My freshman year of college was the first time I'd ever been away from home.
Oh, I'd gone to Austria a few years earlier, but it wasn't the same. I'd lived with a host family in Salzburg and had eaten meals with the rest of the high schoolers in my group. College was much different in terms of personal freedom, and I quickly found myself exploring the campus and the surrounding town between classes instead of going straight back to my room.
One day I was shopping at the late, lamented Quill bookstore, which was right next to the performing arts complex. I saw a new Star Trek paperback, reached over for it - and realized that another girl was reaching for the very same book. We looked at each other, laughed, and began talking, and by the time I went back to Hopkins House for dinner it was three hours later and I'd made my first real friend at Smith.
Her name was Sue, and she was a math major. I haven't seen her in years, but Sue (not my old roommate - let's call her First Sue) and I quickly bonded over backgammon, conversation, and a mutual love of science fiction, fantasy, and Star Trek. We didn't really have much in common other than science fiction but we were close enough that she easily talked me into buying that iconic Star Wars poster, the one with Luke raising his phallic symbol lightsaber while Leia who wasn't his sister back then crouches next to his leg. First Sue also introduced me to fanfiction, which changed my life, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books, which changed my reading habits for a couple of years.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was a popular and prolific science fiction writer almost from the publication of her first novel, The Falcons of Narabedla. She was among the first women to make her mark in what was then a male-dominated genre, even if she had to use the masculine spelling of her first name to do so. She also wrote a lot more than science fiction, including lesbian pornography in the 1950s and a novel about gay trapeze artists, The Catch Trap, in 1984. Bradley also co-founded the Society for Creative Anachronism (where she's still remembered fondly as Mistress Marian of Greenwalls) and authored one of the first pieces of Arthuriana to explore the role of women in the Matter of Britain.
Bradley is probably best known today for that book, which was of course The Mists of Avalon, but her greatest and most influential achievement in science fiction was her series of novels about the world of Darkover. This series, beginning with The Sword of Aldones in 1962 and continuing today with volumes written by the likes of Mercedes Lackey and fellow SCA founder Diana Paxson (aka Mistress Diana Listmaker, and yes, she still attends the occasional event), tells the story of a former human colony, Darkover, as its inbred psionic aristocracy struggles to adjust to renewed contact with the Terran Empire centuries after its settlers were marooned thanks to a starship crash. These colorful, exciting books are full of bloody battles, amazing mind-powered technology, sharply drawn characters, and a surprisingly enlightened view of bisexuality, especially among men.
Unfortunately, Bradley herself has become a controversial figure thanks to two scandals in her later years. One involved a piece of fanfiction that was alleged to be very similar to Bradley's novel in progress, which resulted in Bradley abruptly yanking her book from publication and terminating her long running series of Friends of Darkover fanfiction anthologies. The more serious, which is still taboo in certain parts of fandom, involved her husband’s preference for young boys as sexual partners. Bradley didn’t come off very well in either instance, and her posthumous reputation has suffered accordingly.
All that was in the future when I first discovered Darkover. I devoured two of the more recent installments, Stormqueen! and The Shattered Chain, then worked my way through the rest of the series, book by book. I introduced Roommate Sue to them, and we mutually urged them on our friend Walter, who read them while on junior year abroad in Munich. I'm pretty sure he in turn passed them along to his girlfriend/future wife Lisa, but I've never actually asked.
Some of the Darkover books were better than others, of course. The first few had been written in the days of 50,000 word novels so concentrated more on exciting plots than characterization or consistent world building. Others were clearly more ambitious than Bradley's nascent writing skills could handle. The one I liked least, though, was chronologically the first book in the series, Darkover Landfall.
It wasn't the first written - that was 1962's The Sword of Aldones, which was such an incoherent mess that Bradley later withdrew it and rewrote it from scratch as Sharra's Exile. Darkover Landfall, published in 1972, was decently written and technically assured, if somewhat short, and clearly showed that Bradley had learned a lot about writing in the subsequent ten years.
No, what stopped me cold was a scene of such blinding, irredeemable sexism that I had to read it twice to be sure that I'd read the paragraph correctly. Oh, the characters attempted to justify That Passage on what seemed good and sufficient grounds, but it didn't matter. I had never in my life felt such an instant and visceral sense of wrongness reading a piece of popular fiction, even during the "F'nor rapes Brekke" scene in Dragonquest, and it was not a pleasant sensation, let me tell you.
That's why eventually, after I'd taken a deep, cleansing breath, I put the book aside to read later than I was calmer...and never picked it up again.
That's right. Despite loving the Darkover series as a whole, I have never been able to finish Darkover Landfall. I have no idea why Bradley included the scene she did (although I later read a letter to a 1960s fanzine where she claimed that she was planning something that would "stick it to the Women's Libbers" for reasons known only to her), but she did. Oh, I'm pretty sure I know what happens in the rest of the book thanks to discussions with friends and my knowledge of the series as a whole, but I gave my copy of Darkover Landfall away years ago and have no desire to purchase a fresh copy.
It was perhaps the first time in my life that I'd encountered a really unpleasant book by an author I liked, even if Darkover Landfall itself wasn't truly bad enough to qualify for this diary.
Tonight we have three examples of books that do qualify for that somewhat dubious honor, the very saddest type of Book So Bad It’s Good: lousy books by good authors. One is allegedly non-fiction by a giant of the detective story, one is a truly awful Darkover book, and the third is a work so self-referential and so tasteless that it was considered proof that the author had begun to go senile. All are sad disappointments to fans of their authors, and the reader may be forgiven if she either hurls the book across the room, turns it into gun cotton, or simply puts it down and weeps.
The Coming of the Fairies, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known today, of course, for his splendid detective stories starring the greatest fictional sleuth of all, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes set the standard by which all other detectives are measured, and Dr. Watson is still one of the most satisfying sidekicks in fiction.
Despite these immortal characters, Doyle believed that he was wasting his talents on such silly, throwaway detective stories. He actually tried to kill Holmes off so he could concentrate on historical fiction like The White Company, and the resulting howls of rage from his fans still serve as a cautionary tale to any author who tries to end a popular series by killing the hero without Extreme Foreshadowing and A Damn Good Reason. Doyle eventually gave in to popular demand and brought Holmes back in The Adventure of the Empty House, and despite growing visibly weary of 221b Baker Street and its denizens toward the end of his life, he continued to write Holmes stories until his retirement in 1927.
Doyle also continued to write in other genres. He was knighted for his stirring defense of the Boer War, produced a series of delightful stories about the Napoleonic officer Brigadier Gerard, and weighed in on many of the important political and social issues of his day. He was also instrumental in clearing the name of two unjustly accused men, George Edalji and Oscar Slater, using methods similar to those employed by his greatest creation.
What few remember is that in addition to all of the above, Doyle was also a convinced and enthusiastic Spiritualist and paranormal researcher.
Spiritualism, a quasi-religious movement which had begun with the Fox sisters playing tricks on their parents one night in 1848, was enormously popular by the early years of the 20th century. It promised the bereaved immediate contact with their lost loved ones and a future together in the afterlife, and despite numerous exposes of medium after medium, psychic phenomena were accepted as fact at all levels of fin de siecle life. The Great War, which slaughtered the flower of British youth, only increased Spiritualism’s popularity and influence in society.
Doyle and his second wife, Jean, were no exceptions. Doyle had been interested in psychic phenomena well before the horrors of 1914, and the loss of several relatives around that time, including his son Kingsley in 1918, only strengthened his faith. His insistence on the reality of psychic phenomena cost him friendships (most notably with the great magician Houdini, who spent much of his free time debunking fraudulent mediums) and made him a figure of fun in some circles, but Doyle went to his grave convinced that he’d made contact with his dead son and others too numerous to mention.
If such gullibility seems inexplicable in the creator of the ultra-logical Sherlock Holmes, it is at least somewhat excusable given the times in which Doyle lived. The same cannot be said for his ringing defense of the Cottingley Fairy Photos.
These fascinating images were taken by two innocent young girls, 16 year old Elsie Wright and her 10 year old cousin Frances Griffiths, between 1917 and 1920. They appeared to show the cousins cavorting with tiny, merrily dancing wingéd women in a bucolic glen near their home in West Yorkshire. One even depicted Elsie carefully coaxing a mincing little gnome, complete with pointed hat and miniature pipes, to sit in her lap! The girls, offspring of respectable families, had no apparent reason to lie, and photographic experts, some from Kodak itself, saw no evidence that either of the charming young ladies had tampered with the negatives.
Although the first rush of excitement over the photos came from the Theosophical Society, which saw them as confirmation of humanity’s evolution toward spiritual perfection, Conan Doyle soon heard of them through his connections in occult circles. By some trick of what Carl Jung would have called “synchronicity,” Conan Doyle had been asked to write an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine’s 1920 Christmas issue, and he regarded the Cottingley photographs as a godsend.
Like any good detective, though, Conan Doyle wanted more evidence before he dropped this bombshell on the world. He accordingly sent Theosophist Edward Gardner off to Cottingley to see if the girls could take a few more pictures. To be extra certain that there would no trickery, Gardner brought two new cameras and two dozen secretly marked photographic plates.
At first nothing happened, but on a fine summer’s day when both Gardner and Mrs. Wright were elsewhere, lo and behold! Success! The girls took two more pictures, one showing a fairy leaping at Frances, while a second captured a fairy in a stylish bias-cut dress and fashionably bobbed hair offering a bouquet of harebells to Elsie. Even better, a third photograph taken a few days later caught a ring of semi-transparent fairies taking an “aetheric bath” in the grass to recharge their energies.
Conan Doyle was thrilled. Surely photographs of fairies, taken by two blameless girls, would silence the skeptics who doubted the reality of psychic and occult phenomena! And indeed, the December 1920 issue of The Strand, quickly expanded into a book called The Coming of the Fairies, was a sensation. The magazine sold out within days, and the book was a bestseller despite reviews that could charitably be described as “tepid.” Defenders of the girls (and the author) relied on the girls’ alleged innocence and honest faces, even after it came out that Elsie had briefly worked for a photography studio retouching negatives. Critics rolled their eyes and accused Conan Doyle of being taken in by two pretty young minxes, while Elsie and Frances themselves said as little as possible.
The fairy fuss faded within a year or two, despite claims by Edward Gardner that he, too, had seen fairies (although none had allowed themselves to be photographed). Elsie and Frances grew up, married, and did their best to pretend that nothing had happened. Reporters who tracked them down were told that they had somehow photographed “figments of their imagination,” while Conan Doyle’s many fans winced at their hero’s gullibility.
Eventually, of course, the truth came out. The cousins admitted in 1983 that they had faked most of the photos with cardboard cutouts of dancing fairies that Elsie, a talented artist, had cribbed from Princess Mary’s Gift Book. They had done so because their parents had become annoyed with them going out to play near a local brook and coming back with wet, muddy clothes, on the perhaps justified grounds that photographing the wee folk was a better excuse than “we were tromping about in the muck because it's fun.” Both maintained to the end, however, the “aetheric bath” photo was legitimate, and that they had really, truly seen fairies.
As for Conan Doyle, he was certain that two such respectable girls could never had lied, and went to his grave in 1930 convinced that Elsie and Frances had done the impossible. He doubtless would have been saddened to learn that seemingly innocent girls can and do deceive their elders, that a clever teenager’s fear of embarrassment will trump any innate honesty she may possess, and that a hoax can and will take on a life of its own if enough people are willing to believe.
What Sherlock Holmes would have made of all this is perhaps best left to the imagination.
Thendara House, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Thendara House was written in 1983 as a sequel to one of Bradley’s most popular books, The Shattered Chain. Despite Bradley's mixed record on women’s issues, The Shattered Chain was a long, powerfully written, explicitly feminist novel about the shabby treatment of women in Darkovan society, and the one group that refused to accept this second class status: the Renunciates, also known as the Free Amazons. It was wildly popular, especially among feminist separatists, and the surprised Bradley was accosted more than once at conventions by earnest young women who asked her to be their “oathmother” as they swore a modified version of the Renunciate’s vows.
Thendara House is a direction continuation of the stories of the two main characters in The Shattered Chain: Magda Lorne, a Terran agent who took the Renunciate’s oath under false pretenses, and Jaelle n’ha Melora, a Renunciate who befriended Magda and then fell in love with Magda’s ex-husband Peter. The first book had left the characters seemingly poised to make great discoveries about themselves and their respective societies, as Magda had agreed to undergo Renunciate training and Jaelle had married Peter and taken a job as a translator in the Terran trade zone of Darkover’s capitol, Thendara.
The setup was fabulous: a woman from a theoretically egalitarian society trading places with a woman who was raised in the one feminist part of a deeply sexist society. It should have been a blockbuster, Bradley’s chance to explore gender roles, feminism, and female sexuality, all set against the backdrop of Darkover’s conflict with the Terran Empire and the waning psi powers of the aristocracy.
Instead, we get the following:
- Magda, despite being raised on Darkover by anthropologist parents and working for years as an intelligence agent, keeps making elementary mistakes about Darkovan culture.
- Peter treats Jaelle her like a somewhat retarded child, including threatening to have her tied down and confined to a mental hospital (!) when she gets fed up with him and demands a divorce, on the grounds that she’s pregnant and hysterical.
- The Terran trade colony's computer system seemingly has never encountered a married couple with different surnames, and so Jaelle is forced to accept an identification badge reading “Mrs. Peter Haldane” instead of “Jaelle n’ha Melora.”
- Magda has an out of left field romance with Camilla, one of the older Renunciates, despite absolutely no clues in the earlier book that she was attracted to women.
- Jaelle turns out to be a catalyst telepath who activates everyone else's psi powers despite only the vaguest of clues in the earlier book that she had this rare talent.
- A gratuitous miscarriage and a maudlin little scene where the spirit of Jaelle’s doomed daughter tells her “sorry, not this time, but I’ll be back later!” and goes back to wherever unborn telepaths hang out.
- Terran authorities as a group having roughly the same attitude toward women as the partners of Sterling Draper.
- Jaelle having a whole heap o’ PTSD about her rotten childhood, none of which she explains to her bewildered friends, family, and co-workers.
- A deux ex machina in the form of the Forbidden Tower, a group of rogue telepaths that includes yet another Terran-gone-native, who agree to take in both Jaelle and Magda despite the women’s commitments to, respectively, the Terran trade colony, Peter the stereotypically sexist jerk, the Renunciates, Terran Intelligence, Camilla the Renunciate, Jaelle’s birth family, and pretty much everyone else on Darkover. This includes Jaelle and Magda choosing which of the Forbidden Tower’s men (whom they've just met) will father their children (!) and deciding to contract a platonic marriage to protect each other’s unconceived daughters even though Magda is in love with Camilla.
To say that the book is not Bradley’s best is putting it mildly. It’s not quite as bad as The Sword of Aldones, but it's a very sad and painful read for anyone who loved The Shattered Chain. Even worse, Thendara House was followed by yet another Renunciate book, City of Sorcery, that directly contradicted several of the earlier Darkover books AND conveniently killed Jaelle and whisked Magda and Camilla out of the way so that the Forbidden Tower could go to its doom as per an already published book.
Bradley could do better, and did. 'Nuff said.
The Number of the Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein. Robert Heinlein was, beyond a doubt, one of the most important science fiction authors of the 20th century. His list of achievements is awe inspiring even today, when science fiction and fantasy books, movies, and television shows routinely top the bestseller lists, smash box office records, and are nominated for major industry awards: the Future History series of interconnected novels and short stories; four best novel Hugos, a feat unmatched for nearly forty years; the SFWA Grand Master Award; a series of legendary juvenile novels that shaped whole generations of SF writers and fans; and on and on and on. Stranger in a Strange Land, his best known novel, not only was a smash bestseller despite the stigma of being “just science fiction,” but it was a major influence on the burgeoning hippie movement, Neopagan religion, and even the English language, as anyone who’s ever used “grok” in a sentence well knows. Science fiction would not be what it is today without him.
Unfortunately for Heinlein, his writing suffered a steep and noticeable drop in quality son after the publication of his mid-1960s political novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I Will Fear No Evil, about a man who has himself cloned as a woman, was a terrible comedown after the Hugo-winning heights of Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, and Moon, while Time Enough for Love, a long, rambling, almost plotless book, was dubbed Time Enough for Sex by disgruntled readers who were not happy that they’d read almost a thousand pages of exposition so the omnicompetent, immortal, and increasingly obnoxious Lazarus Long could travel back in time and work out his Oedipal urges on his sex-crazed mother. Heinlein's health wasn’t good, and the charitable wondered if the sudden decline in quality was because he simply wasn’t well.
Then word came in 1979 that Heinlein was about to publish a brand new novel. SF fans rejoiced, and eager readers quickly snapped up excerpts in the October and November issues of Omni. The complete book, entitled The Number of the Beast, came out the next year in an edition illustrated by Richard M. Powers, and went straight onto the Locus bestseller lists.
And then people actually read it, and were confronted by lines like this on the very first page:
“He’s a Mad Scientist and I’m his Beautiful Daughter.”
It gets worse. A character describes a passionate kiss as follows:
“Our teeth grated and my nipples went spung!”
While another character states that, when it comes to her figure:
“I’d be an idiot to risk competing with Deety’s teats.”
And it gets even worse, as disbelieving readers found themselves confronted with villains (the “Black Hats,” and yes, that is what Heinlein calls them) whose names are anagrams of every pen name Heinlein and his wife Virginia ever used, a starship called The Gay Deceiver that travels to fictional universes ranging from Oz to Barsoom to Heinlein’s own Future History, Glinda the Good casually referring to “Lebensraum,” Lazarus Long (AGAIN) and his enormous family, a truly staggering number of breast jokes, an autopilot computer becoming sentient because random numbers are the mathematical equivalent of God breathing life into Adam, arguments about politics and who’s in charge, and enough science fictional, literary, and Heinleinian self-references and in-jokes that the only way I can describe it is to compare it to being trapped at a loud, drunken, late night party populated entirely by over-educated SF fen chowing down on Screaming Yellow Zonkers in the Worldcon hospitality suite right after the Hugo Awards.
And just when the reader thinks that surely Heinlein is joking, that it’s all going to somehow come together in a grand and glorious climax that has nothing to do with Lazarus Long and his mother mutually getting their ya-yas off, or enormous breasts that need a specially cantilevered bra, or any form of sex involving anyone, anywhere, at any time, on any planet, in any of the six dimensions explored by the Gay Deceiver...
It gets worse.
Yes.
Really.
Because Heinlein ends the book with, God help us all, a science fiction convention populated almost exclusively by his own characters, all of whom either know each other, or have read the books starring each other, or have heard of each other. Perhaps the most surreal moment is when everyone practically wets themselves with excitement at the arrival of Sir Isaac Newton – and he turns out to be the Venusian dragon from Between Planets.
Mercifully, the book ends before Heinlein can award himself the Nobel Prize for literature, cure cancer, or walk on water, but not before the reader turns the last page and says, “That’s IT?” in a voice that can be heard half a mile away. Oh, the book has its defenders as a satire of bad writing and/or SF fandom, but it’s hard to take them seriously as the jokes, breast references, fawning self-insertions, and ridiculous characterizations go on and on and on through what seems like at least half of the 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056 universes that the Gay Deceiver can visit.
To say that this book is merely bad is to understate the case by several orders of magnitude. It is so bad that a lot of SF fans were convinced that Heinlein had either gone senile or suffered brain damage during surgery to unblock his carotid artery. Still others plain stopped reading him despite the subsequent appearance of genuinely good books like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Friday, and Job. It wasn’t until his last book, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, about the life and times of (inevitably) Lazarus Long’s mother Mary Sue Maureen, that Heinlein once again approached the depths of The Number of the Beast, and fortunately that one manages to avoid falling apart completely until relatively near the end, when Lazarus shows up one last time to fulfill every man’s fantasy of marrying his mother.
And thank God, no one’s nipples went spung!
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And now, gentle readers, it's your turn. Which of your favorite authors produced a waste of trees rather than interesting read? Which series began with a bang and ended with a blat? I've taken one three for the team, so to you from failing hands I throw the torch, be yours to scream and scream and scream and run and flail and - hold it high!