Worst SFF Book Ever

If a book doesn’t grab me, I probably never get far enough in it to say it’s the worst ever. The furthest I’ve gone into a book before giving up was Heinlein’s Number Of The Beast. I had fifty pages to go but I just couldn’t take anymore. I’ve never had any urge to return to it.
 
That one by Doc E Smith, where the humans are superhuman compared to the humanlike aliens, and possess vast power thanks to their having salt. Who would think a little sodium chloride could make such a difference?
 
The worst book I read was actually a dekology by L. Ron Hubbard. The first book is call The Invaders Plan. I read the first three of ten, the storyline was awful. Then I visited a science fiction shop in Birmingham and was told that only the first book was written by L. Ron Hubbard, the rest was written by a syndicate.
 
The worst book I read was actually a dekology by L. Ron Hubbard. The first book is call The Invaders Plan. I read the first three of ten, the storyline was awful. Then I visited a science fiction shop in Birmingham and was told that only the first book was written by L. Ron Hubbard, the rest was written by a syndicate.

I read the first book of that series and had no desire to continue.
 
If a book doesn’t grab me, I probably never get far enough in it to say it’s the worst ever. The furthest I’ve gone into a book before giving up was Heinlein’s Number Of The Beast. I had fifty pages to go but I just couldn’t take anymore. I’ve never had any urge to return to it.

There is new version of that book with different story angle.
 
Applies electrodes to moribund thread... lightning crackles... oversized switches are thrown.. the thing that goes zzzt! zzzt! zzzt! goes zzzt! zzzt! zzzt! I raise a hand to the heavens while clutching an enormous lever.... "Live! live! LIVE!"

I suspect I am currently reading the worst SF book ever written. At least it's the worst I have encountered. (And I have encountered some real dross in my time.)

Remember that episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace where everyone turned into monkeys? Well take that image and reimagine it as a zero-budget, straight to Free to Air obscure streaming channel movie made by people who got fired by the Asylum for incompetence. (The Asylum are the makers of the Sharknado movies.) This books reads like the novelisation of that movie written by the producer's kid brother to keep him off the set and out of the way.

The plot so far (I'm only about half way through* - people all over the world are turning into hyper-aggressive Neanderthal / Sapiens hybrids and no one knows why. Society is falling apart - though Ubers still turn up on time when the plot requires them to. We know people are turning into hyper-aggressive Neanderthal / Sapiens hybrids and society is falling apart because our cast members constantly tell each other that people are turning into hyper-aggressive Neanderthal / Sapiens hybrids and watch TV news anchormen sat on ergonomically designed couches sombrely telling them the world is going to hell in a handbasket. There is an awful lot of telling in this book including exciting scenes of ultra-violence and excitement; like the moment where the first recorded case wakes up from his induced coma and goes on the rampage: smashing bulletproof glass with his bare hands, killing another patient, and ripping the testicles off a security guard before finally being shot eight times and killed. All of this doesn't happen on the page. It happens between chapters and then people tell each other about it for a bit.

From time to time the writer does remember to do some showing as well so he has excruciatingly boring scenes (full of needless details) of people going somewhere to meet someone to tell them what the readers have already been told three or four times before.

The oddness starts before the book has even started.

For one thing the author forgot to put his name on the spine. It's on the cover. It's on the back cover. It's in the indicia - twice once for 'Editing and proofreading' and once for 'Layout and Formatting' (the fact that there is a typo just below the word 'proofreading' is the funniest joke in the book). But not the spine.

The copyright date at the front is 2017 but an author's intro / dedication talks about a friend who died in 2020 and then the book is full of references to the Covid-19 pandemic. A quick Googling shows that what I have is a rewritten / revised edition. So the bits of this book that were rewritten aren't copyright? I'm not going to go look but I would guess that in the earlier version (or an earlier draft) one of the central families had a different nationality and have gone from being American to British; the wife's mother is called 'Mom', their car has a trunk and a hood rather than boot and bonnet.

The book is riddled with inconsistencies and 'what the fuckery' that comes at you from all directions. The woman of the family works in a hospital on a ward. Her job title is not given nor is it clear what she does but, at the start of her shift (and the start of a chapter) she is diligently "catching up with the status of the patients she would have charge of for duration of her shift" before having a snack. She is then told two pages later by a superior that the unusual patient that had arrived yesterday and whom she saw fit to name and tell her husband about (serious breach of medical ethics there and almost certainly a sacking offence) had been moved to a different ward... without her noticing?

I'm reading this book with a pencil in one hand and there's hardly a page that I haven't marked up a typo or an inconsistency. Things like the breakfast cereal Cocoa Pops being capitalised (as it should be; it's a proper brand name) only to be written 'Cocoa pops' a few lines later on the same page and then 'Cornflakes' having a capitol when it doesn't need it. And some seriously dreadful writing:

"Lynne pulled the door shut and the Prius pulled away. Jeff watched them leave until they had turned the corner and disappeared. Wiping the tears from his eyes he'd tried so hard to hide from them both.." It's so hard hiding your eyes from your family.

"...those who had only just managed to keep their heads above water financially and figuratively speaking..."

Crews of ships at sea are not immune: "Those that had begun turning into hybrids were left wondering the empty hulks."

"Claire realized just how small a fish she really was in the huge pool of what was happening."

"Only crews that underwent the strictest medical examinations before each flight was allowed to fly..."

"She moved back slowly, and as calmly as she was able with her body pumping huge amounts of adrenalin around her." - leaving puddles of the stuff on the floor presumably.

This is awful.








* I say 'about' because, other than measuring the pages read against the pages unread with a ruler, there is no way of telling because, for some inexplicable reason, there is no pagination. I've never encountered a novel without page numbers before. Their absence is oddly disconcerting.


I finished it. Then went to lie down for a couple of days. In the interests of fairness I should report that the author does get round to doing some showing after all his telling. Towards the end of the book our heroine scientist Doctor Joceline Mercer
"Josceline is a tall slim woman and is very much single and unattached from anyone other than her work."
"As usual, she was a picture of tranquillity and logic, never seeing the need to be flustered or lose her composure. She was calm and somewhat of a loose cannon at times. "

Anyhoo... our super French scientist sexy lady partitions the mainframe of the World Health Organization's computer. (And it is the World Health Organization's, not the WHO's, computer. Just about every other organisation in this book gets shortened - sometimes with full stops between the letters, sometimes not -COMBRA, FEMA, UK, US, NFL etc., the World Health Organization is always spelled out in full. (PIN, as in 'Personal Identification Number', got autocorrected to 'pin' at least once. Proofreading my arse! )

I digress.

Having partitioned the mainframe Doctor Joceline Mercer runs simulations and models of her own despite being expressly told not to do so - even on half a computer (What a rebel!) and comes up with 50 pages of printout that confirm her theory. (We never get to see any of this data.)

Her Theory:

"... ahem. My theory, by sexy slim French lady... ahem. This is my theory what is mine... My theory is. That is my theory not anyone else's theory... Ahem. AHEM!. My theory by Joceline Mercer (Doctor) Ahemmmmm!"

She then spends several pages telling people that James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis is correct and the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have triggered a unexpressed gene which has turned everyone into apemen to stop them poisoning the Earth. Because... erm... well it happened before anyway and here are some dodgy examples of pre-Adamism evidence pulled from the interweb or the pages of the Fortean Times. Basically we're all doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. The end.

Except it isn't the end because the author still has all these other pesky 'characters' running about - so he goes the whole Garth Marenghi, cranks up the showing to 11, and has a character race from Scotland to the Lake District just in time to have his mother-in-law's severed head thrown at his car, before racing back across country to a USAF base where he gets a lift across the Atlantic in a cargo plane - the last flight out of the UK - that just happens to have a Hummer on board for no other reason than the plane is landing at New York and he has to get to Washington where his wife and child are holed up in the World Health Organization's research base. While he is en-route some of the hybrids get loose in the research base. Heads are stomped flat. Hummer guy's son turns into a hybrid and stabs his mom to death. He in turn is stabbed to death by sexy French lady scientist (that's the way I want to go by the way) who then takes a shower and then goes out to get beaten to death by hybrids while she is 'still human'. Hummer Guy arrives. Looks about a bit, goes a bit sad, and wanders off into the sunset. The end.

This magnificent piece of work is called Devolution of a Species by M.E. Ellington

I'm going to read some Perry Rhodan books next to bring me back to normality. Like a literary decompression chamber. Take it slowly. I don't want to get the bends. If I tried to read something by a halfway decent writer straight after that I may get the brain cramps.
 
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I might be alone on this, but I tried reading The King of Elfland's Daughter and was bored to tears. Almost no dialogue and little, if any, characterization. The Worm Ouroboros didn't do it for me either.
 
Are we allowed to mention self-published books? There's a certain etiquette that would dictate not, because it seems to be punching down, but I'd like to make a case for The Kingdoms of the Elves And The Reaches by Robert Stanek. Like I say, it seems unfair to select an SP book, but Stanek's aggressive sock-puppet empire and marketing of himself as the winner of several awards (that he made up), warrants a mention.

His deceptions might be forgivable were the book a decent read, but alas; it's utter, utter garbage.
 
Are we allowed to mention self-published books? There's a certain etiquette that would dictate not, because it seems to be punching down, but I'd like to make a case for The Kingdoms of the Elves And The Reaches by Robert Stanek. Like I say, it seems unfair to select an SP book, but Stanek's aggressive sock-puppet empire and marketing of himself as the winner of several awards (that he made up), warrants a mention.

His deceptions might be forgivable were the book a decent read, but alas; it's utter, utter garbage.

I think mentioning self-published books is perfectly acceptable - the Devolution of a Species book I gave a good kicking to upthread is one such. Anyone with delusions of adequacy who puts their work out there (myself included) is entitled to honest criticism.
 
The worst book I read was actually a dekology by L. Ron Hubbard. The first book is call The Invaders Plan. I read the first three of ten, the storyline was awful. Then I visited a science fiction shop in Birmingham and was told that only the first book was written by L. Ron Hubbard, the rest was written by a syndicate.
This is probably the correct answer to the question.

I'm "impressed" you got through three of them. Hubbard died after the first volume was published, so that should have alerted readers that later volumes were unlikely to have been written by him. It's interesting that all the volumes made it to the NY Times bestseller list, but this is not thought to be due to individuals buying them. His 'church' bought the books in very large quantities to bump up the apparent sales. I like this quote from the NY Times review of the first book, which is on the Wikipedia site:

"... a paralyzingly slow-moving adventure... a disregard of conventional grammar so global as to suggest a satire on the possibility of communication through language".
 
I would like to nominate Perry Rhodan 25: Snowman in Flames which, despite being only 116 or so, not very word-dense, pages long, still managed to take a whole week for me to get through due to it's sheer bloody awfulness.


An example of it's sheer bloody awfulness:

Some of our heroes are trapped on an ice planet with no way of escaping.
Unable to find and kill them, the bad guys decide to destroy the planet. The bad guys go to the planet's north pole, dig a hole in the ground, lower an super-powerful atomic device into it with ropes and set 'the clockwork' timer in motion. The device will explode and (slowly) turn the whole planet into another sun. Finding out about their dastardly scheme, and too late to stop the planet-destroying chain reaction, one of the trapped heroes - a teleporting, telepathic mouse beaver called 'Pucky' does what every self-respecting hero of thud and blunder, super-science SF would do. Single mousebeaveredly he captures the bad guys' space ship, turns the bad guys out onto the surface of the planet... and then destroys the empty ship!

and for the rest of the book NO ONE SEEMS TO THINK THIS WAS A REALLY STUPID THING TO DO!
 
I would like to nominate Perry Rhodan 25: Snowman in Flames which, despite being only 116 or so, not very word-dense, pages long, still managed to take a whole week for me to get through due to it's sheer bloody awfulness.


An example of it's sheer bloody awfulness:

Some of our heroes are trapped on an ice planet with no way of escaping.
Unable to find and kill them, the bad guys decide to destroy the planet. The bad guys go to the planet's north pole, dig a hole in the ground, lower an super-powerful atomic device into it with ropes and set 'the clockwork' timer in motion. The device will explode and (slowly) turn the whole planet into another sun. Finding out about their dastardly scheme, and too late to stop the planet-destroying chain reaction, one of the trapped heroes - a teleporting, telepathic mouse beaver called 'Pucky' does what every self-respecting hero of thud and blunder, super-science SF would do. Single mousebeaveredly he captures the bad guys' space ship, turns the bad guys out onto the surface of the planet... and then destroys the empty ship!

and for the rest of the book NO ONE SEEMS TO THINK THIS WAS A REALLY STUPID THING TO DO!
I read a few Perry Rhodan back in the day. Pretty dull, low rent stuff. Did not even have the saving grace of being lurid.
 
I would like to nominate Perry Rhodan 25: Snowman in Flames which, despite being only 116 or so, not very word-dense, pages long, still managed to take a whole week for me to get through due to it's sheer bloody awfulness.


An example of it's sheer bloody awfulness:

Some of our heroes are trapped on an ice planet with no way of escaping.
Unable to find and kill them, the bad guys decide to destroy the planet. The bad guys go to the planet's north pole, dig a hole in the ground, lower an super-powerful atomic device into it with ropes and set 'the clockwork' timer in motion. The device will explode and (slowly) turn the whole planet into another sun. Finding out about their dastardly scheme, and too late to stop the planet-destroying chain reaction, one of the trapped heroes - a teleporting, telepathic mouse beaver called 'Pucky' does what every self-respecting hero of thud and blunder, super-science SF would do. Single mousebeaveredly he captures the bad guys' space ship, turns the bad guys out onto the surface of the planet... and then destroys the empty ship!

and for the rest of the book NO ONE SEEMS TO THINK THIS WAS A REALLY STUPID THING TO DO!
I read a few Perry Rhodan back in the day. Pretty dull, low rent stuff. Did not even have the saving grace of being lurid.

the 1967 film Mission Stardust is as far as I know the only film adaption of Perry Rhoden. It's pretty schlocky but, does have certain low level of entertainment value.
 
This is probably the correct answer to the question.

I'm "impressed" you got through three of them. Hubbard died after the first volume was published, so that should have alerted readers that later volumes were unlikely to have been written by him. It's interesting that all the volumes made it to the NY Times bestseller list, but this is not thought to be due to individuals buying them. His 'church' bought the books in very large quantities to bump up the apparent sales. I like this quote from the NY Times review of the first book, which is on the Wikipedia site:

"... a paralyzingly slow-moving adventure... a disregard of conventional grammar so global as to suggest a satire on the possibility of communication through language".
I totally agree with this. I remember getting these from Forbidden Planet (they were cheap) and wading through them on night shifts. The first book actually gave me a headache, but I ploughed through and I made it to book ten and just gave up. It really is terrible with some really puerile writing and story elements. Interesting covers though.

I'd actually go one better and say that L. Ron Hubbard was a bad writer full stop. I tried to read Battlefield Earth and it was just terrible. An early DNF for me.
 
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Against The Tide' by John Ringo is the worst book of any genre I have ever had the misfortune to be stuck with, I picked it up in a book exchange while travelling, because it was free and had a picture of dragons on an aircraft carrier on the cover..
On the other hand I really enjoyed that book - IMO the Council War books by him were one of his better series.
(And to be fair Against the Tide was book 3 so it wouldn't make much sense without the backstory)
 

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