Well, that kinda sucked from the start, didn't it? To be entertaining to people not of his sect, a ground-eye view of the Apocalypse should not be written by a humorless Christian fundamentalist with a load of axes to grind...
Bruce
Books with Great Premises that failed utterly to carry them out
- Thread starter Father Maryland
- Start date
Well, that kinda sucked from the start, didn't it? To be entertaining to people not of his sect, a ground-eye view of the Apocalypse should not be written by a humorless Christian fundamentalist with a load of axes to grind...
Bruce
C Montgomery Burns
Banned
Not necessarilly: look at Pilgrim's Progress or the Screwtape Letters. A good Evangelical writer could still have wrriten a somewhat better novel with none-strawmannish characters.
Pilgrim's Progress is a bit of a slog
and CS Lewis was neither a hard-core baptist fundamentalist nor humorless... (and even so The Last Battle is the most indigestible of the Narnia books)Bruce
EDIT: Bunyan, having the benefit of living several centuries ago, when God was believed in by all (although the details were fiercely disputed) also doesn't have quite as annoying a set of axes...
Most of anything written by Turtledove, but especially TL-191 and his WW2 rehashes. If none of the characters can do anything about their situation other than complain and smoke, then why are we wasting our time with them? Lets hear from some people that actually can do something other than bitch and whine about being helpless.
I don't know I mean the premise of the apocalypse and the war resulting would be pretty awesome. Hell even the religious bullshit could be cool.
Its just it was written by two moronic syphilitic arseholes whose pre writing career consisted of drinking lead paint and reading jack chick.
Good point. C.S. Lewis, for instance, would have been interested in the story as a story and not just as a way of preaching the End Times.
Bunyan wouldn't have cared about the story, so he would have pared out most of the story elements, giving it a kind of elemental power.
As is, Left Behind, despite all the competition, might be the worst popular fiction of the last decades.
Reading? Nah, they just liked Jack Chick tracts for the pictures.
"Dark Tower" went downward horribly after the first book, so much that I never finished the series.
"Left Behind" is also a good example: the idea was interesting but the total failure to create athmosphere and flesh out all the geopolitcal stuff going on ruined it for me (didn't finish that series too).
Apocalypse books seem to be difficult anyway. I found "Good Omens" incredible boring (some of the subplots were good but the main plot totaly failed).
"Left Behind" is also a good example: the idea was interesting but the total failure to create athmosphere and flesh out all the geopolitcal stuff going on ruined it for me (didn't finish that series too).
Apocalypse books seem to be difficult anyway. I found "Good Omens" incredible boring (some of the subplots were good but the main plot totaly failed).
MrP
Banned
You disliked Good Omens? That nearly makes me reconsider my opinion on reading the dreadful-sounding Left Behind series.
Meh. "British intervene in the civil war and somehow unite US and Confederacy against them, leading to joint invasion of the UK" is a silly premise to start with.
Now, "Confederacy and Union vs Hitler"...
Bruce
Tempted to throw John Birmingham's Without Warning series in there. Excellent premise (America disappears), completely ruined by being a transparent extended author tract. Supposedly he wrote it as a response to people who think the world would be a better place without constant US intervention. What happens? The US disappears, leaving most of the US Armed Forces behind, which then trigger Israeli nuclear armageddon. Hm.
Not to mention the French civil war. To be fair, the sudden removal of the US economy plus the giant radioactive death cloud from burning US cities and unsupervised nuclear reactors probably would be a bit disruptive, but I suppose he felt he needed more of a body count to ram the point home.
Bruce
Most speculative fiction books are written by authors who apparently believe one of two things:
A) Any large scale catastrophes will reduce humanity to small roving packs of cannibals, doomed to extinction.
B) Any large scale change in the world, such as an apocalypse or the discovery of magic or contact be aliens, will result in a world that is almost indistinguishable from ours because people don't care.
A is particularly noticeable in nuclear holocausts and zombie fiction (except WWZ) and B is particularly noticeable in Anime and Doctor Who.
A) Any large scale catastrophes will reduce humanity to small roving packs of cannibals, doomed to extinction.
B) Any large scale change in the world, such as an apocalypse or the discovery of magic or contact be aliens, will result in a world that is almost indistinguishable from ours because people don't care.
A is particularly noticeable in nuclear holocausts and zombie fiction (except WWZ) and B is particularly noticeable in Anime and Doctor Who.
Super Parker Brothers
Banned
Despite my better judgement I bout two of them because I needed things to read and the newest Hitler's War wasn't out. NEver touched them.
Actually, you are forgetting
A-2) Any large scale catastrophe will kill huge numbers of people (which is a downer) but will also lead to Manly Stuff stuff such as colonization of space or full-scale Medieval reenactment, which is Cool.
PS-any overlap between those who die in hugest numbers and people I don't like or am uninterested in, is of course PURE COINCIDENCE
It is also the baseline for superhero comic books. Not sure about Anime: doesn't a lot of it take place in worlds not much like ours to begin with?
Bruce