http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/04/tr_contest_worst_single_fantasy_book.php

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/04/worst_fantasy_novel_and_the_winner_is.php

Lazy ass, make me do it...

I know it's more than one, but I'd have to go with Frank Herbert's last two original Dune books, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. Full of unnecessary sex, violence, and weird-ass technology, it was basically a cash-grab by ol' Frank.

Any book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.
I know its not sci-fi but it's stench crosses any boundary.

The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton.

Somehow strange alien creatures on a backwater planet create a rift in the universe that let's the souls of dead people possess the living. These possessed get super powers where they can zap other people into being possessed by other souls and before long this spreads like a disease and half the universe is taken over by statically charged possessed people.

Then the ghost of Al Capone takes over a space fleet and he and his ghost mafia try to take everything over but they have to hurry because once enough possessed souls get together in any one planet they magically make it dissappear - so whole planets vanish.

Normal weapons don't work on the possessed so they are pretty much unstoppable and go on a rampage - except for the ghost hippies who sit around on a magic schoolbus and smoke imaginary marijuana all day. They believe in peace and love and won't get with the program of taking over the universe with the rest of the ghosts. But - like most hippies, they don't actually do anything to help, they just sit around and get high.

Meanwhile, a satanic cult leader get's possessed and starts taking over the earth.

Since nothing can stop them, the universe is pretty well screwed.

While all this is going on, the good guy, who has sex with every female character in the book (including underage girls) has to hurry up and fly to the other side of the universe to find an alien god to ask for help.

Fortunately he finds the alien got just in the nick of time and the god makes all the ghosts go away.

The End

It took me 3 years to read this because I kept giving up in disgust. Unfortunately, I'm compelled for unknown reasons to finish every book I start so I kept going back for more torture.

Seriously - the ghosts of gangsters, hippies, and a satanic cult try to take of the universe.

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer.

It was unnecessary, the Hitch-hikers Guide series having been brought to a conclusion the better part of two decades ago.

It was unwanted, with the greater portion of Adams’ fans dead-set against the idea of any writer – regardless of their pedigree - writing a sequel to a beloved classic work, officially endorsed by Adams’ widow or otherwise.

But worst of all, the book was just plain horrible independent of your feelings behind it’s blasphemous and troubled creation. It did not read like Douglas Adams. It did not even read like a parody of Douglas Adams.

It bore about as much resemblance to Douglas Adams’ writing as one of the Thrin-Billed Gribelflacks of Apisebim 5, wearing a sheet over its’ heads and singing “I am the writing of Douglas Adams” in perfect West Apisbeiman; a language consisting of three syllables and an unpleasant gastric noise.

The novelization of Star Wars Episode I-The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks. Not that he had much to work with, but the overall story is one of the most despised in science fiction history. Plus, Brooks had to go into depth about such crappy aspects of the film as Gungan culture.

battlefield earth the novelization...nuff said

I going ot get slagged for this but...

Timothy Zahn's Star Wars books all are anooying and really not very good. Predictable with just some of the worst dialogue where the good guys win (SPOILER!) but it feels like they kind of did so by accident. I don't want my Star War novels to read like a 5 year mission Star Trek novel...
and that isn't a dig at Trek novels... it is more about the difference in tone between in deifferent eras of TRek and how those books are written.

Star Wars Crystal Star, Vonda McIntyre.

Jaina befriended a centaur. A fucking CENTAUR.

There were so many other things wrong with that novel that I managed to block out after 15 years. But that one memory stayed. :-(

@Thane888 Hell, I think you've already won with that synopsis. The author probably had to make a deal with the devil (plus the souls of 300 decendants) just to get that tripe published. I KNOW I've read a lotta crappola betwixt 1960 and now but, SHEESH! And to think, there are actually geeks 'n' nerds out there who don't even like "Moontrap" with Walter Koenig and good ol' Bruce Campbell. I'm just sayin'........

Stephen Donaldson's "The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story"
My Review:
What a piece of crap.
How's that for short?

sadly, I need to cite a secret guilty pleasure: the origianl Doom novelizations. I'm talking about the series from the mid-90's based on Doom 1 and 2 written by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. and specifically I refer to the third book of that series: Infernal Sky.

The gist of that book (which exposes the truth behind everything in the first two books):

1. there used to be a really ancient and powerful civilization that spanned the galaxy but they died out leaving behind only a few fragments of writing and teleportors.

2. as time passed other civilizations found those relics and started to translate the writings (poetry if I'm not mistaken).

3. but a few civilizations didn't like the way those poems were translated, they felt too much liberty had been taken with the meaning of the words, they wanted a stricter interpretation.

4. this utterly geekish nitpicking leads to a galactic war between those opposing factions; eventually the earth is in the crosshairs of one of the factions because humans develope too quickly and they feared they would be in danger of losing the battle if the humans were to join it or something like that.

I suppose it tries to be like Hitchhicker with its absurdity. problem is it totally doesn't jive. the series as a whole, though, is lightweight and predictable and talks too much about Mormonism for my tastes (really, that whole angle is itself so out of left field when it arises). and, perhaps the worst part of all, aside from the first two books, there's very little about Doom in it :(

Abraxas - you read my mind. I was just about to post about the Doom novelizations.

Hunters and Sandworms of Dune. The "conclusion" to Herbert's original Dune Series.

Way to take a classic series and completely mess it up. There was so much potential in the Dune series but what we got had little imagination, depth, creativity, or a lick of good story telling. I like to think there is a special circle of hell for Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

I propose Alan Dean Foster's To the Vanishing Point. It has been a few years since I read it, but basically a family in a Winnebago pick up a Hitchhiker and go - among other places - to hell.

The hitchhiker is a 4000 year old being called Mouse and she needs their help to get to the Vanishing Point to regulate the spinner of reality. Which she does by singing to him, IIRC. I think the Vanishing Point was somewhere near Vegas. So was hell. Make of that what you will.

I liked it a lot when I was a kid. I'm a little more widely read now.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's a disgusting wish-fulfillment ARARAR FIGHT THE MAN novel with a hacker hero named w1n5t0n (SUBTLETY!!!) and some of the most slam-a-door-on-your-own-head retarded sentences ever put into print, including "I had a boner that could cut glass," and "she was totally h4wt- that is to say, hot."

I don't remember the name of the book, but it came out sometime around when Shadows of the Empire did. Han was captured by a race of unheard of creatures from some distant galaxy. They were red I believe, and they had these huge chitin blades attached to their forearms. Their culture worshiped the leader to the point where it was a high honor to have the leader chop off their heads so he could bathe in their blood. There was something in there about Han being in restraints and they didn't fit so the leader killed the guard and didn't bathe in his blood, which was a huge dis.
I hope somebody can think of the book that I am thinking of, just because that is the only book I have ever thrown into the trash.

Novelizations of movies are a cheap shot, as are novelizations or series based on movies and TV. But one particularly horrible example was the novel "E.T.". You know, the sweet poo-colored Speilburg alien that we all loved/feared as children?

In the book he has sexual thoughts about Eliot's mother. I repeat: THE SENTIENT TURD THINKS ABOUT FUCKING HIS FRIEND'S MOTHER. And about how sad it is that he can't take her back to his home planet, because the atmosphere would probably kill her.

I argue that this is the worst not only because it is terrible, but because it completely destroyed my enjoyment of a tresured childhood movie.

Bonus: anyone who gets the sentient turd reference gets a cookie.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Shadow God by Aaron Rayburn. I can't do it justice, but the Amazon book review is priceless. Some highlights:

"Trapped under a beam with the countdown ticking away, the monster just on the other side of the battered door, and my friends are trying to free me, I look up at them and yell, "Go on without me. I'll be alright. I'll hold him off while you escape!" And my friends, because they know my sacrifice won't be in vain, make their getaway and when the monster breaks through just as the explosives go off, I know I died saving the lives of my dearest friends."

"Of all the things to think, he never thought he'd think that."

"Already, he knew he wouldn't be able to do it. In fact, he KNEW he wouldn't."

Worst Sci-Fi novel? Easy "Roots" by Alex Haley. This book has nothing I'm looking for in a good sci-fi book. There's next to no action, and I can live with that, but the best sci-fi uses it's fanciful settings to make a commentary on society and this book has got zilch.

Sci-Fi books were rarely assigned in school, but in my 7th grade English class I was to read a book called Singularity. In the book, the two main characters who were twin brothers find a singularity which causes time to slow in a tool shed at their new home. First, they accidentally lock their dog in the shed, only to find him dead seconds later. The end of the book involves one of the brothers feeling inferior and uses the shed to age himself a year older than his brother. Most of my memories of this book have been expelled from my mind, but it stands in my mind as one of the worst things that I have ever read.

Stanislav Lem-The Invincible. It's a story about a ship that crashed on a surface of a planet and they try to repair it or something. I honestly can't remember and that means it was really bad, usually at least I remember something about a book/movie/comic book, but this time I jsut remember I've read it... Very painfully... :/

"the singularity is near" by ray kurzweil. While not technically a science fiction book it is so far removed from reality that I believe it applies.

Basically mr. kurzweil says that technology is advancing incredibly at an exponential rate, and backs up this assertion with over 100 pages of graphs saying that indeed technology is advancing at an exponential rate. which makes sense, especially when you look at how far technology has come since even the early '00s. He then goes on to say that since technology is moving so quickly that by the 2040's humanity will have shed it's physical bodies to gain any one or all of the following (he is never quite clear): robot bodies, upload our minds onto the internet and live our lives through virtual avatars or that humans will become pure intelligence and saturate all energy and matter in the universe with their shared consciousness. It is important to note that according to him, either only one of these will happen or all of them will be happening simultaneously or both. He then goes on to refute any of the strawman arguments that he posed against this theory by saying that nanobots will solve any and all problems that humanity will ever experience because they are magic. of course, by the time he actually starts explaining the magic of nanotechnology that will solve every problem forever he seems to have forgotten that by the time such nanobots are actually available according to him we will be pure intelligence and thus won't have any of these problems.

The rest of the 500+ pages of insane ramblings that don't involve humanities ultimate fate as an energy hivemind that can be found within all matter in existence, explaining how nanobots can do magic or filled with exponential graphs that don't actually show anything(literally. he spends several pages describing what an exponential curve is and how it differentiates from a linear curve, and the rest of the 100+ graphs in the book are basically the exact same graph with subtle differences) are spent on such fascinating topics as: calculating the computational power of a rock, how human brains are different than machines, and how there will be no economies in the future as everything will be free, with a special emphasis on how every economist in the world is wrong because they don't look at the "big picture" (meaning they don't believe that humans will shed their physical bodies and become either robots, virtual avatars, energy beings or all of the above).

Simply put, he takes all the sci-fi ideas that even the worst sci-fi authors thought were too crappy to write about, and then goes to write about how they are actually real and happening, and then handwaves anything that says otherwise with the sci-fi equivalent of magic. This makes it heads and tails worse than sci-fi books that don't pretend to actually be real. Plus, he can't write worth shit.

definitely the worst sci-fi book ever.

"Yargo" by Jacqueline Susann (Author of "Valley of the Dolls")

It is a science fiction/romance novel she wrote in the 50s but was not published until the 70s, after she died.

Janet is mistakenly abducted by aliens who meant to snatch Einstein but were off by a few years. They take her to their planet named Yargo to meet their ruler, also named Yargo. Everyone on Yargo is beautiful and perfect. But Janet soon realizes they have no emotions. Yargo decides Janet can't stay there and they can't send her back to Earth either so they dump her on Venus, a planet of ... bee people. Janet's life becomes a terrifying nightmare. The Venusians want her to mate with a half-breed man-bee.

Reading through the comments, it strikes me that most of the posters have read only the flashy, obvious scifi books found in bulk book stores, but few of them have delved into the truely awful depths of scifi. I worked in a used book store, and I've seen some awful, awful books. Whenever the store was going to throw some away, I would take whatever looked remotely scifi because I'm a pack rat. Of contemporary scifi, I'd have to say Gifts of the Gorboduc Vandal, by Paul O Williams, is the worst because it's the only one, out of the boxes and boxes of cheap, bad, and old paperbacks I own, that I couldn't read past the prologue.

In the prologue, the main character is named Trreggevthann in the first sentence. There is no pronunciation guide to speak of, and almost every other sentence has a made-up name with no explanation. Needless to say, you can't even work out what the plot of the prologue is supposed to be because all the places, people, names, and exclamations don't have any reference whatsoever.

The prologue consists of the unspeakable main character telling the captain of the vessel he's on to do something. What that thing is isn't clear, but the captain threatens him with jail time. Then the captain makes a series of separate announcements declaring, in a different stage with each announcement, that someone, whom I assume is bad, has launched weapons at them, they're all going to die, and it's their societal duty to die with a stiff upper lip, not retaliate, and hope that, somehow, the nature of the universe makes the bad people pay.

"Galaxy 666" by Pel Torro (Lionel Fanthorpe)

Absolutely awful book about a pink-gray planet called "Galaxy 666" which has creatures that are beyond decription, but the author tries to describe them anyway. The planet is impossible to escape from but the protagonists do anyway. The cover has a blurry photo of a USS Enterprise model painted blue whizzing past some papier-mache rocks. The closest a sci-fi paperback will ever get to the movie "Monster A-Go-Go"; everything was done for a fast buck (allegedly Fanthorpe wrote two novels a weekend, dictating into a tape recorder.)

Ummmm, I have a good one, that one sci-fi story where the KID RAPED HIS OWN FUCKING MUM YOU PERVERTED BASTARD DIE.

I'll post properly when I calm down. ARGGHHHHHH.

@ Scarred :

How dare you criticize the ET novelization!? Why...

ha ha, just kidding, but was wondering if in the story itself the alien was actually sad that he couldn't bring the mom back with him, or was that just an observation that you made influenced by a lustful delving into the thoughts of ET as they were presented in the book?
If it's in the book, that is hilarious, because these novelizations usually amount to someone watching the movie and writing down what is happening on the screen as it happens. (Empire Strikes Back and Clash of the Titans comes to mind. Two stories that could have been delved into so much more beyond the bland descriptive adverbs presented.)
So the writer was sitting there thinking about this. And all the more disturbing is the fact that I now want to read this intergalactic soft porn.

Hmmm...wish I could actually think of one. The problem is if it is bad, I stop reading it and totally forget about it anyway!

"Logos Run" by William C. Dietz, which I picked up by accident because my dyslexia thought it said "Logan's Run." My excitement quickly faded when I realized what a poorly hashed MIDDLE book of a trilogy I was reading. More time is spent on secondary bad guy characters that then quickly die then the plot. One of the three main characters dies midway through but he's been paid so little attention I had actually forgotten his name and realized he had less dialogue though the whole book then some antagonists who were only around a dozen pages. In the end, shit went down and badly. Instead of saving the universe, they fucked it up worse. I suppose to set you up to read the next book but there's no way I'm picking up that defilement to the fiction genre.

my pick is star trek the next generations imzadie not only does it have an age riker having to use the guardian of forever after spending his twilight years on a dead in space station but its to prevent counsilor troi from dieing and winds up turning on the old crew

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. I thought Out of the Silent Planet was a damn good story, but it took me forever to read the sequel. Who knows, maybe That Hideous Strength is even worse. In Perelandra, the traveler goes to Venus (aka Perelandra) with an associate, who turns out to be the devil in disguise or something equally threatening. For some reason, Venus is essentially a retarded planet, and its ruler (Oyarsa?) has not even created a civilization yet, or a sentient species, besides Venus’ own Adam and Eve. The devil from Earth (Earth’s fallen Oyarsa) is trying to mess up the Creator’s plan by tempting Eve to sin by getting her off her floating island and onto fixed land and so create the Fall on Venus. There are a lot of long passages in the book that are discussions between the traveler and Eve about good, evil, temptation, etc, one of which is where the traveler has to talk Eve out of having sex with him, if I remember correctly (they are both naked and confined to a tiny floating island…what else is there to do)? Oh, and the traveler falls asleep on his side and gets a massive sunburn on one side of his body, and Eve calls him “Piebald” for basically the entire book. Basic premise of book: man from Earth becomes angel on the shoulder of Eve on Venus, and keeps her from sinning. I read this when I was home sick from school for two weeks, and I wonder how much sooner I would have gotten better if I had been reading Heinlein or Philip Jose Farmer...

Not technically a novel, but I'll use it as a sort of Airing of Grievances: Macbeth, the graphic novel. Yes, one of Shakespeare's best works, turned into a sci-fi blockbuster where Macbeth rides dragons, I shit you not, DRAGONS! They keep the original dialogue, and the art is well-done, but... really? Fucking really.

If it existed: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Novelization. Know what Tuturro was thinking when he was directly underneath the enemy scrotum.

Anyway, on to my choice. Mostly Harmless. Mostly Fucking Harmless. The only Hitchhikers book I can find a copy of in my house. My theory is that Adams was just playing Joss, killing the characters people loved best, and that fucking bird guide. That motherfucking bird guide. There were some great parts, but that's all ruined by the Kill 'Em All ending where the Vogons win. The Vogons Fucking Win. Plus, it led to And Another Thing..., and that's just horrible.

I forgive Douglas Adams, but Mostly Harmless can eat a truly gargantuan bag of dicks, as far as I'm concerned.

Alright, I'm just going to start by saying that I like the Wild Cards series. I really do. I've read nearly every book in it and still think it presents a unique and in-depth look at superpowers in the real world. Unfortunately, the books were wildly uneven and swung around from gangster stories to space opera to a boring story about a were-crocodile's attempts to revitalize Buddy Holly's career. Among other things.

The ninth book, "Jokertown Shuffle", contained some interesting plot points and a couple of cool fight scenes. But I remember it far more for all of the horrifying violence and gratuitous sex it featured in an attempt to be "dark" and "gritty". Basically, the book contains the following. Be warned, it's pretty gruesome:

*An alien scientist named Dr. Tachyon, and previously one of the more interesting characters, is assaulted by his psychic teenage grandson Blaise, who has the power to "jump" people and switch bodies with them.

*He then uses this power to put Tachyon in the body of a teenage girl, whom he then rapes.

*The "jumped" Tachyon is held prisoner on Ellis Island (now a haven for deformed mutants), where he is raped again and impregnated.

*He slowly develops a relationship with the nerdy fat man-slug in charge of the island, who manages to engineer an escape for him...

*...but Blaise catches him, RAPES HIM AGAIN, and he is captured once more.

*I forgot to mention that Blaise and his friends get their powers by having butt-sex with a gross older lawyer named St. John.

*Oh, and there's also a guy with superpowers who has sex with an underaged cat-girl. THREE TIMES.

I honestly can't believe I read through all of this one. It was the only book in the series I wanted to throw across the room. I know what the authors were going for, and I fear that they succeeded. They succeeded far too well. If you do choose to read this series, know the sort of thing you're getting into. And trust me, there are some great, compelling, worthwhile points to Wild Cards. Honest.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

"Hey, listen to me while I spend 700 pages lecturing you. Oh, and I made up a story to go around it as an excuse."

Whoever mentioned the Timothy Zahn Star Wars novels, those sucked hard too.

@Pete: I love Stephenson, but couldn't even start that one. Quicksilver got boring about 1/3rd of the way in, and when I saw it was a trilogy I just quit.

@Korg
R.I.P. Jordan. And for the record, he wrote some good books, he could acctualy divide his three main characters and give them all substantial plot that all tied in together, not the shaft Tolken did by having the only tie in being at the end when they realised the hobbits were still alive, without any acctual proof.

Anywho, worst sci-fi novel
Is the first Halo book.
it was the first real book based off a video game, and it still brings me much pain to this day. I'll admit, there have been goo books based off of video games since, Mass Effect books were good, Warhammer 40k books were enjoyable, but still, that first Halo book brings bile up in my throat each time i think about it.

In defense of the Phantom Menace novelization, if you take the good parts of the book and the good parts of the movie, you actually get a very good story. The trouble is, the bad parts of both congeal into Vance's Green Pearl and soon you die horribly.

The Doom novelizations were the subject of a furious bidding war amongst publishers. The agent sold them by sending out copies of the first game.

The worst sf novel is, imho, GOLEM 100 by Alfred Bester.

First, I'd like to second the nomination of Stephan Donaldsons "The Real Story" for crappiest SF book ever written--I was so offended by that mysogenistic piece of crap that I nearly burned it, and as a bibliophile of 45 years, burning books is against my religion. But I didn't really expect much of Donaldson after he totally SCREWED OVER the readers of the Thomas Covenant series by putting the protagonist through four shades of hades, only to have him EVAPORATE in the final book...yes, that's right, the hero just goes poof, and we are somehow supposed to be okay with that. I wanted to force Donaldson to attend a family holiday luncheon with some of my insane uncles and aunts, that is how pissed off I was!
Anyway, the novella that truly deserves to be put on the crapheap of SF history is "A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison.
The story is about a young guy (actually there are more groups of men and boys) who uses his dog to track and hunt down girls, whom he then rapes. After reading this particularly vile bit of anti-female word vomit, three girls in my junior high school were raped by boys who read the story (it was assigned to us) and thought the premise was a pretty keen idea. Never mind that they ruined the lives of three girls, two of whom tried to commit suicide and one who succeeded. I vowed never to read another word written by Ellison after that, and I haven't, to this day. That SOB deserves to be stuck in prison with a horney cellmate just for writing that novella/short story, IMHO.
BTW, any of the so-called science fiction written by L Ron Hubbard before he invented Scientology as a tax dodge (and because he was pissed off at the Hugo awards) are complete and total crap...trust me.

You know what I hated? The first in the Dragon Riders of Pern series which I think does constitute a sci-fi as most of it took place on a spaceship. Then again, I'm not a huge Anne McAffrey fan. But really, how stupid is this to start your series? They come to this planet on a spaceship after months in stasis, find out about the Thread, this worm thing that eats everything it touches, and bio-engineer these chihuahua sized "dragons" to fight it. I'll probably get flamed for my input, but there was nothing about this I liked. Having a sci-fi prequel to your fantasy series just doesn't sit right with me, the conversation is stilted, and her writing style just plain sucks. It honestly is the worst sci-fi novel I've ever had the misfortune of reading.

I'm going to have to go with The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. I think this one counts since the evil force are actually aliens from outer space. I'd known from fairly early on in the hardcover's 600-some pages that it wasn't going to be good, but King is always readable. Still, when the sentient, flying killer Coke machine appeared, it took all of my will to keep going. And towards the end (like within the last 100 pages or so), King started introducing character after character who was immune to the alien force--which was causing people to turn evil and mutate--only to kill them off a few pages later.

Oh, yeah, and part of the main character's mutation was that she developed tentacles on her crotch.

I know I'll get flamed for it, but I actually liked Imzadi by Peter David, a TNG novel. It has been many years since I last read it, but my memories of it are fond.

There is a TOS novel where Uhura sings with cat people. I liked that too :D

@Zieg,
Are you talking about The Fall of Reach? I thought that book kicked major ass! The Flood (which was actually the novelization of the game) was crap, though.

Also, the Doom novels were indeed shitty. I was especially angered by the fact that it was revealed that the invasion was actually aliens who were using demonic imagery to frighten humans. If I remember correctly, the aliens' true forms looked like their heads were made of cauliflower or something and the good aliens who opposed them looked like Magilla Gorilla. Bullshit. I never even read the last book in the series.

Oops. Sorry for misspelling your screen name, Zeig.

Fuck!

I was just about to post something about how fucking terrible Tommyknockers was.

Yes, it had an in-depth sex scene with a crotch tentacle lady. This shit was cocaine-feuled, alcohol-inspired original FFF bullshit. Of course, when you consider King's personal life at the time, it makes sense. Over a thousand goddamn pages of King basically crying for help. "Look at me! I can no longer write a coherent storyline but instead will relate to you the bizarre and nightmarish fever dreams of my codeine/cocaine/alcohol dependencies!"

Thanks God that dude got some help.

Robert Zubrin's First Landing. Zubrin, of course, is a former NASA engineer, founder of the Mars Society, one of the authors of a pivotal NASA research paper forming an outline for manned Mars exploration. Etc, etc, etc.

First Landing is...not ghostwritten, and is technically accurate.

He also writes plots and human interaction about as well as Joel Schumacher directs heterosexual relationships. Okay, that's not fair. To Schumacher. But Michael Bay does a better job at storytelling, and does it with less jaw-dropping moments of disbelief.

Anyway, basically, we start with the first manned Mars mission approaching their destination. There's some kind of emergency making the landing, and though it doesn't really effect the plot aside from adding some excitment, it DOES highlight the fact that NASA's done the absolute worst possible job of crew selection possible short of sending one serial killer aboard but not telling the crew which one is him.

Anyway, the crew of a couple of haughty scientists and irritating rednecks land, make the worst speech imaginable, and do some exploring. After awhile, they find life—specifically, some proto-algae in a rock, perfectly suited for the Martian environment.

Unfortunately, although the Martian algae is so biologically harmless that the only way it could only pose a threat if you tried to eat some too fast and choked yourself, an ad hoc coalition of panicky tree-huggers and opportunistic Bible-thumpers start raising hell back on Earth to prevent the Mars expedition from coming home. Thus, the adventure really begins.

Everyone in this story is an idiot. And some characters are actually supposed to be idiots, which just makes them slightly more galling.

It's unfair to say that I've read fanfic better than this story, although it's true. But I've read bad fanfic better than this novel. Better composed, better characterized, better cheesy, unbelievable romantic subplots tacked on like a plywood spoiler, and with better sentence structure.

The worst part is, it didn't have to end up like this. The premise--and even the plot--are sound enough, at their basics; he DOES actually bring up some genuinely neat bits in the story; and the science is generally sound. But the overall execution was like a cargo cult trying to build an international air terminal. Out of moldering skulls.

I only shudder to think of what damage this story alone might have done for the cause of manned space exploration.

The amount of sci-fi I've read pales in comparison to the amount of fantasy I tend to read, so my exposure to the bad side of sci-fi is pretty limited. With that said, my nomination for crappiest sci-fi novel is Isaac Asimov's "Prelude to Foundation".

In all honesty I cannot even remember what this book was about, because when I read it I must've blacked out due to sheer boredom. The entire Foundation series is based off an idea called psychohistory, which is essentially a combination of sociology, history, and statistics to create a way to predict how large groups of people (like empires) will end up. Does this sound like an interesting idea for a novel? No? Apparently Asimov thought so, and "Prelude to Foundation" was a huge snore. There was also some big reveal about a robot at the end, but by then I couldn't have cared any less.

PS - I eagerly await Rob's contest concerning the worst horror novel. Boy, do I have a much better entry for THAT contest...

@mrm1138

they were called the 'freds'; yeah, that was one of the worst let down along with the two gorilla allies. but, I did force myself to read the last book and I got to admit it was good. repetitive but good.

"You have come to a world called Gor!"

*whipcrack*

'Nuff said.

The worst one I have read in a long time is....Deathtroopers

That new Star Wars horror book. I mean that alone says how crappy it is. It starts like any other mad libs like horror book. Well sort of everyone dies because they get sick. And so the doctor goes about rounding up all the survivors to get off the ship and she breaks out the prisoners down in the solitary cells and who do they happen to be? Han Solo and Chewbacca. Yeah and this is pre-ANH so somehow and some point Han and Chewie got captured by the empire put on a prision ship, locked up in solitary and attacked by zombies. Further proving anything after KOTOR and before ANH is full of zombies, actually I think zombies are more believable the the prequils.

Also the book is so short they throw in 5 or 6 chapters of a different Star Wars book as a teaser.

On a high note for the book, the dust jacket was a poster, and I got to star at this picture

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/images/features/friday/7_03_09/DeathTroopersKeyart.jpg

Where Han looks like a pouting Skrull.

I don't know if any of you have ever read anything by John Ringo. I've only read just a little and technically I never finished the book, but from the shitload of awful reviews apparently the other 15 books he's written have been just as awful.

The plot is this: Gary Stu---I mean, Mike Harmon---is a retired ex-Navy SEAL who over the course of the series fucks bitches, kills terrorists, fucks more bitches, takes over a castle? does drugs, fucks two bitches at once, etc. etc. Apparently it goes from pretty vanilla to really dark, hardcore kind of sex, too. Hmm. Oh, there's a couple of nukes he disarms, too. I'll quote from a review on Amazon:

"I'm not surprised the author had to be talked into publishing it. It reads more like a private exorcism of personal demons than something intended for public consumption."

Nice.

Can't remember the author, but I remember in 10th grade having to read "The Crysalids" as our study book. At first, it was pretty neat! A story about people with defects (for example, a girl with polydactal toes) and get cast off into the land where mutants dwell. Why? Because it's unnatural. But why are they mutated? Welll it's because of nuclear war and people are in secluded little places, not knowing much about the rest of the world.

So this concept was neat, and this boy (who has the power of telepathy and talks that way with his sister) met the girl who then got shunned to no man's land... And that was around where I lost interest. Later on people caught on that he had a power and stuff happens (not interesting enough to even remember), and later on him and his sister are exploring the country going out of the safe zone. Not to mention "making love in the bushes, quickly"... I think she was only a half sister, but even if the only one you trust in also telepathic, there is no need for a random sentence of incest... Was that even neccessary?!

...I'd also mention 7th grade's "A Wrinkle in Time" but I have a feeling more people actually LIKE it. The idea of the centaur things time traveling was neat, but when the giant brain possessed the main char's brother, it was SOOOO sappy to see lines and lines of her trying to break the spell by saying "You're my little baby brother! I love my baby brother! I love you!" UG!! worst... climax... ever...

Dantheman said:

"unnecessary sex"

there is no such thing...

Worst sci-fi novel ever? Easy. 'Stranger in a Strange Land' by Robert Heinlein. Reason? Just TRY, come on, to read 20 pages of it and NOT hurl it across the room. Pretentious rot.

I once picked up a novel called, "Sundowner," (1994) by Chris Claremont simply because of his work with the Phoinex Saga in X-Men comics. Now: the problem with sci-fi and fantasy novels in general is the concept of a series. No author or publisher these days is in the business for stand-alone novels, because there's no money in that. No, they have to clog up bookstore shelves with their crap series. The second problem with series is: they're meant to be read chronologically. Little is done to place the reader in the moment beyond a short synopsis from previous novel. So if you're looking at book three of a series, and you missed the first two, you're shit out of luck. Plus based on the low popularity of the series, you're likely only going to find one out of three in the series anyway, so you're shit out of luck regardless. Even if all three of three books are available, you might still pick up the wrong book, because few series are numbered based on volume, to keep from discouraging readers.
I tried reading this piece of garbage anyway. The book basically revolved around the main character, Nicole Shea, a space pilot, just kicking back and relaxing after what must have been a harrowing adventure. Yes: all the action and fun happened in the previous novels. Something's still troubling her, so she spends a lot of time rowing around in a boat. It turns out that there's some kind of fucking Cthulu-like space octopus living in the water by where she lives, only instead of being evil it holds the answers to all life's great questions. It's a Godopus.
Everything in the book is either completely out of place of completely overblown in it's delivery. Really ham-fisted stuff.

Worst Sci-Fi book ever: To Sail beyond the Sunset, by Robert A. Heinlein. It was one of Heinlein's last novels, and was largely responsible for the rumors that he had "lost it" late in his career. Sure, there may be some books out there that are more incompetently written, but the fact that this one is written by an A-List SF Grandmaster who had already written about 80 books, most of which are excellent, is justification for deducting extra points. It's a rambling tale of the life story of the mother of one of Heinlein's series characters (Lazarus Long), a farm wife who time travels through a non-linear narrative that seems to focus mainly on who she had sex with. It's all told in 600 pages of the most turgid, protracted over-narrated prose you might expect from a high-school kid who spent the last 8 years of his life trying to write the next "Lord of the Rings". I confess I did not finish the book, so I can't spoil the ending. I gave up around page 350, where the heroine spends THREE WHOLE PAGES waxing philosophically on the pungency of her vaginal odor. I'm not making this up.

War Surf.

OR any Bladerunner sequel. No offense to K.W. Jeter, but there is a difference between being cleverly self referential and slavishly reverential. I love your other books.

Ted Dekker's 'Blink'. It's Catholic sci-fi. Seriously. And offensive to Muslims. (Not that I am one, but if I were...)

Michel Faber's 'Under the Skin. If you don't get what's going on right away, you're an idiot. And I'm not someone who calls people idiots casually and without cause.

Scientology by L. Ron Hubbard. Throw in Dianetics too.
We have all seen the piece of crap with Travolta.
We have all seen the southpark.
Tom Cruise believes its true....it must be crap.

DeAnn Rossetti mentioned it, but not as an entry.

@scarred

RE: sentient turd

You aren't talking about "Twilight of the Cockroaches", are you?

I personally found The Giver by Lois Lowry to be absolutely awful, and we had to read it for Year 7.

I'll put it this way: Sometime in the near/distant future (The book isn't too clear on this) a Utopian society has been created, which isn't really Utopian, because it's really ordered and Communist. Anyway, all emotion, feelings, and for some reason, perception of colour has been forgotten.

Anyway, there's this kid who gets chosen to be the apprentice to some old guy, who proceeds to give him memories of the world before it went all messed up. These memories are transferred from the old man to the kid by the kid toughing the old guy on the back.

It soon degenerates into weird shit about 12-year olds having sexual feelings, infanticide, and a stack of other stuff.

The whole thing is pretty much an attempt to make 1984 for 9-12 year olds. Instead, it just ends up very messed up.

Yes – all of you douche bags and your “geek cred” can go to hell. It’s easy to complain about Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Dune books. It’s easy to rip apart Robert Jordan’s one-million-volume “Wheel of Time” novels. You bought every last one of them and you know it. Fuck off.

Here is an easy answer to the question at hand:
Many of you haven’t experienced the horror that is ‘Christmas Slaughter’ 5th(!) in the series called ‘Mutants Amok.’ I bought this book originally to remind me that publishers will print anything. It also reminded me that my skills as a writer certainly surpassed anyone who’d write a book called ‘Christmas Slaughter’.

It deals with mutants who dress up in Santa costumes and slaughter people. Okay – I have it on the shelf but haven’t read it all the way through. It’s terrible. Look at the cover. Look it up on Amazon, you bastards. I’ll wait.

You’ve got to be kidding me…

When I saw this book at my local grocery store (yeah, not a bookshop), I couldn’t help but buy it. Five pages in, I knew that pain was ahead. I actually should have known earlier, I mean – look at that fucking cover!

I wish I could compete in this contest. You see..back in the day,I read EVERY Star Wars novel that was published. EVERY ONE!!! And apparently Lucasfilm and their publisher wouldnt pay their writers dick....it was thought that the "honor" of getting to write for Star Wars was worth more than any monetary compensation(I also had a friend who worked for ILM and it was the same policy there-nobody who works at the 'ranch makes squat). Anyway,as a result,the shittiest writers in all of Sci-Fi all managed to chrun out a Star Wars book or comic at some point in the 90's and by god I read them all....but I have no worst memory as I've pretty much managed to block them all out. I cant recall the exact book,but there was one where it seemed like the elderly versions of Han and Leia just bitched about how horrible their marriage was for like 300 pages...I finally stopped torturing myself when they did the Chewie-snuff book.

Wow, my bad HTML skills know no bounds.
To hell with me -- that's what I get for being an insulting douche.

What the hell happened to the board? Did the sheer amount of suck we were discussing actually break the Topless Robot commenting section? EVERYBODY RUN!!!!

Did someone divide by 0?

Anyway, there's ass needs kickin', but I'm not the one to do it. Who volunteers?

Hey, it's fixed! Wheee!

Stephen Kings says in him memoirs he remembers very little of writing the Tommyknockers.

If we're talking bad SK books (and I love SK, don't get me wrong)what about Dreamcatcher? Alien parasites that give their host the worst (and the last) *flatulence* of their lives?

Shel, I have to agree...

Anyone saying "You're my little baby brother! I love my baby brother! I love you!" *would* make it the worst climax ever.

Do not, I repeat do not EVER say that during climax.

I've never read it, but even worse than "Battlefield: Earth", L. Ron Hubbard wrote a terribly LONG multi-part novel called "Mision Earth" that is clearly at least 10,000 pages. The story looks to be very similar but much dumber and more decompressed than "Battlefield: Earth". Last time I was at my local used book store there were eight or nine copies of all TEN VOLUMES of this shit sitting there for less than the usual minimum price of $0.75 apiece. One could buy all 10 volumes and 10k plus pages for less than $3, and NOBODY ever touched them. They've been there for the last 6 years while every other shelf in that store has seen every item sold with new items replacing them. I may never have read the books, but I doubt that ANYTHING (even Eoin Colfer's "And Another THing..." could possibly be worse).

My vote goes to NEXT by Micheal Crichton. Which is sad because I was a huge fan and this was his last published book. I honestly don't remember much of it. I must have blocked it out. It had something to do with a talking(or maybe just extra-intelligent) genetically engineered monkey. The plot went nowhere. There was little to no characterization. and to top it all off the "climax" was close to nonexistent thanks to the overall haziness of the narrative. I really hate that this hunk of garbage was the last we'll read from such an amazing author.

The Book of Revelation by Rory Barnes and Damien Broderick. I read 79 pages, hoping it would get more interesting, then gave up. Two excepts on the back cover, which I should have taken more notice of when grabbing it from the library's reject pile (that inself should have given me a clue):

"Tilted on the hard slab, he knows the heavy stick of the place. *What awful crap do they suck up with those lipless little mouths?* The grey doctor touches his forehead with a needle - sharp, glinting - and pushes it hard into his skull."

"Unpleasant as a fish, she is stretched out like someone expecting a disagreeable medical examination. The grey doctor touches his arm. You will give her a baby, Klar-2 instructs him"

It sounds a bit like FFF looking at the cover now, I remember grabbing it because I thought that it maybe interesting given that it involved a UFO cult leader. What was I thinking? The horsewife mentioned in the blurb should have been a glaring beacon of the crapola contained within.

Worlds of Power: Mega Man 2.

In this part of the Scholastic Worlds of Power series of children's novels (of which there was never a Mega Man 1, never mind 3 and up), Dr. Wily is at it once again, just as he is in the game. Dr. Light, creator of the heroic robot Mega Man, decides that in order to better combat Wily's robots, there should be two Mega Men. Like Mega Man 2, get it?

Anyway, he screws up. Instead of making two Mega Men, it makes the one Mega Man into a human. That's right, instead of Super Fighting Robot, Mega Man, you have not-so Super Fighting Human, Mega Man-- just what everyone paid to see when they bought a book about robots blasting the hell out of each other.

And so it goes, with an aside every few paragraphs about how hot Mega Man feels in Heat Man's lair, or how creepy he finds Flash Man's lair. All emotions that he could never feel because he was just a simple robot with simple programming. But not any more!

And so it goes, about eight times over, plus the Dr. Wily levels. Characterization was pretty much paper thin; Wily was evil, because in the games, he was evil. You never really hear word one from him until the end of the book, and barely even then. Light is good, Mega Man is good, it's all good... well, except for everyone else. And the rest of the book.

Sadly, I rather liked this piece as a child, given I loved (and still love) Mega Man, but we lacked such things as the cartoon series (until the early to mid-nineties) and the manga that are on the way now. The only alternative was the green dwarf that is the Captain N version of Mega Man.

"Hi, I'm Mega Man! I'm mega-horny! I need a mega-condom and some mega-spanking!"

Yeah, the human Mega Man looks a little better after that.

Heartlight
I can't remember who wrote it, but I acquired it when I was in 8th grade... they were giving it away for free to anyone that bought a dictionary at the local bookstore. I have no idea why.
Im sure you havent read it, but there's a nuclear scientist with a wacky theory about black holes. Then he gives a ring to his granddaughter and they fly giant butterflies through space and meet god in another solar system and theres a sympathetic block of ice (which has no fingers, they stress that for a few pages). Then another scientist arrives without using a butterfly and he threatens to destroy the earth but god tells him not to. They go back to Earth and the first scientist dies from cancer.
I hated it because it was horrible juvenile fiction that clearly could not be sold for money and they had to foist it on me for innocently buying a dictionary.

Oh man I wish I had been around for the Fantasy one. Anybody read "Orcs"? You know, with the unicorn horn strap on dildo used for banging a chick to death to steal orgasm majic? Guh.

I'm just going to have to say "Children of the Jedi" by Barbara Hambly.

It was as if someone who had never seen Star Wars or read a Star Wars book had taken one of her own rejected novels and scrawled "STAR WARS" on the cover, then systematically started changing the names of her characters to Star Wars characters.

I have blocked the memory of most of the book, but I can say this much about it: When it was over, I felt as if I'd been butt-raped by a gay, cross-dressing version of the Death Star. This book made "The Phantom Menace" look like "The Empire Strikes Back". It made the Ewoks TV movies look like Shakespeare. It made any possibly novelization of the "Star Wars Christmas Special" look like "Heir to the Empire".

When I put Barbara Hambly's book down, I felt like R2-D2 felt when the Jawas shot him. I think I even made the same sound.

It's no wonder I've set up mental blocks. . .

Here are a few things that bugged the piss out of me in the book, though:

She misspelled almost every Star Wars name, place, and concept outside of Luke Skywalker. It's like she didn't have a reference book or anything, or perhaps this was written by a 10-year-old.

She had a tendency to write in one incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic. It was NOT hypnotic. In fact, it was like reading a Star Wars book written by a person with severe Attention Deficit Disorder.

There were coffee cups in the Millenium Falcon. COFFEE CUPS. Any Star Wars reader knows they don't have coffee; They have caf. This just demonstrated that she hadn't researched her setting very much, and pulled the reader out of the book.

Details. Way too many details. Each page was loaded with in-depth descriptions of the surroundings, the clothing, the way things smell, and so on... But in doing this, she forgot to write things like character transitions, the middles or ends of discussions, and plot points that would have made the book read more like a novel, and less like Japanese stereo instructions translated to poor English.

She actually uses the phrase "hirsute skeleton".

I can't go on. Just do me a favor and don't read this book. Don't even look at it, or the stupid might wear off on you.

OK, so actual SF entry here:

Time Enough for Love by Hienlein.

This was my first exposure to him, back in high school. Apparently this dude was a master of science fiction, and I had never read him! Of course I had to rectify this!

Unfortunately, I acquired a book written towards the end of his life. You know, from when he became obsessed with consensual incest.

It starts off with these doctors examining the worlds oldest man. Surprise, the oldest man is immortal! The doctors go off to bang without ever seeing each other (they are in these full body suits) or even knowing the other person's sex, but because one doctor asks to bang the other, they have to, since in the future it is illegal to refuse to have sex with anyone who asks. Seriously.

The doctors then get the immortal guy (whose name is Lazarus Long. Might as well be Never Die Hella Old Guy)to tell his life story. This ends up being a who's who of bangin' people throughout history. Some highlights:

-While living on Mars (the space equivalent of the Wild West), Lazarus adopts a girl whose parents have been killed. Despite raising her as his daughter her entire life, he eventually bangs her and raises children (grandchildren?) with her.

-Back in the future, Lazarus is cloned by some doctors he banged. Both doctors carry his clones in-utero, but alter the genetics so they give birth to girls. Lazarus bangs both of his female clones in a threeway while they are still in their teens.

-Bored with future sex, Lazarus travels back in time, only to fall in love with his own mother. His father has no problem with this mysterious "stranger" banging his wife, as they have an open relationship, despite the fact that this is in the early 1920s. Unfortunately for Lazarus (but fortunately for the reader), he gets cockblocked by his childhood self.

This is a shortlist of a book whose title *should* have warned me off in the first place. It would be almost a decade before I would bother to read anything else by Hienlein.

I agree with those that said the Crystal Star, this I read in High School, was so pissed off by the book that I wrote a letter to the author and Publisher and that freak Mcintyre and complained about the book and she sent me back a letter with thanks for my comments and an autographed cover of one of her other books. She didn't even read my freakin letter. Luke goes all EMO, Jaina befriends a centaur as mentioned and then there is this big glob of a creature that freakin EATS KIDS for their force abilities. Luke jumps into the blob and leia has to go in to save him!

Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. Why is it that Pulitzer Prize winning authors need to transcend genres after they've done something decent? Want some free advice? If you built houses with your lego sets instead of spaceships when you your 7 then you probably shouldn't be a Sci-Fi author! I don't mind something that genre-bending and original, but keep your post-structuralist rip-offs of a good author (Virginia Woolf) out of our house.

Oh yeah, and Death Troopers sucked hard.

Finally, Timothy Zahn wasn't that bad. The stories have structure and make sense in an arc. The problem is that his books read like Tom Clancy: all of the characters suffer from a severe lack of humanity. The he portrays Luke makes him come off like a Mormon instead of the kick-ass Zen Buddhist he was really envisioned as. I mean give Luke a break, his character had to evolve beyond the Farm Boy mentality in his 40s.

One final Star Wars comment:

The man with a dark appetite who killed off Chewie, R. A. Salvatore, was signing books in my hood. His actually one of the most docile and passive people I have ever met.

I'm generally a well balanced and calm person in personal life and in my job. I have a high stress job but I'm able to shrug it off and play guitar or go biking; I generally don't want to maim or kill my coworkers or clients. I qualify this because I have to admit that my first impulse when talking to R.A Salvatore was to think of Chewie and kick R.A. squarely in the nuts. The whole expanded universe is so over-written and implausible that there is no reason to snuff all of the main characters to get attention, this thread clearly proves that we all buy this crap anyway. Why the hate on Chewbacca?

I'm not sure it would qualify as "sci-fi." I have read every book in the "Crosstime Engineer" series. (*hangs head in shame*) In his last book, Leo Frankowski couldn't even find a publisher willing to print his book. So he self-published online through PDFs.

The entire series is about a "Mary Sue" by the name of Conrad Schwartz (called "Conrad Stargard" in the book.) Somehow, he gets sent to 13th century Poland, a decade before the Mongols are to show up. He somehow ends up saving the day, wins fame and money and lots of mid-teen lovers. In his last book, which was never submitted to an editor (*ARGH!!!*), he is captured and enslaved, and starts a slave rebellion, leading the freed slaves from Western Africa to the Mediterranean coast, then on towards Egypt.

(Just found out he died a year ago...)
The author has an ego the size of his gut. He's an absolute bigot, a misogynist, and a homophobe. If I didn't like (1) time travel, (2) the "one man can change the world" scenario, I would never have made it past the first book. I can "data-mine" from what he wrote, after pulling out his alter-ego, but it's still excruciating to see what his work was like BEFORE an editor managed to clean it up...

So yeah. Lord Conrad's Crusade, a "Mary Sue" from a published author whose ego was too big to put up with having someone cut out his grandiose self-congratulations...

OK, I have two. The "Mission Earth" series by L. Ron Hubbard. You thought the movie of "Battlefield Earth" was bad, Mission Earth went to a whole new level of paranoid delusional. And it was long. Soul suckingly, road trip with your smelly deceased aunt long. 10 Books long. As far as I can tell, it was ten books just so Mr. Hubbard could coin a new term "decology" which I believe is greek for, "this is two months of your life you'll never have back, and by the way I hate the CIA and psychology."

The second, would be "Pornucopia" by Piers Anthony. It features a protagonist with a detatchable penis and godsohelpmeitsSkywalkingtrue, Magic Smegma. I won't spoil the end for you, but Magic Smegma and Detatchable, interchangable Penis comes in to save the day. Trust me, the number of ways you can Skywalk with magic smegma and a detachable, interchangable penis is remarkable.

Lives of the Monster Dogs. What's sad though is that when I was a somewhat pretentious teenager, I actually thought this book was some sort of amazingly deep parable...or something.

So here's the plot...a mad German scientist in the 19th century decides that he's going to create a race of perfect soldiers, and chooses dogs since they'd be super loyal. They end up creating these part cyborg super intelligent dogs. They have surgically attached prosthetic hands, walk upright, and can speak with voice boxes. They eventually revolt against their human masters who'd moved the whole monster dog making operation to Canada and end up in modern day New York wearing human Victorian dress and generally having the mannerisms of a Victorian aristocrat. Eventually they have a kind of existential meltdown trying to grasp their place and purpose in life and they slip into insanity.

@Bill Binder: My dad found your comment very funny. And he wanted me to post it on here. Yeah. My dad's a nerd too.

Okay you said novel but All I can think of is storyline. And that is a retelling of the Pacific war of WWII. I have sen this done at least three time that I can recall and maybe up to five. The two who's authors I can recall are the Sten series by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole and a trilogy of books by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole. And they all were crappy because you know what's going to happen. Two space power at edge of war, the one representing Japan launches a sneak attack of a "naval" base, and other posts of the power representing the USA. You have a Philippine campaign, and battle of Midway, some island...I mean planet hopping, a retaking of the Philippines, with a MacArthur archetype, a Yamamoto type admiral who will die, and a battleship Yamato style suicide attack. All end up with the Japan style power totally defeated and occupied after a devastating attack with or with out the uses of a superweapon (aka the A-Bomb). I do not read these types of books any more. Once I see where the plot is going I know they are a waste of time and money.

For some reason, the first book that comes to mind is Keeper of Isis Light by Monica Hughes. It's kind of obscure, and was written before I was born. Really it wasn't that bad. I liked the book, right up until the ending. It was like the writer got bored or something. It had a good premise, basically a robot raises a human girl alone on a planet that her parents were supposed to be preparing for colonization. To ensure his ward's survival, the robot alters her (through surgery or DNA recoding, I can't recall). Everything's fine, until the human colonists finally arrive. There's some interesting conflict when the humans learn what the robot did, and a really great action sequence, but the ending just... failed. I felt cheated. And I read this thing when I was ten.

For me I have to say it's a toss up between the quantum gravity series by Justina Robson and The Sex Gates by Darrell Bain and Jeanine Berry. But if I'm choosing I think my entry will be the Sex Gates series. Now just for some perspective the quantum gravity series reads kinda like a scifi version of twilight even though it still has demons and elves. whatever it's bad, moving on. The Sex Gates starts with an interesting premise gates appear and whoever passes through them gains youth and changes their sex. Everything kinda starts degrading when the main characters start taking trips through. People begin having random sex but in a teenage boy fantasy kinda way where there will be piles of girls and only one guy and the sex never gets real explicit so it reads kinda like a porno with all the sex scenes cut and just the openings scenes left.

Characters appear for about one scene and then disappear forever. The main character's brother who is supposedly a transsexual shows up for half a page gives a huge emotional speech then walks away for the rest of the series. The main characters parents show go through the gates because of illness. They say their piece and then leave. The next book and half the characters are actually living in the parents house with no mention of them.

Then authors decide to start preaching. Woman who change into men start to get into power and suddenly the world is a much better place. They actually straight out proclaim that. Next they compare religious people to the mentally ill and criminals. With some science of the gates not working with those groups. At a point in a later novel where all the characters are living on a compound "together" they actually sit around and laugh at the idea of a soul. But then they spend the entire last novel terrified of losing that indefinable thing that makes them human.

And finally not to give away the ending but... there isn't one. Not as in they didn't write one, but like they forgot they needed a point to the series and tried to create one in the last couple chapters then just kinda tacked on some cheap epilogue.

wow I was not planning on making this entry that long.

Before I start mine, I'd like to mention that the last time I read any of these books was probably 10 years ago, so my facts may not be EXACT.

@ZeroCorpse
Thank you for mentioning Barbara Hambly. The more annoying (and therefore awful) book by her is Planet of Twilight. Hambly introduced a love triangle in her first book, Children of the Jedi, in her character Callista, which Luke Skywalker finds interesting. Callista is then practically killed off by Kevin J. Anderson in the book Darksaber, and the fans rejoice (because Children of the Jedi was seriously a horrible, horrible book). But Hambly won't let her character die, and writes Planet of Twilight to REINTRODUCE the fallen Callista through the most twisted, weird plot line ever. Oh, she survived! And the story goes something like this: Callista is a Jedi who can no longer use the light side of the Force, only the dark side, but she isn't evil, so she's annoyed by it. Therefore, she needs to travel around the galaxy looking for some sort of crystal to restore her connection to the Force? That makes TOTAL sense!

I've always been curious about who gets to write the Star Wars novels. Barbara Hambly wrote such great sellers as Dog Wizard, her foray into Fantasy, a few vampire novels, and Fever Season (along with several others) that were Historical Fiction, so why is she qualified to mess with Luke and Leia?

The worst book ever is Wratheu by Storm Constantine. It is basically Mad Max/X-men/Anne Rice mash-up. It is the future and humanity is evolving. Into "super beautiful" hermaphoditic ubermensches. The normal ugly people get mad at the race of male models, because despite being hermaphrodites the look like men, and have a war destroying society. Thus the wratheu as the new race is called must rebuild society with their new psychic powers and having LOTS AND LOTS of SEX! If Anne Rice had a massive head injury and decided to write and unimaginative sci-fi epic this would be it.

Dammit! So because I'm not well versed in sci-fi novels, good or bad, I'm procluded from my weekly chance to win a website t-shirt? I knew my functional illiteracy would come back and bite me on the ass eventually. Well played, sir.

Dan Brown, Digital Fortress. If you've read it you know why. Godfuckingdamnit.

...Three submissions:

1) *ANY* "Star Trek" novel hacked by Michael Jan Friedman, who to this day I'm convinced only got all those writing gigs because he was blowing someone high up at Pocket Books.

2) "Black Fire" by Sonni Cooper. Spock as a pirate does *not* work.

3) *ANYTHING* that Gentry Lee wrote and stuck Sir Art Clarke's name on just to make a buck.

I was hoping I could get to Mission Earth first seeing as I found a copy of the first book today at a thrift store for .75 cent, but sadly I was beaten. Although shame on that person who not mentioning that the series was 10 books of Hubbard failing at trying to be a 'classic satirist' while writing a story involves an alien planet wanting to take over Earth by preventing us from destroying ourselves where our hero not only uncovers a plot that reveals Homosexuality is created by alien made rock music; but also gets trapped by two 'man-hating' lesbians who eventually marry him after he rapes and tortures them so they know what real love is.

Also, while it was released after his death, Hubbard wrote the lyrics and composed the music for a horrendous rock album that was the soundtrack for the Mission Earth series and features the albino wonder Edgar Winter doing to his music career what John Travolta did to his acting career with the Battlefield Earth movie.

Smallville.

Doomstar, by Richard Meyers (late 70s). This is the book that -- though my memory has blotted out any particular details -- convinced me through its dialog, plot, and setting that I, too, could be a published SF writer some day. If someone would publish Doomstar, at least twelve someones would publish me.

The best plot synopsis I can find (http://www.sffworld.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-21382.html) reads:

Alright so theres some guy who is supposedly really really smart and a clone? or made if i remember correctly, and has some ship that is co piloted with him by some temperamental feline woman. the ship can talk and has a witty sense of humor and is always messing with the smart lead pilot person. they get in a few gun fights here and there then in their travels through space they find some huge chunk of metal now they bring thispiece of metal onboard for somme reason and it turns out to be some man inside a "space bullet" from some warrior planet and his names hallan(( i could be wrong)) well they end up listening to his story and taking him to his homeworld and end up fighting with him against some alien species or something like that.

The space bullet guy and the feline woman end up hooking up, and i think the main guy dies.

Yeah. That rings a bell.

And I rank this as the crappiest even as an aficionado of tempermental feline women.

This one's easy!

Dianetics (any of them) by L. Ron Hubbard.

Wanna' argue about it being Science Fiction? One would look pretty silly if they did. It's bad, bad Science Fiction.

@scarred: sentient turd/bono = cookie

Wow, somehow I dont think it will be too hard to figure this one out!

Jess
www.private-web.se.tc

Any Dune (novel) sequel. Just pick one. Any one.

Star wars By George Lucas.

its god awful, but the line about Obi Wan stalking about like a weasel tops it out.

To the people criticising the Night's Dawn trilogy - strikes me that you're not a huge fan of Space Opera maybe? Like it seems you're criticizing them for doing pretty much precisely what they set out to do. I can't disagree with anything you say (as such) but all that shit was ridiculously entertaining to me. Yeah it wasn't realistic or even sensible, but it was entertaining, engaging and there were some conceptually interesting ideas. They don't rate compared to the Sci Fi I love (Iain M Banks, Philip K Dick, China Mieville) but highly entertaining yarns.

Typically I've been fairly lucky with sci fi insofar as I've mainly read things either recommended to me by people with good taste, or based on authors I have already read, so I can't honestly recall anything wholly bad. Closest would be I think would be 'Shadow Puppets' by Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow I loved, and Speaker for the Dead, and Shadow of the Hegemon were great too. But I really HATED in Shadow Puppets how Bean was pressured into having children. It seemed really off to me, and it was clear from the way it was written that the reader was supposed to think it was right. At the point I read it I didn't realise OSC was a card carrying homophobic mormon, when I discovered that it made that element make more sense, but still, it felt ugly.

Most Doctor Who books, those things sucked ass.

I've read science fiction on Authonomy. Heck, I've *written* science fiction and put it on Authonomy. I have no choice, though, but to go with the Wayfarer Redemption series.

Sound familiar? It should; it's the home of the Fetus Slap attack and winner of the Worst Fantasy Novel contest. Turns out that in book 4 or 5 there was a huge sci fi twist - a third of the population is descended from refugees from Earth who were fleeing the "Timekeeper Demons", which eat your mind if you're out under the open sky at specific times of day. Never mind the concept of time zones, but IN-BOOK, they're thwarted by the use of a parasol.

The science fiction elements are made a HUGE deal, but they're almost completely irrelevant and serve only to distract from how awful the series is getting by that point. Apart from the Fetus Slap, book 5 is majorly concerned with the protagonist's brother having been set up by prophecy as a decoy messiah, and his subsequent messy death. DragonStar (yes, that's the hero's name) uses this decoy to reach the soul of the imprisoned demon lord that the others are trying to release; it's trapped in the form of a suit of armor. He rides in naked, takes the tablecloth that was draped over the armor, wears it as a diaper and rides out. Nobody ever mentions ANY of this ever again; apparently he sacrificed his brother for no actual reason.

Meanwhile, the ruler of a kingdom that got pwned by the demons is all pissed because someone else saved his peoples' lives and got them into this sanctuary that most of the second book was dedicated to finding. In the first few pages of book 3 he sells out that sanctuary to the demons and all the civilians have to flee again, but it's okay because the back of that sanctuary directly connects to heaven.

The demons are defeated through a series of challenges in which 3/4 of their opponents die, but in the last ten pages DragonStar reveals that he was defining death as winning so his people actually WON, nyah! So the demons get executed by hanging using a rope made of tied-together arrows and their terrible, ineffective leader gets eaten by a bear cub that symbolized love. How do we know it symbolized love? The author directly tells us.

Afterwards, everyone who didn't flee directly to heaven is already dead except for a few characters the author shows as still alive despite being at what looked like ground zero. Everyone else is in heaven so it's all good.

I'm disappointed, no one has mentioned TekWar by good ol Shatner himself? The line of books got made into a short lived tv series back in the 90s. Its one of the few examples of the tv show being better than the books (but not by much). Basically it seem to steal most of its ideas from from other, better cyberpunk stories out there.

I'm not sure it quite SciFi, but pretty much anything by Clive Cussler. I've manged to get through two of his novels (Raise the Titanic and Valhalla Rising) and wanted to stab myself in the eyes afterward. Raise the Titanic isn't wholly bad, just one ridiculous scene after the other. Valhalla Rising on the other hands gets to be near incoherent at times. One dimensional characters, cheesy dialog, and Captain Nemo's Nautilus is discovered (you heard me). Ancient Vikings that have nothing really to do with the story except the title of the book. At the end of the book the main character meets his grown children. He finds out that his lover - who he thought was dead - had born and raised their children herself as she had been injured and didn't want him to know about her pathetic state.

David Gunn's "Death's Head" series.

It's pretty bad when the main character(Sven Tveskoeg)is a blatent rip-off of "Riddick" from Pitch Black/Chronicles of Riddick except somehow more derivative.

And seriously, Sven Tveskoeg?? Why not just call him Toughguy McExplosionman or Gunny Punchinface.

That would go to The Ear The Eye and The Arm. How it won so many awards I'll never figure out.
The book itself was a boring mess with characters that cannot be sympathized with. I think it won just because it featured African American characters personally.

Another book that pissed me off as a kid in school. The Giver.
It wasnt a horrible book. Its just frustrating to think that my classmates could be so stupid as to not realize that the main character DIES in the end! He is DEAD!

to me there are 2 .
the dark angel trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce
book one was set in the future with no mention of earth and basicly an evil sorceress takes control of a planet . her sons are 7 dark angels who are also vampires (bear with me , ok it was a good read and i she cuts her heart out and swaps it with his , making him human again. then they go out to save the world .

gathering of gargoyles , in which she goes on this quest to kill said witch and discovers the origins of her race (think 10,ooo bc - the movie ,execpt the atlanteans choose to be isolated , and die out in empty towers and fade into legend) along the way all of earth's technology is forbidden to mention and therefore called magic .
as well as bring 6 gargoyles back to strength.

pearl of the soul of the world .
its after the 4th chapter of Gargoyles that she loses her Effin mind , it was a decent story and should have ended it as 1. instead the herione is fucked over and kills the witch (who finds out that Earth is no more because of all the bio warfare we had and is completely lifeless in the sky)... makes a sacrifice by leaving the former angel with his own heart once again .only this time she gets killed in her fight with the witch and is ressurected as a clone/golem which you dont find out until the end of the book.
finally as her being a clone and will live forever due to the infinite power of the "magic" she leaves the darkangel who has fallen in love with her from book 2 and goes off to seach for the scattered peices of the pearl .
i have this as a hardcover , so i have to deal with shitty writing for books 2-3 .
THE HEROINE ENDS UP losing the man she loves , because the witches mother tricks her into supposed responsiblity "for the good of the world"
FUCKING FAIL !!!!

this sounds like ramblings but you search "Pearl of the Soul of the World by Meredith Ann Pierce " on bn, amazon and read the reviews.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the lady penitant - lisa smedman for all the DnD fans out there , if you have read the War of the spider queen avoid this like the plague , or atleast download a copy for free. its not worth your hard earned cash. as well as be majorly dissapointed at how shitty her writing is . YES ITS WORST THAN "Twilight's SteVe myer" (HA , see i made her a girl with a guys name , hows that for unique spelling )

quick summary , HALLISTRA IS ALIVE, forced to serve Lolth, FR gods die , somewhere in this Hallistra is on a trip of vengeance to kill Lolth , while this is going on Drow are trying to redeem themselves from the underdark because the female magic that failed in WoTSQ gave males a higher purpose and they want to be free from said matriarchial tyrany .
now dont get me wrong i

end of books >> THIS FUCKING BITCH REDEEMS THE DROW.
YOU DONT REDEEM THE FUCKING DROW , they are naturally EVIL BEINGS .

Ok... its not a novel but a short story we were forced to read in school. The cold equation. about some guy who works for the worlds most efficent space cargo thing. Just enough fuel to get from a to b depending on how much was being carried and a stowaway girl trying to see her brother. (considering your weightless in space [less I'm missing a part of this[ I didn't exactly understand how much fuel some teen age string bean of a girl could lose by her walking on the ship as well) It tells you from the beginning what the ending is but you wish from the beginning that it would have some sort of magic last chance final page saves and well.. no... he stuffs her in an airlock like he is so posed to after waiting out to the last second for her to say goodbye to her brother via space intercom thingy and fires her off into space to die so he and the crap he was transporting could land safely. Epic sadness...

"I don't remember the name of the book, but it came out sometime around when Shadows of the Empire did. Han was captured by a race of unheard of creatures from some distant galaxy. They were red I believe, and they had these huge chitin blades attached to their forearms. Their culture worshiped the leader to the point where it was a high honor to have the leader chop off their heads so he could bathe in their blood. There was something in there about Han being in restraints and they didn't fit so the leader killed the guard and didn't bathe in his blood, which was a huge dis.
I hope somebody can think of the book that I am thinking of, just because that is the only book I have ever thrown into the trash."

@Patracolos.

You´re thinking of "The Black Fleet Crisis" trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell.
Book 1: Before the Storm.
Book 2: Shield of Lies.
Book 3: Tyrant´s Test.

And you´re right it was pretty awful to read, unfortunately I have this terrible, terrible condition that forces me to read a book to the end once I´ve started it. It sucks...

I have to go with “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s an overrated story of a dystopian future where the U.S. government, in an effort to create an equal society, forcibly handicaps its citizens deemed to have an unfair advantage over the rest of us. Graceful dancers wear weights, the beautiful wear masks, the intelligent are forced to listen to Phillip Glass when they think too much, and on and on. This is strictly enforced by the appointed Handicapper General of the United States.

This is not the crappiest sci-fi story because it’s set in the future, but told entirely in past tense (“The year was 2081…”). It is not because the story’s concept is painfully weak (it was likely in my middle school textbook because everyone from my middle school could have written it). It is not even because Harrison Bergeron’s stunning act of rebellion is to dance with a ballerina on the future’s version of “So You Think You Can Dance.”

It is the crappiest sci-fi story because, in the thrilling conclusion, the United States Handicapper General herself bursts onto the dance stage and shoots Bergeron dead with a shotgun. This is the equivalent of Janet Reno busting into the Waco compound herself to personally light David Koresh on fire.

@PeterJR1961 said:

Okay you said novel but All I can think of is storyline. And that is a retelling of the Pacific war of WWII. I have sen this done at least three time that I can recall and maybe up to five. The two who's authors I can recall are the Sten series by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole and a trilogy of books "by I believe Norman Spinrad"(correction). And they all were crappy because you know what's going to happen. Two space power at edge of war, the one representing Japan launches a sneak attack of a "naval" base, and other posts of the power representing the USA. You have a Philippine campaign, and battle of Midway, some island...I mean planet hopping, a retaking of the Philippines, with a MacArthur archetype, a Yamamoto type admiral who will die, and a battleship Yamato style suicide attack. All end up with the Japan style power totally defeated and occupied after a devastating attack with or with out the uses of a superweapon (aka the A-Bomb). I do not read these types of books any more. Once I see where the plot is going I know they are a waste of time and money.

Needed to make a correction the The second author was I believe Norman Spinrad

The Church of Scientology
by
L. Ron Hubbard

I can't remember the name, but it was included in one of those (extremely cheap, we were poor) collection of sci-fi short stories books. This MAD STORY OF TIME AND SPACE featured an astronaut crew landing on a planet where the surface was bouncy and colorful. After having a gay old time on Planet Springy or whatever the hell, they try to blast off finding that omgno!!!! they're stuck in the planet's surface! Shit in a sack of spoons!

After doing extensive surface composition test, one of the (I'm sure white and male given the time of this book's production) astronauts gets the genius idea of unloading all of the ship's water supplies on the planet's surface as the planet is, actually, of course, a giant gumdrop.

As in...a giant fucking gumdrop.

I don't know what's worse: the fact that the story's antagonist is...candy, or the fact that if the crew really did dump all their water they'd die of thirst in the depths of space before they got home.

Actually, you know what? Fuck 'em. They deserve it for being in such a shitty story to begin with. And they did destroy a freakin' entire planet to boot. You couldn't eat your way out? Or dig? Aren't astronauts supposed to be smart? Assholes.

Actually actually, fuck me. Fuck me for being such a literature whore as a kid that I read any shitball book I could get my pudgy little fingers on. Now I get to remember "A Sticky Situation...In Space!" or whatever the fuck the story was called for the rest of my life. Seriously, fuck me.

And fuck my dad for leaving when I was five, that son of a bitch.

Ah, how could I forget this one: Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. As much as I love Clark's original Rama, the sequels, that were actually written by Gentry Lee for the most part are truly horrible.

I am not as well rounded with the sci fi books mainly the classics, Dune, Foundation, Ray Bradbury, but this one I found read was the worst one i ever read.

Recursion by Tony Ballantyne

This story in a nut shell is AI trying to fight another computer AI for no reason what so ever, and was planning it for nearly 200 years.

What's annoying about this story it starts in the future, than proceeds to talk about the main characters ancestors each feel out of place together. So its set up with 3 stories one set in modern times, one set up 100 years than 200 years.

Modern times is basically follows a girl who is followed by a all powerful AI, it gets weird and makes no sense since this is supposed to be the good AI but ends up killing people who are suicidal instead of trying to help them. This story is completely slow paced doesn’t even feel like sci fi novel until the end of it so it just feel out of place the entire time. until the very end of here story, and then it just feels like it wasn’t needed.

The second story follow some guy who works for a corporation that’s trying to figue out some secrete he knows or at least they think he knows. His is a bit of lame story telling but sadly his is the best story out of them all, You find out mid way that he’s not real but a digital copy of the same guy from the first chapter of his story and they are trying to use a fake digital world to manipulate him into finding out whatever they want. Although this process takes years and by the end the original people who started seem dead. What ever they wanted seems irrelevant in the end and he’s actually in the third story as a small robot.

The third story follows Herb a guy who basically owns a planet but gets in trouble with the government for trying to create life on it. But the twist is the ai from the first one was behind all of this and needed him to distract the other BAD AI so that the Good Ai good self replicated the bad AI so that it looses it’s mind.

What threw this story off so much is not so much the cliché ideas but just the pacing all the stories a mixed together and it just jumps from one to the other, while you are reading it. You might be in something cool going on in this one story than it cuts off to the lame ass bitches story, or even if it is a good part of another story it still cuts you off.

It was like playing Mario Zelda and Metroid together at once but right after each level you are getting into it than it switches the other style and you don’t feel like playing the next section because you just got into

Doesn’t matter if they are good stories but it takes you right out of the story you just got into and it’s keeps doing that throughout the book, so you never really get to enjoy otherwise a mediocre story.

Only reason I finished it was because of a 2 hour train ride with nothing to do.

Thank you Mysterious Stranger!
I suffer from the same affliction. And I am willing to believe that everyone else here does as well.

@Adam37
Sorry about your dad.
Also "Shit in a bag of spoons" is one fantastic way to say Fuck me, or Fuck you.

I've read lots of sci-fi novels, and lots are dated and crappy, but the one I truly hate is Ender's Game. Not because of the author's reprehensible politics and views, since I didn't know about those at the time. But because about ten pages from the end, it becomes painfully obvious that instead of wrapping up anything into any kind of conclusion, all of a sudden this is the first book in an unending series. Which is why I don't read a helluva lot of sci-fi novels anymore.

My vote is for a little known (as in really little-known) book from 1990 called "The Stars Must Wait" by Keith Laumer AKA Guy-Who-Clearly-Lives-Off-Food-Stamps-Now (my apologies if you live off food stamps).

This book was so bad that I remembered the name of the book and the author from memory and recognize that it is the worst Sci-Fi book I've ever read, but I cannot remember anything about the plot. Not one thing. I had to look it up online, and even then only eBay could give me even a brief synopsis.

I could go into great detail as to why Battlefield Earth (the movie not the book - like hell am I putting money in Scientology's pockets) sucked, or extrapolate on just how horrid Cop Rock was (singing cops and crooks - you can't make that kind of crap up), but when you know something is so mind-blowingly shitty, so bowel-churningly rancid and CANT remember anything else about it? Well my friends, THAT is the hallmark of a truely bad product.

Oh by the way the book is about some kind of post-apocalyptic future and some dude trying to get into space. There was some chick involved too. I think I THINK the book ends with the dude staying on a screwed up Earth for the chick and to maybe help save the planet. But mostly for the chick. At least his priorities were strait.

"Garfield Eats His Heart Out"

Anthropormorphic cat does not in fact consume his own heart.

Bill Binder if that was a joke, your humor is lost on me. There's nothing funny about slavery.

@bill binder

yeah man , that shit aint even cool , even by nerd standards ...

@TberK @jaganar

Lighten up guys

City of the Dead by Brian Keene

The last book of a two part zombie story which has the worst ending ever. I read two books to get to the end where the ex-druggie hooker lady, a cat, and little kid find safety in a government bunker. That night zombie rats crawl through a crack in the wall and kills them all which is mentioned off-handly like it's no big deal. And all the souls return to God while the zombie souls move on to destroy another planet. So it's a Christian Zombie book? WTF?

Battlefield Earth, By L. Ron Hubbard.

Why is it crappy? L. Ron Hubbard; the zany antics of the Psychlo; the subplot involving a club footed leader of the human resistance to the human resistance of the Psychlo; the banking subplot that starts somewhere and goes no where; all dozen of the look-a-likes the stupidest named hero (Johnny Goodboy Tyler) when humanity is literally down to hundreds of people; gold as the macguffin and uranium as the deus ex machina; the retarded, and often bewildering, human characters that were less believable than the aliens; the portrayal of the Scottish survivors as silhouettes of the Austin Powers/Fat Bastard stereotypes; the senseless racism against anyone from Africa, white or black; the complete lack of anything actually scientific beyond the really desperate attempts at pseudo science.

If you wish, I can bullet point that for you, but then each problem would stand out by itself and just make you angry.

Saurian, by Willam Scholle.

This is a book about a were-dinosaur. He can transform from a man into a gigantic prehistoric beast, and into a slightly smaller prehistoric beast.

Trust me, this isn't as awesome as it sounds. The author can't seem to decide who or what he wants the villain to be; but what's clear is that only One man can stop it.

This poorly-written, poorly-plotted piece of birdcage-liner boasts not only a weak story and a weaker hero, but also cringe-worthy comedic irony.

(eg, "Why, that looks like a dinosaur's footprint! But that's just silly. Dinosaurs are extinct! But wouldn't it be awesome if they wer--*chomp*)

I hate this book so much that even the dedication pissed me off. "Thanks to everyone who helped me realize my dream," or something like that.

Keep dreaming, buddy.

The worst science fiction book of all time is "Brother To Shadows" by Andre Norton. Aside from forcing you to read it yourself, which not even inhuman sadists who enjoy FFF would support, I give you the quote from the Amazon sales page. This was the best review Amazon could find:

"The well-known author of the Witch World series sets her disappointingly thin mix of fantasy and space opera in the far future on the recently settled planet of Asborgan. After being expelled from the brotherhood of assassins by a corrupt priest, Jofre makes his way to a rundown Asborgan city. There he rescues from street thieves a reptilian alien named Zurzal, who hires the young man to be his bodyguard on a quest for valuable ruins left behind billions of years ago in the first wave of galactic colonization. They are dogged during their travels by others who want to reach the ruins first and by the cohorts of the priest who exiled Jofre. After a desperate battle of half-magical, half-scientific forces, Jofre and Zurzal triumph; the former even acquires an assassin girlfriend. Although possessed of a certain old-fashioned charm, the novel is static and expository, the characters more archetypes than real people and the plot extremely predictable. A forgettable effort from a writer who has done much better."

... "A forgettable effort from a writer who has done much better." That's the best review Amazon could come up with to sell this book. I rest my case.

'Dhalgren' by Samuel R. Delany.

Why? Because it makes no sense. Rather than trying vainly to sum it all up myself, I checked for other people's summaries, only to find that they're all a page or two long and still claim they don't do it justice.

However, what it lacks in coherent plot it makes up for with "florid verbiage, explicit gay porn, endless narrative loops, and massive chunks of text scratched out and written over." Here'e the opening paragraph:

to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with the wind.

What the hell Delany.

I suppose my runner up would be "Scientology: the Fundamentals of Thought" by L. Ron Hubbard. Heard that one sucked.

@Whowhatwhere
*Sigh* I guess to qualify for true nerd-dom in the 21st Century, one need not understand the basic scientific difference/relationship between Weight and Mass. A lack of gravity (weight) in space does not equate to a lack of mass. Mass requires a certain amount of energy to move it, whether in space or on a planet. Lack of gravity may translate into a lack of friction, but the amount of mass itself still determines the amount of energy (High Test Space Rocket Fuel) to move it.

I suspect that you were forced to read it in school in order for you to learn your lesson well from the STATE. You are a cheap replaceable piece of property to the State. Fuel/Cargo=Big Buck$ is not easily replaceable. Ergo, if you or your former schoolmates (or ANY of US for that matter) get in the way of the "progress" of the State, YOU MUST DIE! Get the picture now?

I really wish I could get my hands on that story and research the author. I'm sure I would learn much more about "WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?" in regards to your puzzlement/sadness over the story and its ending.

Anything that Gentry Lee "cowrote" for Arthur C. Clarke. He turned Clarke's series into porn Hustler wouldn't touch with a ten-foot dildo.

Fairyland by Paul McAuley. It's set in a dystopic future (I think, although the only reason it appears to be dystopic is because the future is always dystopic in sci fi because so far there's been no explanation why life seems to suck so much) and there's these "dolls", which are some sort of genetically engineered blue things that people use as slaves or something (I only know this from the back, it has yet to be explained in book). Only sometimes they get turned into "fairies", which have free will. Only the only thing they do is produce drugs from their own bodies which they then get stoned on. Yeah. And the main character is some really unlikeable guy who does "gene hacking" and he's really FAT (this is brought up every two paragraphs). I got halfway through and looked it up to make sure it wasn't a sequel because I didn't have a clue what was going on. Oh, and did I mention the only things the author actually explained were real word terminology? We got half a page on plasmids and vectors and nothing on what a doll actually was and what was going on.

Nobody has mentioned Godwhale. Fucking awful.

what about the worlds most famous zombie : jesus christ
now that aint bible bashing cus its true =]

so theres proof that GOD approves of the undead =
)officially according to Dr."bones" McCoy's coronor report - "he's dead Jim"

then 3 days later he rose from the dead.

I'm not sure if this necessarily counts as sci fi, but it take place during the apocalypse so I count it.
Enclave by Kit Reed.
Even though it has an abundance of other problems (characters, plot, dialogue etc.) Within the first few chapters nearly all the teenage girls were being described essentially as the biggest sluts you could possibly imagine, and you seem to get the impression the author thinks this is a good thing.

Solar Heat by Susan Kearney. My friend sums it up best:

Let's talk about some of the things I've learned from this book so I can write my own scifi romance:

*When trying to create that sense of an alien environment, the trick is to take something normal, add a common suffix, and italicize it. This book contains such gems as diamondite, granitite, pepperite, jadite, marbellite, and appelite. One might also just very slightly twist familiar words to make them seem exotic and new, such as cinnabari, salmenda (get it? salmon?), gazella, micronbit (as in, “Give me a micronbit”), frong (chirping in the swamp), and vanillan. Also an option is completely making up words for human genitalia, such as longo and minga. (I’m sure you can figure that one out.)

*Random, non-corporeal, telepathic aliens who lower inhibitions and implant sexual fantasies but really have no impact on the plot except at the very end and with the vague explanation for their antics of “you’re meant to be” really help cram in extra love scenes.

*When most of the big issues have been resolved and you’re on a spaceship on your way to plant a bomb on an asteroid heading straight for your home planet in order to divert it far enough away from the gravitational field in order to save everyone stuck on the planet (Zor, in case you were wondering), the aforementioned random, non-corporeal, telepathic alien that’s been bugging you the entire book will randomly get the female protagonist pregnant. What’s more, he will mess with the genetic structure of the babies so that they’re telepathic, which results in such gems as this exchange:

“I’d call altering my children’s DNA and expediting the pregnancy process a helluva lot more than a nudge.”

Dad, it’s going to be all right.

We like being telepathic.

“My children haven’t even been born yet and they are arguing with me. It’s fripping unbelievable.”

“Don’t swear in front of the babies, dear,” Azsla instructed him in a mild tone as if she totally accepted what was going on here.

Yeah, don’t curse, Dad, or you might singe our delicate ears.

You don’t have ears yet, one twin teased the other.

It is good to know that, while the fetuses don’t have ears, they do have fully-formed brains and telepathic powers.

*Finally, when you’ve written yourself into the corner as the female protagonist prepares to set off the bomb in the asteroid which, they’ve learned, is really just a giant alien womb filled with young from the random, non-corporeal, telepathic aliens (”our young begin life corporeally”) and if they blow it up to save their home planet then all the alien fetuses will die, but if they blow the bomb up in a different location it’ll merely be diverted around planet Zor, thus saving the humans AND the alien fetuses but the female protagonist won’t survive the blast because the ship that was coming to pick her up before the bomb went off damaged its engines in the last space-battle with the main antagonist and won’t be repaired in time, you can use those aforementioned telepathic babies to get you out of a sticky jam. Example:

Her only hope was to find the biggest pile of fendiziom available and hide behind it.

Or under it, her baby suggested.

Mom, there’s an ancient tunnel and air, the other twin added. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

“A tunnel? Air?” How could her unborn children know about an ancient tunnel?

We learned of the primeval secret from the alien young.

Hurry, Mom.

They proceed to direct her where to drill to unlock the door by giving her directions in precise degrees. Absolutely atrocious, which is a shame, because I'd been actually entertained by the other books in this line. However, the terrible plot of the book didn't diminish the sheer enjoyment my roommate and I found in advising each other of our intentions to journey to the store in search of milkite, eggites, and breadite.

"The Price Of The Phoenix" and "The Fate of The Phoenix" by Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak. Most boring Star Trek books ever. If I recall correctly: new villain named Black Omne who seems to be a super scientist who dresses in all in black clones Kirk, kills Kirk, but somehow Kirk gets revived. Teams up with clone, defeats villain. Two Kirks is just too much awesome for Starfleet, so clone is genetically modified to be a Romulan and goes off to live with the hot Romulan commander from the Steal the Cloaking Device TOS episode (huh?). Villain comes back, they team up and...oh God, I can't take it anymore. It hurts too much to remember.

Octavia Butler's [i]Lilith's Brood[/i] series. Any science fiction series that involves an alien race come to Earth to solve our problems (and ultimately destory it when they're done absorbing our race genetically) and involves men giving up the ability to have sex just because they want to procreate is retarded. Guys? Anybody here actually want kids bad enough that they'd volunteer never to have sex or to be able to touch a woman again?

the 22nd Gear by mike Sirota:

To sum up it's like Sliders (before the show ever existed), but with a bicycle that the main character uses to cross dimensions as he travels "the ultimate bike path" and crosses into Hell, Heaven, and Predator movies with companions that include horny furries and disco roller skaters in neon green spandex. I don't remember if the 27 year old bicyclist had any destination in mind, but he did seem to enjoy sleeping with catgirls on the side of the bikepath.

Now the story is so stupid, it's actually fun to read. What makes it terrible is that this would be a perfect book to read while you're high as a kit, but if you're high as a kite, why would you even bother reading anything?

My entry is Shadowrun 02: Choose Your Enemies Carefully by Robert N. Charrette. As if shadowrun books weren't bad enough, but this book is by far the worst in the series. The story starts with the main character talking about how he's a mercenary techomage and his older brother is a bigwig security advisor/necromancer for one of the world's largest corporations. The book basically is about how the younger brother is given job where he has to steal something from his older brother's company. The book builds up for an eventual meeting between the brothers or at least an email (lots of bad blood), but at the climax we find out that the younger brother kills his older brother unintentionally with stray collateral damage. The god damn book even has a dragon say "well that was rather anti-climatic, I was hoping to see some drama. Oh well." And then the stupid lizard kills everyone off. the end.

Shadowrun 02: Choose Your Enemies Carefully by Robert N. Charrette

Young brother sent out to steal from his older brother's company. The two haven't seen each other for years, there's lots of bad blood. Book builds to up to the heist and the brother's meeting again, but at the climax of the book as the caper gets all FUBAR, we find that a dragon was coordinating the whole event and that the older brother was killed during the first firefight like any other nameless stormtrooper. Even the book admits this is shit when the dragon says, "well isn't that anti-climatic. I was hoping that there would be some extra entertainment." Then the dragon kills everyone else and that's the end. For the love of all guns, they couldn't even send a hateful email between the brothers?

in reply to Doc- when the apocalypse comes. I really hope the ladies get really slutty.

@whowhatwhere

Cold Equations is supposed to be sad! That was the whole point, and even if you are weightless in space, you still have mass and a certain amount of energy is going to be required to move it.

As far as bad SF, I know people idolize Philip K. Dick and I agree he has some incredible stories, but "Man in the High Castle" was absolutely terrible. I get what he was trying to say, but the plot was so dull and went absolutely nowhere.

Late though I must agree with J.H. about the Timothy Zahn trilogy, but for very different reasons.

Sixth grade, I hated reading.
Seventh grade, I got to do a book report on any book I wanted. I chose Splinter of the Mind's Eye. I got an A+.
Eighth grade, I started ravenously reading all post-ROTJ novels in "chronological" order.
Ninth grade, I finally got to the famed Zahn trilogy. Being young and naive, I ate it up, my youthful enthusiasm blinding me to the fact that it's essentially the EXACT SAME PLOT as the original trilogy.

Fast forward to age 18. This true barelylegal has not reread the books since the first time and only remembers how AWESOME they seemed at age 14. And here comes the opportunity to meet Timothy Zahn at a book signing. Omigod, what next?!
I wait my turn. I go up to the man. I'm surprised by how short he is, but in any case tell him how much I loved his books. He signs for me. Since none of my friends (as if I had any friends who had even heard of the guy) will believe this, I ask for a photo. With a gracious smile, he agrees. And stands up. And comes around from behind the table. And stands next to me. I'm thinking, "this is totally awesome!! he's such a cool guy to his fans!!" The camera is raised and we're told to say cheese.

Timothy Zahn's hand touches my back. And goes up it. And down again. And up again.

I'm having my photo taken with a balding man several inches shorter than me who is rubbing my lower back.
The look on my face in the photo is priceless.

I effin hate those books.

@ledhed:

Technically, you only need to exert force to accelerate; if there's enough of a vaccuum where friction is negigible, you don't need it to move for a very long time.

As for the main question:

Brave New World.

I did not see it as a horrible apocalyptic nightmare. I wanted to sign up. No more stupid high culture. Religion reduced to a non-threatening tokenism. Idolization of industry and mass production.

So I'm guessing that Mr. Huxley failed wildly in his attempt to deliver a message.

I'll probably piss at least a few of you off with this, but the Bible has GOT to be the worst science fiction story ever. As retaarded as Scientology is, it's nowhere nearly as stupid as half the shitin the Bible.

On a related note, I recently went into a Borders storeto buy agift formy mother-in-law. It was a book she had asked for. I found it in the "religious fiction" section. This kind of redundancy amused me. All religion is fiction.

Okay, I know that a LOT of the "licensed-yet-not-canon" Star Trek novels could fit here, but one still sticks in my craw: Dreadnought! (exclamation point included), by Diane Carey. An archtypical Mary Sue story, and the author even admitted in interviews that the main characters (a preternaturally effective young female lieutenant and her academy classmates) were based on herself and her college friends.

Kudos to ledhed for being the first to suggest a hugo award-winning book as the worst sci-fi novel ever. :D

In Lunacy: Apostle of Insanity Trilogy Book 1. I was curious about the Mutant Chronicles series and picked this up for less than a dollar at a used book store. Some hacker or something tries to stop an assassination plot or some crap. I stopped 20 pages into the shit prose that made the average piece of crap fanfiction look like Ray Bradbury. I wish I didn't trade it back to the store if only to show you the god awfulness. The best I can share is an excerpt used in the Amazon.com review of the awful sentence structure and terrible grammar used throughout the whole novel "They all switched on their helmet lamps, throwing angled beams jerkily in every direction at the stained, filthy of the walls of the tunnels by the motion of climbing down the ladder." Check out the comments on Amazon.com. 2 bad reviews, where both are attacked in the comments section. 3 of the positive reviews are by users who have NEVER REVIEWED ANYTHING ELSE...suspiciously looks like the author made some fake user names to pad the reviews.

Two basic entry formats in this week's contest:

1. "There was this book one time and I can't remember its name and I didn't finish it so can't (or am not creative enough to) really say anything about it myself, but it was still really bad, just trust me. Also, here's a link to Amazon. I can haz shurt nao?"

2. "L. Ron Hubbard, LOLOLOLOLLOL>LLOL. I r so originull."

Just give it to Thane888 and save yourself a lot of unnecessary reading, Rob.

WORST. ENTRIES. EVER.

I have to second Robseth on the Star Trek "Phoenix" books by Culbreath and Marshak. It's been years since I read them, but I still get flashbacks.

Michaek Chrichton's The State of Fear in a nutshell: crazed ecoterrorist organization ELF plans fake natural disasters to convince people that global warming is real.

One of them involved rockets and wire to simulate a lightning storm while the ultimate one involved hitting known conservative and global warming denier hotbed California with a tsunami that was to be generated on an island guarded by cannibals and crocodiles. There was also the ELFin practice of silencing critics via "death by rare octopus to the armpit."

I think the worst science fiction novel I read was "The Bible" by various authors. It is an anthology that reads much like episodes of full house, wacky build ups with predictable preachy endings. Alot of the problems that plague the show 'heroes' often plague this novel. For example, they constantly kill of characters only to bring them back again, and it also has too many storylines branching out only to end up unresolved.

In general, I can't help but think the quality of some of the replies this week is kinda lacking.

But even so, I'm very glad that Googum mentioned 'ENDER'S GAME', simply because someone needed to. I just found that book dreadful. Especially the largescale massacre of an entire race of lifeforms by a kid who thought he had been told he was playing video games - the result of which, in anything remotely close to the real world, would have caused not only the kid in question to become an utter psychological wreck and incapable of trusting another living person for decades afterward (culminating no doubt in his own final, messy suicide attempt, perhaps scrawling 'life is no game' on the walls of his low-rent apartment before shooting himself in the head), but more than enough litigation, media spotlighting and human rights tribunals to fill half a continent with the sheer quantity of paperwork. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

I'd actually like to nominate the Uplift books, especially STARTIDE RISING by DAVID BRIN. That one specifically, rather than 'Sundiver', which was a vaguely enjoyable whodunnit murder-mystery kind of an affair.

I nominate it even though it's won the Hugo award a wad of times and probably has countless fans all across the world and all. It's well-respected and all, I suppose. But personally, I just couldn't get into it, for a whole bunch of reasons that all come down to one thing and one thing only...

Dolphins... IN SPACE!!

Now in theory it works, and indeed in 'Sundiver' it is still all very theoretical, the idea that humans can (and eventually do) artificially evolve dolphins to the point of true sentience. The same is true for apes in both books; personally, I can picture an artificially 'augmented' ape working on a spaceship a lot easier than I can picture a dolphin; hell, a monkey could even wear a uniform, even if it did need holes so that the wires sticking into its brain could fit.

The problem with Startide Rising is that the entire book is based around a starship that's piloted by a crew which consist almost entirely of dolphins.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/StartideRising%281stEd%29.jpg

What do you notice about this front cover? I'll give you a clue - it contains several metric fucktons of water. Spaceships, in general, tend not to have a lot of water in them, unless it's in big tanks and all that. So in order to take all of this into effect (purely because dolphins are smart), Brin decides to invent the most headache-inducingly stupid spaceship designs ever invented, including water funnels, slaloms, and because the ship has about three or four humans onboard, the most retarded airlocks ever.

Let that simmer in your brain for a moment.

Now, let's consider the dolphins themselves. A good chunk of the book is written from their perspective. Dolphins, as it turns out, see the world quite differently from people. In fact, they see it in a manner that isn't dissimilar to a whacked-out acid trip. In order to make this easier for the audience to get involved with, Brin decides to say a big "Fuck you" to the reader and give the dolphins weird lucid dream type meditation mind-trips every now and then, just to increase the whole hallucinogenic effect.

But the story itself is pretty decent, right? Well, no. I couldn't get more than halfway through it.

You see, the book started with the ship crashed into the ocean of a planet somewhere. Slowly, we learn that some months ago they'd found a fleet of abandoned spaceships, which were important for a big intergalactic war. Before long, a tidal wave came along, causing several of the dolphins to go mad for some reason. Probably because THEY'RE FUCKING DOLPHINS, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PUT THEM IN SPACESHIPS ANYWAY??

Urgh!!

So, after the tidal wave makes the dolphins go mad, a bunch of aliens turn up in orbit around the planet, including the evil insect empire aliens, a type of aliens not unlike living trees, and... oh fuck it, I can't be bothered to go on.

Dolphins in fucking space, people.

This same author wrote the Echo the Dolphin video game. And while I agree with him on a lot of the points he's made on other sci-fi and fantasy series (he's written critically about Star Wars in the past), it's all pretty much underscored by the fact that his own idea of sci-fi eventually comes to DOLPHINS IN SPAAACE!!

I eventually ditched the book after one entirely incomprehensible and pointless sequence involving dolphin dream-speak hallucinations, and actually read 'Tarnsman of Gor' instead. By all counts, it was a book that was written in a poorer manner, but still outranked this one as it didn't have dolphins piloting spaceships all over the bloody place.

In general, I can't help but think the quality of some of the replies this week is kinda lacking.

But even so, I'm very glad that Googum mentioned 'ENDER'S GAME', simply because someone needed to. I just found that book dreadful. Especially the largescale massacre of an entire race of lifeforms by a kid who thought he had been told he was playing video games - the result of which, in anything remotely close to the real world, would have caused not only the kid in question to become an utter psychological wreck and incapable of trusting another living person for decades afterward (culminating no doubt in his own final, messy suicide attempt, perhaps scrawling 'life is no game' on the walls of his low-rent apartment before shooting himself in the head), but more than enough litigation, media spotlighting and human rights tribunals to fill half a continent with the sheer quantity of paperwork. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

I'd actually like to nominate the Uplift books, especially STARTIDE RISING by DAVID BRIN. That one specifically, rather than 'Sundiver', which was a vaguely enjoyable whodunnit murder-mystery kind of an affair.

I nominate it even though it's won the Hugo award a wad of times and probably has countless fans all across the world and all. It's well-respected and all, I suppose. But personally, I just couldn't get into it, for a whole bunch of reasons that all come down to one thing and one thing only...

Dolphins... IN SPACE!!

Now in theory it works, and indeed in 'Sundiver' it is still all very theoretical, the idea that humans can (and eventually do) artificially evolve dolphins to the point of true sentience. The same is true for apes in both books; personally, I can picture an artificially 'augmented' ape working on a spaceship a lot easier than I can picture a dolphin; hell, a monkey could even wear a uniform, even if it did need holes so that the wires sticking into its brain could fit.

The problem with Startide Rising is that the entire book is based around a starship that's piloted by a crew which consist almost entirely of dolphins.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/StartideRising%281stEd%29.jpg

What do you notice about this front cover? I'll give you a clue - it contains several metric fucktons of water. Spaceships, in general, tend not to have a lot of water in them, unless it's in big tanks and all that. So in order to take all of this into effect (purely because dolphins are smart), Brin decides to invent the most headache-inducingly stupid spaceship designs ever invented, including water funnels, slaloms, and because the ship has about three or four humans onboard, the most retarded airlocks ever.

Let that simmer in your brain for a moment.

Now, let's consider the dolphins themselves. A good chunk of the book is written from their perspective. Dolphins, as it turns out, see the world quite differently from people. In fact, they see it in a manner that isn't dissimilar to a whacked-out acid trip. In order to make this easier for the audience to get involved with, Brin decides to say a big "Fuck you" to the reader and give the dolphins weird lucid dream type meditation mind-trips every now and then, just to increase the whole hallucinogenic effect.

But the story itself is pretty decent, right? Well, no. I couldn't get more than halfway through it.

You see, the book started with the ship crashed into the ocean of a planet somewhere. Slowly, we learn that some months ago they'd found a fleet of abandoned spaceships, which were important for a big intergalactic war. Before long, a tidal wave came along, causing several of the dolphins to go mad for some reason. Probably because THEY'RE FUCKING DOLPHINS, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PUT THEM IN SPACESHIPS ANYWAY??

Urgh!!

So, after the tidal wave makes the dolphins go mad, a bunch of aliens turn up in orbit around the planet, including the evil insect empire aliens, a type of aliens not unlike living trees, and... oh fuck it, I can't be bothered to go on.

Dolphins in fucking space, people.

This same author wrote the Echo the Dolphin video game. And while I agree with him on a lot of the points he's made on other sci-fi and fantasy series (he's written critically about Star Wars in the past), it's all pretty much underscored by the fact that his own idea of sci-fi eventually comes to DOLPHINS IN SPAAACE!!

I eventually ditched the book after one entirely incomprehensible and pointless sequence involving dolphin dream-speak hallucinations, and actually read 'Tarnsman of Gor' instead. By all counts, it was a book that was written in a poorer manner, but still outranked this one as it didn't have dolphins piloting spaceships all over the bloody place.

Right, well, I don't have anything to say here, save that Rob should have a worst Horror Novel Competition next, because boy do I have some doozies!

just a tip, it's not "REASONABLY BRIEF" if you're comment can't fit on the screen without scrolling. just saying. i'd agree with Dhalgren. basically unreadable. i know i it and didn't read much more than a few pages of it. and as far as the ending of ender's game seeming tacked on to make a series, i just heard an interview with OSC who said that while the ender's game short story came first, the novel speaker for the dead was written before the novel ender's game and that the end of ender's game was tacked on to allow it to be basically a prequel to SFTD.

The Traveller by John Twelve Hawks.

I lost my copy about 2/3's into the book. That was the only good thing to happen during a particulary crappy week.

Where do I start? Oh yeah, the book is populated by an elite secret society of super elite secret super warrior types. They keep their super secretness by living "off the grid". Which apparently means only flying first class and using credit cards while surfing the net at Starbucks or something. And no one can tell that they are super elite secret super warriors because they hide it by all wearing black tailored suits and carrying swords. They have to carry the swords all the time. It's in the super secret rule book. But that's cool, because they carry them in leather tube shaped cases slung over their shoulders so no one will notice.

This Twelve Hawks fella is a mysterious figure. The press releases all say that he has never been seen/photographed because he himself lives off the grid. I bought a Press
Release to English dictionary and it said this means Twelve Hawks is the product of a bunch of literary agents who snorted too much cocaine at the last meeting while discussing alimony payments.

I have to agree with the other Heinlein haters, though my choice would be "The Number of the Beast." Because after reading that, I hated his writing so much I refused to ever read another of his books. I think I stopped reading sci-fi as a whole, in fact, so you could possibly say that Heinlein managed to destroy all of sci-fi for me. Quite a feat.

I'm not really sure what the plot is, but it's something about how there are 6^6^6 permutations of the universe (ha ha! Get it? The Number of the Beast in the bible is actually an ancient, but weirdly scientific prophecy! *deep!*), and some scientist builds a flying car that can flip between them. So they travel to a few, and then they go to - shit, who knows? Mars? Sure, Mars - and ... look for something.

I can't remember the end, because I stopped about that point to drink dran-o so I could stop being alive. But alas! That was after I'd read the bit where the small band of impossibly sexy and witty young scientists spent a weekend at some house walking around naked and explaining why they referred to breasts as "teats" but pronounced it "tits." He spent a couple pages explaining how this was enlightened.

I hope Heinlein spent his later years riddled with syphilis (ha ha! with SyFy! Get it?), for inflicting this on me.

The "Bio of a Space Tyrant" series by the king of interesting concpets gone wrong, Piers Anthony. Apart from his usual preachiness and closet misogyny, Anthony gets a big fail in Geography- his main character, Hope Hubris (a classic awful name) comes from Callisto, which, like all the moons and planets of the solar system, has been colonized by a particular segment of the earth's population, in this case Hispaniola (Jupiter belongs to the U.S, Saturn to the Soviets, etc.). Here's the part that got me- Hope and his family come from the part of the moon that corresponds to Haiti. But they speak Spanish. If you don't know what's wrong with that, go to your elementary school social studies teacher and demand your money back.

Dear god, I actually went and picked this thing out of my bookcase. It was an enjoyable read...when I was in high school, which is where I got it. My library was selling it for a quarter, I figured "hey why not?" so I picked up a copy of 'The High Crusade.'

A book that has a Knight wielding his sword and a RAY GUN on the cover.

Here's the entire concept of the book: Alien scout ship lands in England during the Crusades. Local lordship fight the aliens using pit traps, horses, lances, etc etc all what you'd expect to have in a medieval army... and they beat the aliens. They then take control of the scout ship, fly into space and proceed to wage a war that over throws an the entire empire who sent the scout ship to earth.

This is like if the empire had landed on Endor with a shuttle, a band of ewoks defeat the storm troopers, and then proceed to fly off and over throw the entire Empire.

Oh, and the knights also inter-marry with the alien races... and spread the whole knight culture.

Thank you 1960 sci-fi book, for a very interesting ride that was fun, but when looking back on it a decade later, was just.... so... idiotic. I refuse to reread it for this contest. It's only 167 pages, but I'm going to keep it a dull, shadowy memory in my mind. Heck I had to run up, find the dang thing to even remember it's name...

Thank you Topless Robot, for making me unearth the stupidity and having to live with it longer

I generally try to read through everything I pick up, no matter how awful but “Price of the Stars” by Debra Doyle was a notable exception. I can stand awful; awful can be fun and occasionally quite imaginative, but out and out derivative and you lose me quick. I got a few chapters in this book to find it featured a heroine named Beka who flew around in a pimped out spaceship that was once owned by her space pirate father and aristocratic/politician mother … oh, and if memory serves she had an uncle who was some sort of mystic monk.

I quietly closed the book and never bothered to open it again.

Kathy Tyers' Firebird Trilogy. (the copy I bought was an omnibus edition so I figure it counts) If her name sounds familiar, she wrote the Truce at Bakura and Balance Point star wars novels. this is her writing her own space opera setting.

In a universe where Jesus was never born, (you can already see where this is going can't you?) Humanity has colonized the stars, and set up several stellar empires, and as empires frequently do, 2 of them are at war. Enter our Firebird, the 3rd (and unwanted) daughter of the empress, who is a hot shot pilot, leader of men, and beloved by all of her fellow soldiers. She is specifically chosen to go off on a daring (read as suicide) raid against the home planet of their hated enemy, only to be shot down and nursed back to health by a telepathic hunk who she falls madly in love with. Only to be told that he can't have sex outside of marriage, and can't marry outside his faith.

Blah blah blah, she converts, her home system falls to shit only to be helped by the enemy, evil telepaths show up, some bullshit about her child being the savior of humanity (didn't see that coming did yah?), evil destroyed.

now as far as christian sci fi goes, it wasn't horrible, but as romantic sci fi (which was what the bookstore had it listed as) it was horrid.

My nominee is

Midshipman's Hope by David Feintuch.

This is the first book of a series that apparently was popular enough to win its author awards. I picked it up because, as a fan of early twentieth century popular fiction, I thought the "Hornblower in space" conceit was interesting. The reality ended up being more like "Mr. Magoo in space."

The plot in a nutshell. Lowly teenager Midshipman Nicholas "Mary Sue" Seafort is promoted to captain of a starship when everyone more senior than him is killed in a freak accident almost as soon as he steps on board a ship for the first time. He them demonstrates his suitability for command by stumbling on a computer problem that proves that he is smarter than the entire space navy IT department and singlehandedly killing a mess of mutineers.

Then he gets to the end of his journey where, conveniently, everyone senior to him on the space station, all of the admirals, captains, and lieutenants, have been killed by a mysterious space disease--meaning Mary Sue is now in charge of the entire space navy. So he promptly discovers an evil alien life form and proceeds to save humanity, or at least as much of it that hasn't been slaughtered by now. And of course it ends on a cliffhanger, because there's never just one bad sci-fi book; it has to be at least a trilogy (and apparently there were at least six sequels).

Hornblower was a flawed character who worked his way up in the ranks despite (and because of) his lack of self-confidence. Seafort is a smug know-it-all who is in charge of the Space Navy halfway through his first voyage because wherever he goes, everyone higher in rank than he is drops conveniently dead.

The main character is so dislikeable, and the random events that happen throughout the book are so depressing as every even vaguely sympathetic character is killed off in service of advancing his career, that if Mary Sue had actually ever set foot on a naval vessel, he would have been flushed out of an airlock as a Jonah within a week.

A couple of people have nominated Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Rest of the Story," which I actually enjoyed. The main character of that book spends the entire book raping, murdering, and betraying people in the most brutal way possible. But he still ends up a more sympathetic character than the "hero" of Midshipman's Hope does after saving the human race. And that's saying something.

I gotta jump on the Heinlein wagon with "The cat who walked through walls". Let's bullet point the reasons why this is the worst sci-fi story ever.

-The narrator has been widely acknowledged to be Heinlein's own Mary Stu.
-The book itself is a FFF mashup of characters from other novels he himself wrote.
-Like all later Heinlein books, it has multiple instances of incest. This includes times when the narrator has sex with children he sired in alternate universes.
-The titular character appears for perhaps 3 pages, and is the only likeable creature in the entire book.
-Just in case things weren't confusing enough, time travel!
-Heinlein apparently forgot to write the climatic scene, as the last chapters skip from "Let's go into battle!" to "I'm shot and I'm dying. Also, the cat is dead."

Gentry Lee's The Tranquility Wars, the only book I've ever burned. OM and qona have already detailed his love for poorly written space porn- imagine a protagonist who juggles two women while managing to bone every other girl he meets. Whilst he wanks his characters off with one hand, Lee hastily tosses in a piracy plot into the mix with the other, which quickly takes a backseat to the fuckin'. Passing up space piracy for painfully written sex is awful enough. But Lee isn't done. With the grace of a club-footed moonwalker, Lee shoves his Rama novels into the book as holodeck-style entertainment and pointedly has his characters talk about how wonderful they are.

"Delta Search" and "In Alien Hands"

About a kid with a weapon hidden in his dna runs around the galaxy like a retard because the space academy he wanted to go to tried to kill him for no apparent reason. So instead he becomes a mercenary. Oh, and with furries.

Oh, and written by William Shatner.

While Thane wrote a brilliant entry I have to disagree with his opinion. The Nights Dawn trilogy is actually a really enjoyable read (even if the ending was kind of a kick in the teeth). So while it may not be the best series ever it certainly wasn't the worst. It had cool technology, believable characters and a really well fleshed out universe. While I admit it was rather ridiculous with the whole Al Capone bit but I think the author pulled it off well enough.

Note: The author is from the UK so the girl you mentioned as underage isn't considered so there.

As for the worst Sci-Fi book I ever read? A star wars book named shatterstone, I could not finish it, in fact it made Mace Windu look like a little bitch.

Well I belive whats pretty crappy is Orson scott Card getting PAID for all his same books from different views of his real classic Ender's Game! Come on Ender's Shadow, the Hedgemon, Ender's Colostomy, Ender's Toilet Paper Collection. All the same story but from different views. I got it already from the first book!!!! Silly Mormon!

I'm going to have to either go with the Warhammer 40k book Eldar Prophecy OR the Star Wars Episode 3 PREQUEL Book "Labyrinth of Evil." The Eldar novel was written by someone who had obviously never played the 40k miniatures game or knew anything of the involved race's already made canon. "Labyrinth of Evil," on the other hand, is essentially a crap-tacular summation of the 5-minute Clone Wars episodes CN used to do (which were FAR superior to this piece of rubbish) with a few plot twists strewn about here and there that DON'T CHANGE A GODDAMN THING BECAUSE WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO GO DOWN IN THE THIRD MOVIE!

You all missed L. Ron Hubbard worst science fiction work he's created... The documents related to Operation Thetan... basically it's a batshit insane collection of writing that take years to finish because it requires you to join Scientology and pay around $365,000 - $380,000 to finish. And when you finish your supposed to be able to do stuff like create your own universes, but of course you can't so its a total ripoff... I shit you not...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Thetan
http://www.sweenytod.com/cos/pricelist.html

"Wild Parrots Squalling Somewhere" by Sharon Lim-Him is an entry into a anthology of lesbian fiction. To my severe disappointment the anthology includes stories that feature little to no sexual contact between women. "Wild Parrots" is set in a dystopian future and is about a tribe of lesbian women. Except, like I said, they don't have sex ever. The story is just an exercise for the author to show off her purple prose and to put Asian women in roles that are not hentai. Besides the overly dramatic, overly descriptive prose clogging up the plot and the endless and BORING back story about how the characters met, the main plot is about four members of the tribe on their way to a prison to get pregnant.

The women talk about plants fucking at the beginning of the story, so I got excited that this story might actually feature sex. However, again I am disappointed as the best sex from then on is a talking monkey offering to impregnate the women. They decline the offer based only on the fact that they want an Asian baby. Hey, I think you can't be too picky as a lesbian in a wasteland meets killer jungle type future.

When they finally get to the prison they find their Asian and have him jerk off in a cup, then one of their companions spits the semen up their vaginas via reverse felching. Yummy!

The story just reinforces the 2 Girls 1 Cup-ian mantra: Just because it's about lesbians doesn't mean it's sexy or good!

I don't read much sci-fi, but I nominate any sequel in a Piers Anthony series. I like his first books, the initial idea. Then he kills the horse, beats it, rapes it, has underage sex with it...

I can't really pick out specifics, other than he does the same thing with every series he's ever written. In my defense, I read them all real young, and didn't re-read them until recently (somebody at work found them online and I could read them at work). In general, he starts with a good idea, then all the sequels wind up with underage sex in some capacity. How the authorities weren't raiding his house all the time is beyond me.

Also, I found Enders Game to be wildly overated.

I'd much rather see a best of list at some point.

why is it that all these sci-fi writers seem to be obsessed with sex with teenage girls? sex with women > sex with teenage girls by about ten thousand times. knowing what the hell you're doing really makes a difference.

Eighteen hours of Kevin Costner in space.

Then Tom Cruise shows up to prove that he is the best spaceman.

just want to say its nice to finaly know the title of that story with the girl getting shoved out of a cargo hold for think the story also became a episode of the outer limits

@chaos,

It's not just sex with teenage girls, its sex with anything they can get their hands on it seems (see: David Brinn's the uplift war and the alien girl, not to mention the damn chimps, the whole thing was rather creepy for what was an ok book).

Its kinda odd really.

Without a doubt, the worst Sci-Fi I've ever read was the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. While I work under the assumption that 78% of all SciFi and Fantasy is written by male virgins, I can only assume that Robinson is an especially oppressed man who has never discovered internet porn.

Overlooking the fact that he kills a main character halfway into the first novel, a character he'd spent the said first half building a book around. But eventually, the entire thing turns into people fucking each over. The murderer, the people. And as the trilogy progresses, it just gets worse, and you can tell when he lost the plot and needed to rub one out for "inspiration," because that's when a new sex scene comes in.

And just to make sure the reader is good and traumatized, by the third book, you have a bunch of immortal elderly people, the first colonists, that spend their lives screwing each other. There was no plot by then, just geriatric humping.

It's kinda science fictiony but I'm gonna say The Giver by Lois Lowry, I read that book in high school for english class and it was boring, slow, and confusing and the worst part about it is it didn't really have an ending it just stopped as the main character was heading down some hill on a sled and that's it. My english teacher of course had some BS explanation for it. "It let's you make up your own ending to it, making it more personal for the reader." Seriously it might be the most bullshit ending to a boring ass book.

I'm kinda surprised how much hate for The Giver there is here, I'd always kind of assumed it was pretty popular. I remember really liking it when I had to read it for school...but then I haven't read it since then so I may remember it to be much better then it was.

DAMN!! 12:09 and I had this great one...it's called "Deus Ex Machina" and no, it has nothing to do with any of those words. It was written by a guy who is an English professor at some community college (in real life), and the story is about, you guessed it, an English professor at a community college (who has only 4 students- guess he's not that good), plus he's a pimp on the side and his hos are so in love with him that they fight over him even when they're not working for him anymore, plus the Earth is being destroyed by something they never really specify, and this C-list professor/pimp is apparently one of 100 ON THE WHOLE PLANET chosen to be saved on a space shuttle because he is apparantly somehow (though we never see how) this amazing writer on a level with Shakespere. Need I add that this whole book is just written terribly?
Self-serving authors FTW!!

I know it's awful of me, but I rather enjoyed the novelization of E.T.

There were talking cucumbers in it.

"The Female Man" by Joanna Russ.

This badly dated novel is an early example of feminist SF. The premise is interesting-a woman from our world meets her counterparts from 3 different realities. But for starters, all 4 women are based on the author. Next, Russ is too interested in writing a screed about feminism to bother with a plot or characterization. And the book ends with this pretentious line: "Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned...Rejoice little book! For on that day, we will be free." Yes, she is referring to the book you have been reading. And this was supposed to be a novel?

"The Ayes of Texas" by Daniel Da Vega. My high school Civics teacher gave this to me back in 1985 or so, because she felt I didn't fully appreciate the communist threat to our nation. I was a Jehovah's Witness at the time, which gives you some idea of just how insane this woman was.

So anyway, "The Ayes of Texas" is the story of Gwillam Forte, a Texas entrepeneur who is tired of all the ankle-grabbing the US is doing to the Russkies. He's also a high-tech defense contractor, which is where the sci-fi part comes in--he's got energy weapons like you wouldn't believe, so much so that when the Russkies invade (after Texas has seceded from the US and taken all their power with them), he fights off the Russian navy with one ship, uncrewed except for himself sitting in the bridge firing all these high tech weapons. He dies in the defense, of course, but is also the greatest Texan hero of all time because he breaks the Russkies once and for all. I think there's also a rape in there somewhere, but it's been nearly 25 years since I read this piece of crap, so I could be wrong. That might have been left for the sequel, where in order to deal with the drought, Forte's heir comes up with a way to tow icebergs from the Arctic circle and melt them down for drinking water and irrigation. That one's a winner too.

"Also, I found Enders Game to be wildly overated."

It's just Hitler fanfic with laser beams, pretty much.

One of the worst sci-fi novels I can think of (other than Peirs Anthony, but his awfulness has been covered fairly well) was Michael Crichton's "Prey." The reason I dislike this novel so much wasn't because of the premise (nanites on the loose) or the way the novel was structured (nicely separating most of the math and science as chapter forwards instead of trying to lamely shoe-horn it into the narrative), but the sheer cynicism with which it was written: It was a fucking screenplay.

He was probably still rolling in "Jurassic Park" money when he pounded out this thing, and it showed: He wanted more movie money. The "hero" got to have a hot wife who (spoiler warning) doesn't make it through the novel, but don't worry, there's a hottie scientist he works with who thinks he's cute, so we've got our romantic bases covered for those who hate it when people end up boink-less. There's a scene lifted straight from Isla Nublar where the power needs to be turned back on or the monster will get in, the switch is in a shack outside, and someone has to go out and get the generators back on... blargh.

Add into the mix incredibly bone-headed characters who can't seem to figure out what a sixteen-year-old Star Trek fan would have deduced before the third chapter was over, and you get the gist of "Prey." I'm truly amazed it hasn't been turned into even a sci-fi original movie by now, unless even studios can tell when they're being pandered to.

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King. 11 words that totally stopped me cold reading further: "Ass-weasel alien that pops out your ass and kills you."

@ DeAnn Rossetti

Very sad story about the copycat rapes - but I fail to see how that is Harlan Ellison's fault.

My entry - Foundation's Fear by Greg Benford. It's awful. Apparently Benford is a somewhat successful writer (I was so put off by this book I've never read anything by him again). The awfulness of this book inspired me to log onto amazon and write a review to warn others. The cool thing is - I just looked it up on amazon again and, after nearly 10 years my review is ranked "most helpful" and listed as the 1st entry when you look up the book!!! So I feel it's entirely valid I copy and paste the link rather than re-write it here.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2AXR2N2Y23HF8/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

I'm way late on this, but I wanted to add one:
"Tears of the Singers" a TOS Star Trek novel by Melinda Snodgrass (who actually did a couple of decent TNG eps):

1) It's Uhura-centric, which isn't that bad because Uhura never got enough screen-time. But this version of Uhura is so perfect and capable that's she completely 2D.
2) It reads like a non-Trek novel that was re-purposed into a Trek-novel.
3) Uhura gets romantically entangled with this fey, bitchy tormented musical genius. An avatar of one of the author's friends, perhaps?
4) The action centers around planet faux-Hoth where there are these faux-baby harp seals that make wonderful songs to each other, like whales. They are called the Singers.
5) At the moment of being clubbed on the head, the Singers excrete a blue tear that hardens into a jewel prized throughout the galaxy. Thus the title, Tears of the Singers, get it?
6) Uhura and music guy have to fight to save them and prove that clubbing them is naughty. There are many scenes of Uhura bravely and proudly standing up to authority.
7) And, if you haven't seen it coming, it ends on an environmentalist note less subtle than the average Captain Planet episode.

It sure doesn't feel like Trek, all the characters are cardboard cutouts and it's preachy and long-winded.

Norman Spinrad, Iron Dream. But it's supposed to be bad.

Not that I have (or ever will) read it, but I'm going to guess that The Host by Stephenie Meyer wins forever.

It seems to be TWILIGHT MEETS ANIMORPHS. WHY, GOD, WHY??

Here is the description printed with the book:

The author of the "Twilight "series of # 1 bestsellers delivers her brilliant first novel for adults: a gripping story of love and betrayal in a future with the fate of humanity at stake.

Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving their bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed.

Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie's body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn't expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.

Melanie fills Wanderer's thoughts with visions of the man Melanie loves-Jared, a human who still lives in hiding. Unable to separate herself from her body's desires, Wanderer yearns for a man she's never met. As outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off to search for the man they both love.

Featuring what may be the first love triangle involving only two bodies, THE HOST is a riveting and unforgettable novel that will bring a vast new readership to one of the most compelling writers of our time.

"The Technicolor Time Machine" by Harry Harrison.

A movie studio finances a time machine to be built so they can film a Viking epic. The characters and dialog are terrible.

I'm almost afraid to nominate what I think is the worst SF novel.

Stranger in a Strange Land.

I read it in high school. I was transitioning out of a romance novel phase into a little heavier fare. I thought jesus how old is the author 13? Really fixated on the sex there buddy. what is the plot? Hell if I know something about kid raised Mars goes crazy for the poon-tang when he gets to earth and is and instant celebrity. boring.

And I learned as i read more of his novels, Friday, The moon is a harsh mistress, that yep he really likes the sex and his new fangled family unit that propagandizes the shit out of to the detriment of the plot.

And I hear Lazaras Long is awesome. but I fear to pick it up because it will be more of the same garbage.

I may have missed the cuttoff, but I need some cathartic relief.

In my early teenage years, I discovered Piers Anthony's Xanth series, a whimsical fantasy series that relied on light danger, magic, puns, and teenage sexuality.

So at this impressionable age, I purchased Bio of a Space Tyrant Volume 1: Refugee.

It starts out in a similar Piers Anthony way. Teenage male protagonist traveling with his family to the planet Jupiter for a new life. On the space ship he meets and lives with a young girl posing as a male.

From there, endless horrors ensue, as space pirates board the ship about 100 times during the voyage, during which the following takes place: His father and every older male aboard the ship is murdered, his mother and oldest sister are raped, his oldest sister sells her body to a pirate vessel, the starving refugees cook and eat the dead (including his own father), his mother is murdered, he marries his female companion, the main character then has to kill her to save the ship, and finally he and his youngest sister (his emotional rock) are separated so he can make it to Jupiter.

I remember reading this book in a laundromat, with nothing else to do, turning pages, waiting for the story to get good, waiting desperately for the horror to end, waiting for some sense of triump, of redemption, of satisfaction, of mercy.

None were found.

@Marsten: It's funny, cause that's exactly what happens to Ender after he wiped out the Buggers. He "[became] an utter psychological wreck and incapable of trusting another living person for decades afterward".

Anyway, I figure if someone is going to take out the Ender series, they should at least do it with by far the worst book of the Enderverse, Xenocide.

I read every other Ender book in just a few days in high school, but Xenocide took me half a year. Why? Because it just goes on and on and on about some girl who has to trace the grains on the wood, and if she loses the grain then she has to start over again. So I read her tracing over and over and over and over again until my eyes were just totally numb.

It's also the longest book in the Enderverse, though certainly not near the length of the other novels written here.

@Robert Schwabe: "Space Tyrant Volume 1: Refugee"
Don't forget that during the whole rape-fest the protagonist's infant brother is raped to death by the space pirates, pretty graphically, if I remember right.

@Beppo: Don't forget that during the whole rape-fest the protagonist's infant brother is raped to death by the space pirates, pretty graphically, if I remember right.

As awful as I remember that book, I don't think he had an infant brother. But there may have been an infant raped in that book.

I think I created the word mysogynist while reading that book.

I'm too late but I can't pass this up: "The Man Who Folded Himself." It's about a guy travels through time so he can have sex with himself. Okay, that's not why he traveled through time, but the author almost certainly wrote about a guy who traveled through time, so he could write about a guy having sex with himself. And I read that when I was 13. Thanks, David Gerrold, for making me well aware of anal sex at that tender age.

"Why the hate on Chewbacca?"

Because Chewie was a useless sack of shag carpet who made funny noises. Wookies have to be one of the worst alien races in the Star Wars universe, ranking right up (or down) there with Ewoks.

@ Paolo Mongon:
Just to let you know, he didn't die in the end. Read the sequel, Messenger.