Quote:
Originally Posted by Luce
Naw, just juvenile and a terrible writer. Seriously. Farnham's Freehold was an assault on the very idea of writing.
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Sorry, kid, it's none of those... there is, after all,
Time Enough For Love. His writing did not have the occasional leaps into poetic sensibility that Roger Zelazny had, but then who else did? Heinlein's prose was instead transparent -- its style does not get in the way of its story, and that's an accomplishment. RAH's particular distinguishing mark was his making of radically curious, even outrageous, societies and constructing tales springing out of these -- FF no less than his others.
RAH has an imitator in David Drake and another in David Weber. Operas, that is. I say of the Weber 'Verse that they have *extremely* cheap interstellar flight to make the plots/societies derived from, erm, the more dysfunctional sorts of earthly societies even work. But that's for some other post, some other day.
For bad, yet published, writing, you go to Pel Torro (a pseudonym, but you can Wiki this hack) for the abysmal worst -- or Piers Anthony when he was just trying to pay the mortgage. Not quite as abyssal, but his stuff is too thin for adult readers, leading to unflattering speculation as to Piers' general mentality. Even he was a step up from L. Ron Hubbard, who is unreadable.
It may be friendly advice to say there are at least a couple even awfuller writers out there, one fraudulent but sane, just nontalented, and one who is probably not quite sane and even worse a writer -- Edward Chu-Teh Eng, perpetrator of
Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate. You can find this one sporked and on YouTube, if you are a) daring, b) insensitive if not insensate, and c) have a strong stomach. No, it's not
present enough to be gory, nor is it nasty in the de Sade manner -- but you may irritably want those hours or minutes of your life back.