Bought all three on special offer from book club and they were all in paper back and once i pick up a book i read it to the bitter end and i just wanted to see if it got any betterOriginally Posted by Mithfânion
Bought all three on special offer from book club and they were all in paper back and once i pick up a book i read it to the bitter end and i just wanted to see if it got any better
I actually enjoyed the the whole trilogy. True , the characters are a bit stiff and the soap opera aspect of the trilogy was slightly over the top, but I think that I liked how Rohan wasn't trying to win by beating his foes into submission, but tried to enlighten and convince them of a better way of life.
DragonPrince by Melanie Rawn. Awful stuff.
Agreed. This was one of the worst Fantasy books I have read, but more importantly, it must have been one of the very few to actually irritate me as well.
Read up through part of book two, and regretted that. The premise and concepts of the book I found boring and dull. The writing I found to be adequate at best. The characters were adequate. The world building was adequate. The plot was terrible. The magic system was boring and dull. I simply wasn't impressed. I will use a eufamisim that I have used on a few other occassions....It simply wasn't my cup of tea
I really find this topic interesting. It is interesting to see the differences in taste. How one person cannot stand a given saga, but another absolutely loves it. I think that is a great thing. Shows how much opinion and taste come into play when judging a work of Fantasy.
I actually really enjoyed the Dragon Prince and Dragon Star Trilogies. I thought the world building was excellent, and I found the magic system to be interesting and different.
Peace
Let's see this is pretty tough. Terry Goodkind is the symbol for everything that is wrong with Fantasy right now, IMHO, however his first Wizard's First Rule was somewhat readable. After that, the novels were less and less readable and more and more crap.
Everything I've seen about Newcomb points to his work being crap, but I can't really comment since I haven't read any of it.
However, the WORST book I've read in the Fantasy genre has to be Sara Douglass' Hades Daughter characters that were flat out DUMB, utterly despicable and unreedemable. The plot was very thin as well.
I completely agree with you about Jordan...Except I will take it a step further...basically just about everything after book 6 has been completely off course and unneccessary. I am just hoping Jordan finds his way back to his original plot and that the saga ends as well as it began.
I completely disagree with you about Fool's Fate by Hobb. I found the entire saga, The Farseer Trilogy and The Tawny Man Trilogy, to be outstanding. I look at it as one saga, although it is broken up into two seperate trilogies. It is one of my all time favorite sagas.
Peace
I read up through book 5. I did not read books 6, 7, or 8 and have absolutely no interest in reading them. Once I finished book 5, I was like, okay...this is crap, no more for me *lol*
The #1 award for “Most Appalling Fantasy Book Ever Written” and for the Most “Appalling Fantasy Author” would have to go, unequivocally, to Robert Stanek’s Keeper Martin’s Tale. You ain't seen bad baby, till you plow through his putrid prose.
I tried reading the first of his Ruin Mist Chronicles, "Keeper Martin's Tale", only to discover that I wasn’t actually reading a professional novel. It was more along the lines of a Grade Seven student's first creative piece. After about two hours of reading, I wanted to rip out my own eyes from the pain of reading his book.
I don’t think there is an English word for how appalling his writing was.
Stanek's prose makes Robert Newcomb (who I would rate as a close second on the utter crap scale), look like Sean Russell or GG Kay. Bad as Newcomb's books have been, at least he doesn’t resort to fake reviews (see my review of "The Gates of Dawn" here: http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showt...ght=gates+dawn). Fake reviews? Yup. Stanek has posted hundreds of outrageously fake reviews on amazon.com-- all of them similar, all of them gushing with ersatz superlatives. In an attempt to balance the scales, I blasted his book in my own scathing review of “Keeper Martin’s Tale” (the same one I posted here: http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showt...ght=gates+dawn ), and twice Rob has gotten Amazon to remove it.
Let me just sum it up by saying unlike George R.R Martin—a REAL author—this “Martin" is sure as hell not a keeper.
Last edited by Jasc; July 25th, 2004 at 04:23 PM.
I didn't think Hades' Daughter and God's Concubine were anywhere near the quality of Douglas's Wayfarer series, but I still enjoyed them, thought they were fun. I guess I found the mythical/historical connections interesting. One of my Brit friends whose opinions on fantasy I respect suggested to me that they are primarily "women's books," whatever that means.....LOL
It's no secret that Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen is just a fantasy rehash of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I don't like criticizing a fantasy author for trying to make his book say something, but FotF was so clusmisly executed that it is, without a doubt, the worst fantasy book I have ever read. That said, I haven't read much bottom-of-the-barrel fantasy, so I'm sure there's plenty worse out there.
Inquisition by Anshelm Audley has to be named as well.
Also, Blood of the Fold by Goodkind. I agree completely with Dragonprince.
I can't remember the precise title, but Piers Anothony's on a Pale Horse (the Incarnation Series with Death as the protagonist) was lough out loud bad. The situations were devoid of any moral ambiguity whatsoever, and the rediculously out of place, "erotic parts" were anything but.
I only later realized his audience was more the 12-13 year old set.
The Elenium by Eddings
Shadowkings by Michael Cobley*
Beyond the Pale by Mark Anthony*
Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. (Well, that's not total crap, but, still, I found it dragging at times and with a boring-out-of-mind main character.)
Crown of Fire (I think that's the title) by Ed Greenwood
Thornkeep by Elain Cunningham
(The ones with the asterix are the ones I couldn't even finish.)
Last edited by Bardos; July 26th, 2004 at 03:15 AM.
I'm sure I haven't even read anything that is remotely like the tip of the iceberg as far as bad fantasy goes, and I hope I can keep avoiding it.
But one's that stand out for me as being particularly bad are:
Sword of Truth - anything after book 2
Sara Douglass - The Crucible (I think that was the title)
JV Jones - The Baker's Boy
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