Worst SFF Book Ever

[ablackenedrose]

Spine of the Dragon would be my first pick - everything about it drips with the feeling of desperately wanting to be adult-oriented, but everything about it is also written in a way that's utterly juvenile, and I mean that in the most demeaning way possible.

 

[hvoad]

Fourth Wing. It butchers SSF as a genre so badly I took it personally. Everyone involved in the making of the book should go straight to jail.

 

[paranoid marvin]

i know there are people who really love the series and don't want to insult them, but it just didn't work for me.

I think that many who like the series acknowledge that it is an acquired taste, and that it is just as likely to be hated by other readers as loved.

Personally I found the characters didlikable, the writing unappealing and at times repetitive, but the world created and some of the parts of the stories to be of such quality as to want to keep reading despite my misgivings.

I read the first 2 trilogies, and (from what I remember) I didn't particularly care whether the protagonists succeeded or failed. They are books I have no wish to ever read again.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Why do I love bad writing so much? It's a question I often ask myself as I bludgeon what few brain cells and critical faculties I have left with some dreadful book or other. There are so many great books I've never read. Why do I keep reading drivel?

It's a question I'm asking myself more than a lot at the moment because I am currently wading through a book called either

Eden Rising
----1----
The Dark Sanctuary

or

The Dark Sanctuary - Book One ​

- depending whether you read the front cover or the spine. The back cover lumps for Eden Rising. 'Eden Rising will draw readers into a dark dystopian world like no other.' so that's the spine outvoted.

Needless to say it screams 'self-published'!

In a not-so-distant future, women outnumber men 7 to 1, and no one can explain it.
Threatened by this mysterious phenomenon, the government impulsively passes new abortion laws and strips women of their rights.

I nearly put it down after the weird use of digits in '7 to 1,' I think the usual rule of thumb is to write out from zero to one hundred rather than use figures but was I intrigued to see how the author manages to get that scenario on its feet. Given that kind of ratio, and given that ninety-five percent of the women I know wouldn't just idly sit back and let that kind of thing happen with a fifty fifty (ish) population ratio, I just can't see it happening. But it's been a long time since I read any overtly feminist SF which I haven't really done since the days when Vonda McIntyre, Marge Piercy, and Marion Zimmer Bradley* were making waves. I wondered what the field was like now. Copyright date of 2022. Up to date stuff!

Eden Rising. Big good old feminist fist in Venus symbol on the front... and it's AWFUL!

For one thing it claims to be taking place in the 'Present Day' - and in 'flashbacks' which are apparently, according to the text (pg. 11), taking place in or around the the year 2062. So the 'present day' is even further into the future... okay, and the prologue, if I'm getting the internal logic correct, took place some time in between. So this book is taking place in three time frames: a future 'Present Day' time and 'Flashback' - but still in our future - past, and 'Prologue' in between time - and all three are written in the present tense.

I find present tense first person narration very annoying and hard to read. Especially when the first person narrator keeps changing from one chapter to the next and in this book, within the first thirty of so pages, there are at least three of them. Why do I keep reading this drivel?

Because some of the writing is just too deliciously bad for me to put it down:

'There's a woman standing beside my mom's window. Her hair is bigger than her head, and there's a goofy smile on her face.' (Pg.35)

'Her turquoise eyes look like Halloween candy-perfectly round and much bigger than the average eyeball.' (Pg. 43)

It didn't take me long to work out that there is no way in hell this author is going to deal with the problem of how to convince the reader that 87.5 percent of the population (women) will have their reproductive rights taken away from them by the other 12.5 (men) - which is what a 'seven to one' ratio would be. Because, on page five, the evil male politician being interviewed on TV infodumps that it's been 20 years since people noticed the change in birth statistics, and that 'now' seventy percent of the world's population are women. Well 'seventy percent' of anything isn't 'seven to one' of what's left. It's seven to three.

And since there's no mention is made of male life expectancy suddenly significantly dropping - I really can't see how you go from fifty-fifty (ish) to saying seventy percent of the world's population are 'women' in only twenty years. Most of the people born in that twenty years would still be children and ineligible to vote. So at the time that the 'government impulsively passes new abortion laws and strips women of their rights.' the population would contain only slightly more voting-age women than men.

I really hate it when the logic of SF books fall to pieces quite so quickly.

But...

'The skin of her forehead creases into rolls, and she's breathing hard through big nostrils. (pg. 7)







*When it was still possible to read her books without feeling uncomfortable.

 

[Peppa]

There are many ways to make a book bad. But John Norman's books in his Gor series seem to be the worst.

They are poorly written, practically indistinguishable from each other and something about their content suggests that the author has certain psychological problems. The poor women in his books are constantly being sold into slavery, beaten and raped, and this makes them perfectly happy.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

I think it's too easy to find really dreadful SF books (as with any other genre). The game would be more interesting if the object were to find bad works by normally good writers. Or bad works that are generally considered good (the Three Body Problem springs to mind).

 

[JunkMonkey]

I think it's too easy to find really dreadful SF books (as with any other genre). The game would be more interesting if the object were to find bad works by normally good writers. Or bad works that are generally considered good (the Three Body Problem springs to mind).

It's very easy these days to find bad writing when everyone with a manuscript and the arrogance / self-confidence and money to pay a printer to put it out there can do so. Old bad writing is a lot more fun to find but, back in the days when paid by the word pulp was churned out in prodigious quantities sometimes by people who were obviously capable of much better stuff, and there was a lot of it. Most of it now rightfully obscure. To my mind, enjoyably bad writing is enjoyably bad writing no matter what the source.

 

[Bick]

It's very easy these days to find bad writing when everyone with a manuscript and the arrogance / self-confidence and money to pay a printer to put it out there can do so.

This. Given most self-published stuff is very poorly written, this thread game really needs to be restricted to traditionally-published books. A traditionally-published book that won numerous awards, but which I thought was dreadful was Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

 

[BAYLOR]

This. Given most self-published stuff is very poorly written, this thread game really needs to be restricted to traditionally-published books. A traditionally-published book that won numerous awards, but which I thought was dreadful was Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Sooner or later , that will be a streaming tv series.

 

[Phyrebrat]

This. Given most self-published stuff is very poorly written, this thread game really needs to be restricted to traditionally-published books. A traditionally-published book that won numerous awards, but which I thought was dreadful was Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Definitely agree!

If we might include horror and weird fic in SFF: I get my recs from Twitter or here as opposed to my kindle recs. Every book I’ve bought in the strength of awards — particularly horror by two U.K. female authors — have been cosy chick-lit horror. Dreadful.

I’ve found modern American writers (women) are much better at horror than female U.K. horror authors (Caitlin R Kiernan*, Joyce Carol Oates*, Tananarive Due) from my reading.

But if you go back some decades you get exceptional horror/gothic/weird from women authors. Rebecca and Wuthering Heights spring to mind — not read Frankenstein (not a fan) so can’t comment on Shelley.

I do actively seek out minority writers so I’m surprised how hard it is to find decent female horror writers in the U.K.

*now identities as non-binary but was trans fem.
*I know JCO does more than horror