Kim at LP links to a post at Feminist SF – The Blog! which gives tips on how to spot if you’re reading bad sci-fi/fantasy:
- Are the characters’ names impossible to pronounce? Alternatively, when you pronounce them, do you realize that they are actually homonyms for scary-sounding English words? If the book is not written by Tolkien and is not a parody, it might be a Bad Book.
- Do the characters glower at each other menacingly? Do they wear a lot of leather and call each other by French terms of endearment? Do the men have long hair and faces too beautiful to be borne? If it’s not early Laurel K., you might be reading a Bad Book.
- Do your villains have implicit/explicit homosexual tendencies that reflect the unthinking homophobia and unimaginative laziness of the author? If so, you might be reading a Bad Book.
- Do your characters experience instantaneous mind-blowing attraction that causes them to act in increasingly stupid ways so that the plot moves forward because only mind-numbing lust could possibly justify how ridiculously moronic the otherwise lethal/professional/intelligent characters are suddenly acting? If so, you might be reading a Bad Book.
- Does anyone lurk? If someone’s lurking, you might be reading a Bad Book.
- If you get to the end of the first chapter and all you know about the protags is the detritus of their lives and nothing that makes you think that detritus has a point — if you can’t remember their names, or what they’re fighting for, or who the villain is (and you don’t care) — you might be reading a Bad Book.
- If your characters repeatedly ask each other to explain complicated plot points in a clearly expository fashion because otherwise you-the-reader would presumably have no idea what’s going on, you might be reading a Bad Book.
- If the physical description of the male protagonist brings to mind Fabio, Arnold, or Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, or if that of the female protagonist is eerily like Pamela Anderson or Angelina Jolie, you might be reading a Bad Book. Don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by its capacity for imagination.
- If the cover of the book is more interesting than the first chapter, you might be reading a Bad Book.
- If your main characters spend a great deal of time early in the book thinking about their respective Frozen Insides and Hardened Hearts, then meet each other, and suddenly it’s like someone put the microwave on thaw and Unchained Melody on the radio, you might be reading a Bad Book.
- Does the book begin with some sort of random sex scene meant to show you how desirable / virile one of the protags is because if you don’t know about his / her addictive sexuality you won’t understand why they’re supposed to be attractive given their lack of any other character traits of note? If so, you might be reading a Bad Book. Actually, you almost certainly are. Hopefully you didn’t pay money for it. If you did, I’m sorry. … Did you keep the receipt?
- Do your female characters sit around a lot thinking about how stupid they are, and how nice it is that the big strong hero will always protect them, even though they’re totally unworthy of the hero’s affection or respect? Do your male characters run around protecting the women-folk from their own Too Stupid to Live follies, doling out bruising, punishing kisses after the big rescue? If so, you’re definitely reading a Bad Book, no maybe about it. Go wash out your brain with Catherine MacKinnon. Use the Listerine approach, though. Don’t take internally.
Very funny. I can add some of my own comments from my previous post on women and sci-fi:
- There is no character development at all and the characters are like cardboard cut-out stereotypes (which really is a short version of the list above).
- All the female characters are gorgeous sulky bitches with jutting bosoms, and they just exist to be attractive handbags for the male hero (again, a short version of some points in the list above).
- The central premise is unbelievable. The central premise must be believable, no matter how outlandish it is. It takes a skillful writer to make you believe a really strange premise.
- A science fiction book that is unscientific. So irritating if there’s a fundamental scientific error.
12 Comments
On the other hand, sometimes you CAN tell a book by its cover.
If the cover art shows the busty, semi-clad female lead bent backwards at an impossible angle being menaced in a cross between a 50′s SF poster and the side of a panel van circa 1975… it’s probably a bad book.
Oooh, yeah, too true DEM.
You know what really gives me the irrits? When the cover bears NO RELATION to the characters inside (eg, hero has blond hair on cover, is described as black haired in book).
There’s a blog (“Mind the Gap”) over on nature that many of your readers might like, because it’s somewhat like a scientific version of skepticlawyer, Jennifer Rohn blogs mainly on “lab-lit” (she’s an author with a book about to be published) as well as personal stuff. Her sense of humor is not unlike LE/SLs
http://network.nature.com/people/UE19877E8/blog
(I’d also recommend you wordsmith types look at “http://network.nature.com/people/UE19877E8/blog/2009/01/28/in-which-you-are-invited-to-expose-yourselves”)
I feel blessed to have never read such a book!!
You are indeed lucky. I have occasionally read such a book because, well, I’ll give almost anything a go when I’m desperate for a read (yes, perhaps it can be said I’m a book sl*t). Occasionally I have even made it to the end of a book of this type, because I have to find out what happens to the characters even though I hate their guts. Of course, sometimes, I just flick to the end.
LE@5 said “Of course, sometimes, I just flick to the end.”
Hey, you could always turn them into an “art house” book by, like the film “Memento”, reading each chapter in reverse order.
Dear Mss Skeptic and Eagle – I am looking for an email contact for youse – I cannot find one – am I just bad at looking?
Nope, we just don’t have it on our site.
My e-mail is:
legalsoapboxATgmailDOTcom (replace caps with symbols)
If you click on the donation tab and make to donate without doing anything, you’ll get my email addy. We haven’t set up a general blog email address, mainly to stop people abusing us. Maybe we should, we had a poor guy from the SMH have to leave his phone number in the comments recently when he wanted LE to talk to him.
I’m not against pictures of scantily-clad women in themselves, but I always feel irritated when I see fantasy literature with pictures of warrior-women wearing chain-mail bikinis. Because when you’re fighting enemies who have swords and tusks, you really really don’t want to leave your belly exposed. I’m a soft urbanite and I’ve figured that out, damnit!
Amazingly helpful! One of the things I do is teach an Open Universtiy creative writing course and oh so many of them write fantasy. I have to say I don’t read much fantasy (no disrespect, it’s just not my cuppa – or maybe I haven’t found a good one yet). So I’m left reading and re-reading and doing this Emporer’s New Clothes thing, of thinking: This doesn’t make sense – it’s incomprehensible! Is this because I don’t really ‘get’ fantasy? But soft! It’s actually because it’s BAD.
Thank you so much for this – I’ve printed it out and will vigorously apply to my Bad Fantasy Writers.
Cheers!
Jane
Jane, the amazing thing is that some popular published works tick all the boxes above.
But there’s also some good stuff out there – I must get together a list. In my post on sci-fi, I tried to list some good sci-fi books. I’ll have to try to think of some good fantasy too.
Anyway, glad to be of service