Books Worst books you've read?

[Bear Ribs]

Note that Clancy sold the rights to his own name towards the end of his career. There are a ton of Clancy Novels produced without Tom Clancy himself ever seeing them, some even after he died. These typically have Tom Clancy's name across the top in letters taking up a third of the cover and the actual author's in small print hidden at the very bottom.

 

[Skallagrim]

Note that Clancy sold the rights to his own name towards the end of his career. There are a ton of Clancy Novels produced without Tom Clancy himself ever seeing them, some even after he died. These typically have Tom Clancy's name across the top in letters taking up a third of the cover and the actual author's in small print hidden at the very bottom.

Sure enough, but his plots already went batshit crazy in the mid-'90s. Sure, Debt of Honor can be forgiven for seeming dumb in retrospect, because Clancy was far from the only one who bought into the "Japan is the next big superpower and a BIG THREAT" meme that floated around at the time. But Executive Orders is just batshit neocon wish-fulfillment with only the most tenuous links to reality.

With 2000's The Bear and the Dragon, Clancy just seems totally incoherent. Gone is the clear insight he once had into Cold War geopolitics back in the '80s. It really seems that he never understood the post-Cold War realities, and the set-ups for his books consequently become patently ridiculous.

From that point onward, he started "co-writing" (and later outsourcing), and the quality dipped further and further down. But Executive Orders was already self-indulgent, writing-wise, and The Bear and the Dragon is overly bloated and (it seems) barely edited. At least not edited by someone who could ever say "no" to Clancy...

 

[gral]

Sure enough, but his plots already went batshit crazy in the mid-'90s.

Agree with everything what you've said(Rainbow 6 and Without Remorse were the last decent books Clancy wrote, and the former has some problems), but I'll note that was a problem with the entire spy/war thriller genre -they couldn't understand the post-USSR world. A friend of mine has for some time wished for the return of the Cold War: 'Only way we'll get good spy or action movies', he says.

 

[TheRejectionist]

Sure enough, but his plots already went batshit crazy in the mid-'90s. Sure, Debt of Honor can be forgiven for seeming dumb in retrospect, because Clancy was far from the only one who bought into the "Japan is the next big superpower and a BIG THREAT" meme that floated around at the time. But Executive Orders is just batshit neocon wish-fulfillment with only the most tenuous links to reality.

With 2000's The Bear and the Dragon, Clancy just seems totally incoherent. Gone is the clear insight he once had into Cold War geopolitics back in the '80s. It really seems that he never understood the post-Cold War realities, and the set-ups for his books consequently become patently ridiculous.

From that point onward, he started "co-writing" (and later outsourcing), and the quality dipped further and further down. But Executive Orders was already self-indulgent, writing-wise, and The Bear and the Dragon is overly bloated and (it seems) barely edited. At least not edited by someone who could ever say "no" to Clancy...

I honestly like the idea of the Bear the Dragon but of course I see as product of it's time.

Wish It would have happened but we can't have nice things in this timeline.

 

[TheRejectionist]

Also the Japan conqueres the Word trope was awesome though not practical afterwards.

 

[Skallagrim]

Also the Japan conqueres the Word trope was awesome though not practical afterwards.

Well, it at least made for some fun cyberpunk stuff.

 

[Earl]

Well, it at least made for some fun cyberpunk stuff.

Ah the 90s, that glorious decade of utterly unique pop culture and entertainingly wrong assumptions.

Edit on Clancy: it’s a pity on his 90s carreer because Clear And Present Danger shows he can dos stuff not against the Commies pretty well too. Alas.

 

[bintananth]

Ah the 90s, that glorious decade of utterly unique pop culture and entertainingly wrong assumptions.

It was the end of an era. When I was a HS freshman merely posessing a pager was grounds for expulsion because "drug dealer". When I started college I had a Nokia cell phone.

 

[Large_Farva]

For me it would be Freehold, by Michael Z Williamson. I got it via the Baen Free Library.

It's nominally a MilSF book, but I never got the chance to find out, because it was one of the very few books I've ever just quit reading.

I'm not one of the people who demands that authors keep politics out of their work - people have viewpoints on lots of things, and those viewpoints will inform how they write. This is fine. I can make a pretty good guess at, say, Richard K Morgan's general politics but I still tend to enjoy his novels.

What I really really don't like is when a novel is actually a political diatribe. There's a really long section in the first half that is basically just the protagonist bumping around the titular colony going 'But isn't there a problem with...(fill in the blank - a LOT of blanks)?' and someone going 'Nope! Because of Libertarianism!' and delivering a lecture about why Big-L Libertarianism is De Wey.

I never got past that point - I'm reading MilSF because I want to see cool future tech used in exciting action sequences against exotic backdrops. I don't want to hear about how great everything would be if only everyone did what the author thought they should and how the only people that would disagree are the ones who can't handle your philosophy's awesomeness and rectitude. (Which is a hundred percent where it was going - the corrupt tyrannical government that the protagonist escaped from was absolutely going to try and invade the Libertarian Paradise because they ruled too much and the big bad .gov couldn't let something that great exist because something something Libertarianism good government bad. And they would be driven back because those super-cool Libertarians were all way smarter and tougher and better and sexier with bigger dicks or tits.)

And I tried to read it when I self-identified as a small-l libertarian.

 

[Abhorsen]

Gotta agree on Clancy's decline over time, though the climax's of his works were always top notch: the shortening passages between POV changes as the action boiled over made me feel like stuff was happening faster and faster.

 

[Agent23]

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by the wife of Daemon Knight.
Badly written boomer eco alarmism with one-dimensional characters and a stupid, virtue-signalling plot.

There was this one book where the names of a lot of the weapons and ships were lifted from the Master of Orion games and where your usual collectivist dictatorship tried to one-up the capitalist free space colonies by creating an army of supersoldiers that had rebelled and decoded to take out their masters.

That thing was awful.