Which famous writer do you think is absolute rubbish?

Brian Herbert. Fifteen years ago I was at a Borders book store with a friend, just shopping around, an inexplicably finding strange things such as the Modern English version of Shakespeare question mark and The Canterbury Tales in non-fiction. Setting that aside, my friend told me to grab one of the Brian Herbert books and open to a random page, pick any paragraph, and give it a read.

The best way I can describe it is that some stymied and decadent civilization exists in a perpetual state of languid war, only the whole civilization exists within the belly of a cat that is being wrung out like a rag at an incredibly slow rate. That's not a description of the story, but of how it read.

I bought the book, and every once in a while I call my friend and we perform the "Dune Check," in which I open to a random page and read a paragraph for a good chuckle. I recommend it. It's fun. Live the Dune Check or you haven't lived.

 

That is like the traditional way to read The Eye of Argon. You have a group of maybe six people or more. The first one reads until he cracks up, and hands it to the next person, who reads it until she cracks up, and so on. If you can read more than one page without cracking up, you are deemed to be devoid of a sense of humor and must pass the text to the next person. The game has been played by sci-fi convention-goers and SCA players for probably a half a century now.

One person at a session I attended had to drop out... she was a professional proof-reader and the mistakes in the text were actually painful to her.

 

Shakespeare was using a story line that was popular at the time, and almost all of the previous versions had Shylock as a remorseless villain. I highly recommend Michael Radford's movie version of the play. Roger Ebert's review was masterful, as almost all of his reviews were:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-merchant-of-venice-2005


A confession: while watching Al Pacino playing Shylock, I had to repress my thoughts when he was being being baited by the others. "Don't do that!" I kept thinking. "Don't you know who that is? That's Michael Corleone!"

 

I think King Lear and MacBeth are amazing. But even at Shakespear's best, he's only as good as the performance. And that's the problem with playwrites all together.

 

...
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I have to buy this book...

 

Some writers are great at story construction but poor at story telling. I'd say Stephen King is in that category.

Charles Dickens passed away just as the typewriter was being invented. His writing would have benefited from liquid paper and the backspace key.

My writing also benefits from the backspace key, particularly if I limit my efforts to just that one key on the keyboard.

 

No, you don't. It's free, except for the print-out:

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/eyeargon/eyeargon.htm

The only thing missing from the original were the crude illustrations, which were on a par with the literary quality of the piece. I don't think any of the published editions included those illustrations.

The full story can be found on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Argon

 

Thank you.

 

Eye of Argon is amazing stuff, but it was at least the product of a teenager. Sometimes I read this sentence (from a different obscure author) to make myself feel better when I doubt my own writing:

Upon the Mesozoic verdure, the sun cast its dawn light, giving life to the hovering woodland realm in the form of photosynthetic vitality that sparkled betwixt the morning arbor

The person that wrote that is college educated I think. He's got some inflammatory views, so I don't feel too bad about reading his stuff for this purpose.

 

And a thesaurus just vomited all over the page.

 

I'm doing it. I'm doing an eye of Argon thread. Just you stop me...!

 

Because it is too bad not to discuss, but I don't want to derail this thread, here is the Eye of Argon thread. Any follow up about the Eye of Argon should come to this thread. If the moderators agree of course.

 

Since I'm the OP, I don't mind but it's up to the mods of course. Any fame/infamy is better than no fame/infamy. But I won't advertise my books as that would be distasteful.

Yours,

Alex Mahon/A.T. Mahon

 

I was going to say I disagree but it made me think about some things.
I was going to say most people never see a Shakespeare play. Some may see a TV or Movie adaptation, but most people will only know Shakespeare through literature taught at school, and I thought about my own experiences as someone who studied english literature. We looked at Romeo and Juliet, Much ado about Nothing and Twelth Night. Not a fan of Romeo and Juliet but really like the other two, but then I realised that in regards to a performance, well, that was played out in my head. I then realised thats the same for any book, you are playing it out in your head, or at least I am, so, even though you are reading it, you are creating your own performance.

So I dont think its right to criticise shakespears work on the basis that hes 'only' a play write. The stories he tells are good, very cleverly written and force the audience , be they reading or watching, to think in order to get the proper understanding and enjoyment out of it. The style of his writing appeals to me because its all about the character dialogue, where as stories with tons of flowery description and spoon feeding you explanations of what is going on bore me.

Also, everyone should read the "shakespearian" adaptation of Star Wars. Brilliant.

 

Well, that could also be said of screenwriters, who are only as good as the director and actors can make their scripts. Most screenwriters never have their work published to be read, except in the rare case of the script turning up on a web site for fans of the movie or TV show to read. Of course, few people remember the credits listing the screenwriters, so the products of even the top writers of their field sink into obscurity.

That said, I've seen plenty of films whose scripts I thought were rubbish, although some, like the products of Ed Wood, achieved a sort of cult status. Whether they were written by people who had great reputations in the genre is something I don't know, and am not interested in researching.

 

The Moon People trilogy by Dale M Courtney.

Even a quick look on Amazon shows how highly his work is rated but after reading through all three books, I find the quality in his writing to be somewhat lacking.

 

Not a big fan of the truck stop books section, I take it?

 

That's something I kind of felt about Clive Cussler. You read a couple of his books and you've read almost all of almost all his books, but it's still amusing to see him throw his characters all across the map chasing down leads to whatever outlandish scenario he's concocted. Probably true of anyone writing in the old pulp novelist tradition.

For the record, Raise the Titanic! was one of the saner novels of the NUMA series. Though to Cussler's credit, he always seemed to me to be a little more self-aware about fantasy than Brown or Clancy.

 

Although that plot went out the window when it was discovered that the Titanic was broken into two pieces plus a debris field. And we know now that what's left is probably too fragile to be moved.

 

Which doesn't matter because this is fiction, not a documentary.

 

Keep in mind that their justification for raising it in the first place is because they think samples of an exotic ore are aboard which can be used as fuel for a superweapon that deactivates ICBMs.

The fact that ICBMs have been functionally obsolete since the mid-80's in Dirk Pitt World is never mentioned again in the series, any more than the fact that Quebec voted for independence and Canada is a de jure part of the United States... because Britain sold it in 1914, and the modern-day British government was willing to raid the US mainland and spill American blood to destroy any long-buried evidence that this had happened.

...I almost wanted to be mad about that one, but it was just so hilariously daft (and one of the better written of the series) that I couldn't do anything but laugh.

 

Absolute rubbish is exactly what Aldous Huxley is. He has strong opinions, but no imagination. Possibly the most striking proof of that is people worshipping Ford and making the letter T with their fingers like the Christians do the sign of the cross. Can't get much lamer than that.

Mr. Huxley could have been a great political columnist. What possessed a man without any creative abilities to write the so-called novel "Brave New World", I can't imagine. Even more baffling is that some people venerate an utterly boring novel just because it expresses shocking ideas.

One of the stupidest article titles ever is "The Hidden Message of Christianity in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World". Hidden? Huxley is just as subtle as the hero of a slapstick comedy kicking another one's butt. He takes things from the real world and turns them around to provoke the reader. I wonder if he has any ideas of his own.

Mind you, this is not about religion, homosexuality, narcotic drugs or technology. All I'm saying is that Aldous Huxley is a complete nothing as a fiction writer. He's like a medieval man who said in public he didn't believe in God. It might have been a huge act of courage back then, but it's no reason to idolize him forever.

 

Not sure if this constitutes particularly famous but as far as modern authors actively getting works published, Richard Powers has a few best sellers, and one of them, "The Overstory", was recommended to me by a college professor I had. It was quite honestly laughable in almost every respect and I was quite shocked at the amount of praise it had received in press. Goes to show how different styles and approaches can cause drastically different reactions in people.

 

I read a lot of Sc-Fi and many of those on Amazon are hardly of that genre at all. Mainly dealing with relationships and flashback story of no relevance. I don't like too much character building. Kim Stanley Robinson I could not complete his book The ministry for the future and others he has written.