Worst SciFi Authors

I was wondering, after reading the atrocious and utterly stupid Posleen series by John Ringo, who are the worst SciFi Authors.

My nomination goes to John Ringo. Why?
John Ringo quite simply put cannot design military equipment to save
his ^$$, which is sad, since he's a former paratrooper in the US Army.



Let us look at what he designed the "A4" Abrams to be in the fourth book:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

Y'know, this should have been done by 2004 when the Posleen first arrived, instead of waiting until 2009 to appear. Would have saved alot of lives.

Instead of building fantastically expensive ACS suits, the Indowy
should have been building huge slabs of armor capable of defeating railgun
rounds instead of complicated suits.

To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret "add-on" weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and the "coaxial" 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the "A4" Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.

The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few "silver bullets" for old time's sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.

Let's not get to the Bradley:

The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

What a bunch of bloody stupid designs. Did Mr. Ringo even stop to think
in his wanking to consider:

1.) Where the hell is the ammo going to come from?
2.) It's not firehoses of firepower which kills Posleen, it's sustained deep firepower.

To elaborate on the firehoses of firepower vs deep firepower, let us consider the following:

1.) Posleen are big centauroid horse sized aliens.
2.) Posleen like to attack in waves which make the chinese blush
3.) Posleen rarely deviate from human wave attacks.

The ideal weapons system for dealing with such attacks is the 25mm Bushmaster or 40mm Bofors firing HE Frag rounds fuzed so that they will penetrate through three or four Posleen ranks, killing four posleen through massive trauma from 25mm-40mm holes, before detonating and cutting down the Posleen mass behind the first few ranks.

7.62mm Miniguns, or Metalstorm units firing 40mm Grenade rounds, or even 25mm Bushmasters firing HE shells fuzed to superquick will simply just vaporize, shred, puree, mistify the first rank of the Posleen, leaving the mass of posleen behind the unfortunate first ranks alive and unharmed.


SheVas and why they make no sense

In Book 2, when a salvo of 16" shells from a battleship is mistakenly thought to have hit a Posleen lander over Virginia and annihilated it, what does the USA do? They build 16" smoothbore guns using fixed cases with electro-thermal propellant, and a depleted uranium sabot with a 10 pound antimatter breaching charge....instead of producing 1 million LOSAT armed Bradleys.

Let's do the math:

A 16"/50 HE Shell has a muzzle velocity of 820 m/s, and a weight of 862 kilograms; that equates out to 289.8 megajoules if my math is correct.

(NOTE: the rounds fired at Fredericksburg, VA were HE, not AP, they were firing for effect on massed formations of Posleen)

The 16" Smoothbore of a SheVa is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so that's 1,738.8 megajoules. LOSAT is stated to have 40 megajoules of KE; so that means a 43.5 LOSAT missiles equal the firepower of a SheVa.

Now, seeing as the original LOSAT was a stretched Bradley, carrying four LOSATs ready to fire, and 16 more in an autoloader, with average reload time for all four missiles 15 to 20 seconds.

What this means is that three platoons of LOSAT-Bradleys (12 in all) will be able to put 48 LOSATs onto target at best, or about 1,920 megajoules of energy; enough to cripple or knock about a Posleen Lander. And they will be vastly cheaper, easier to maintain, easier to replace than SheVas.


Or build HIBEX with 400g acceleration and a one kiloton nuclear warhead, no Posleen Lander will survive and its speed makes it uninterceptable.



Why the US Military's Artillery Doctrine Makes No Sense:

Posleen do not have the following:

1.) Artillery
2.) Counterbattery Fire
3.) Firefinder radars

So why does the US Army spend so much time mass producing 155mm wheeled open-topped guns based on South African Chassis, when they should have been producing M270 MRLS. A Posleen attack meeting a MRLS Division would cease to exist under steel rain.

What's the reason for producing guns anyway?

Guns are good for:

1.) Sustained fire (useful, but we can just get 8" Howitzers to do that for us instead of 6.1" (155mm)).

2.) Counterbattery fire (Uhm, since the posleen have no artillery, why do we need this capability? ).

The US Military KNOWS the way the Posleen attack; they've had five years to prepare, analyze and they build the WRONG WEAPON SYSTEMS! If you gave me a few MRLS Divisions, I could annihilate entire military map sheets of anything that lives in minutes, inflicting millions of Posleen casualties for zero Human. Yet Ringo's Humans all do it the stupidest possible way, muddling along the fighting for five years, allowing the Posleen to slowly learn basic military tactics, making their jobs much harder in the end.

Wait? What about the Posleen's uber anti rocket device which does nothing against shot and shell?

Firstly, it's nothing of the sort. It only tracks and destroys POWERED projectiles; or projectiles that are TRANSMITTING. In the books, artillery shells with cameras in them that transmit pictures back are shot out of the sky easily, but dumb shells aren't.

And in book 4, hundreds of ICBMS are launched from the Northwest against Posleen positions in Tennesee; most of the ICBMs are shot down by the posleen in the BOOST phase, but once the warheads debuss and are on pure ballistic trajectories, the posleen can't do anything to stop 'em.

What would I have done if I was in charge instead of the imcompetents in the book?

I would have simply done the following for my anti Posleen force:

1.) Obtain M-1 and M-2/M-3 armor upgrade packages from the Indowy before Posleenfall.

2.) M-1 Abrams gets cannister, and the capability to airburst 120mm HE rounds, and a 25mm coaxial chaingun firing HE fuzed rounds.

3.) The M-2/M-3 Bradleys obtain said 25mm HE rounds fuzed for detonation shortly after impact.

4.) Hordes of LOSAT armed Bradleys are procured to deal with Posleen landers or HIBEX if Congress doesn't skimp on money.

5.) Hordes of M270 MRLS systems are built and scores of MRLS rounds are stockpiled, along with 8" tracked howitzers with anti-matter shell just in case we need to open the nuclear can of whoopass on the Posleen.

6.) Hordes of 120mm Mortar Armed M113A3s are built and assigned to the Abrams/Bradley/LOSAT task forces.

7.) Mass production of Watercooled Browning .50 Caliber HMGs; are distributed all over the United States to anyone who has the space to store 500,000 rounds of .50 cal. ammunition.

8.) I mass produce the M-14 once again, and re-equip my infantry forces with it. Horse sized aliens won't be dropped by 5.56mm.

9.) M249 SAWs are replaced on a one-on-one basis with M-240Gs.

When the Posleen land; I move up my armies; and then begin the process of reducing the Posleen pockets. A hour or two of MRLS salvos from my MRLS Divisions to clear the landing areas of anything LIVE (hey, if people are caught in there, they're dead anyway), then I move in my M-1s, M-2s, M-3s, under a constant hail of 8" gunfire and 120mm Mortars, with LOSAT armed bradleys picking off Posleen Landers.

Mechanized task forces of M1s and M2s proceed in, eliminating scattered bands of Posleen who survived the MRLS barriages. Once the majority of Posleen have been eliminated, the infantry dismounts and proceeds to mop up the few scattered Posleen who survived all this with their infantry weapons.

I estimate total eradication of all organized Posleen resistance in the Landing Pocket in a day or two, with mop up of scattered bands of Posleen in out of the way places for several months after the main pocket has been eliminated.

Why are the Humans stupid in conventional military doctrine?

I realize that Mr. Ringo must make the book exciting and he obviously wants to write more than just one book; but did he have to make humanity, in particular, it's militaries so terminally brain dead? Having the conflict drag on for years and years on Earth wasn't necessary to keep the story going; there are 70 planets that the GalFed has lost to the Posleen in the last couple of years; they all have to be retaken...which is room for several more books...

Contradictions in the books themselves.

From When the Devil Dances:

October 12, 2008 Last Transmission: Red Army, Nizhny Novgorod.

October 21, 2008 Official Determination: No coherent field forces outside of North America.

But we have him saying in the same book:

On the other hand, Canada's supplies of pitchblende were plentiful and above the weather-line that the Posleen preferred.

Wait, how can the Russians somehow magically lose their infamous harsh climate? They just need to keep walking east, cross the Urals, and the Posleen simply cannot touch them there, because Siberia is that cold; the Russians have done this before; in WW2, and they still have a rather big industrial base in Siberia, albeit with most of it idle since the end of the Soviet Union; an Alien threat would revive the Siberian factories quickly.

One of the big problems that Mighty Mite faces in Book 4 is he's running
out of power for his suits due to the way the M-300 Rifles are designed.

Human-manufactured 3mm by 4mm DU bullets for the M300 don't have their own antimatter power source, meaning that when the railguns are firing that kind of ammo, the power to accelerate the bullet to 0.3c comes from the suit's own power supply,which means they're slowly running out of power against a huge Posleen horde.

First, a little system analysis. If each railgun round when it impacts a
Posleen, has the power of 100 kilos of TNT, killing the Posleen it impacts
as well as inflicting splash damage on the nearby posleen, what reason is
there for a rate of fire so high that it's described as "streams of silver
lightning"?

Cutting the rate of fire down to 8 rounds per second, or about 500 rounds,
or about the rate of fire of a Maxim machine gun of WWI infamy, will signifcantly extend the ACS' suit's battery supply, as well as ammunition supply while retaining a significant proportion of lethality against the Posleen. Hell you could probably lower it to about 200 rounds a minute, especially if each individual 3x4mm DU round has the lethality of 100 kilos of TNT and it should be.

High rates of fire simply expend the majority of the 3x4mm DU rounds in converting the front ranks of Posleen into red mist, when blowing them into bloody chunks will do the job more efficiently. It also wouldn't lead to them running out of ammo and being overrun in the fourth book.

This systems analysis of how fast you really need to fire to kill posleen
can also carry into other aspects of the ACS suit. Without the need for obscene ammunition stowage for the railgun, you can free up a lot of space on the ACS suit for more armor or additional support weapons, like 60mm micro mortars, which will allow you to kill Posleen in the mass behind the front ranks while you mow down the front ranks with railgunfire.

Meanwhile, the Indowy have given O'Neal a suit of armor just before the Posleen landings with the following armor rating:

"Sixty-millimeter frontal monomolecular uranium-silicon alloy with energetic reinforcement. The energetic reinforcement is logarithmically autocontrolled against nonrelativistic–velocity projectiles. As the round comes closer to a penetrating angle, the deflection energy increases logarithmically."

Gee, you know, this would be really really great stuff to have mass
produced in 2 foot thicknesses (609mm), because that's how thick the
armor on the M1 is, and installed at Lima, Ohio, replacing the old
Chobham packages; making the M-1 nearly invincible to Posleen attacks.

Also, it would be relatively easy to mass produce this stuff compared
to a ACS suit; because instead of visualizing each and every atom in a complicated piece of battle armor, with all it's various advanced sub
systems, the Indowy would only have to visualize a flat slab of armor.


For all this I give John Ringo my nomination for worst SciFi Author.


Who are your nominations?

You.

heinlein.

and before ppl jab me in the face with starship troopers, i say this: "I will Fear No Evil,* by heinlein. wow. That, combined with the lazarus series, this dude had issues, a lot of fluff thrown up as an excuse for kinky redhead sex with his mom.

Originally Posted by MrMofo

heinlein.

and before ppl jab me in the face with starship troopers, i say this: "I will Fear No Evil,* by heinlein. wow. That, combined with the lazarus series, this dude had issues, a lot of fluff thrown up as an excuse for kinky redhead sex with his mom.

I've only read one Heinlein book ("Starship Troopers"), and I honestly thought it was really boring. I actually enjoyed the movies & t.v series much more than the book

HERESEY

i really like starship troopers. I think it's a wonderful book, well ahead of its time.

But seriously, pick up something else by him and come back. I even think the lazarus long series has a wonderful background idea, as most good sci fi does, but then what he does with it is simply atrocious lol.

A friend was telling me something about censorship laws being repealed right about the time he was writing, and then WHAM, heinlein kicks into crazy with immortal redhead incest sex oh boy.

then again, maybe some of you 12 yr old wouldnt mind it so much. Buy new copies tho, as the old second hand ones have pictures of nekkid space chickies on the front like all old sci fi books do. The new ones you wouldn't have to hide from yer moms.


EDIT: if you sorta like the military aspects of starship troopers but don't like the long political diatribes, read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. In essence, the same book, sans bluster.

Originally Posted by MrMofo

...if you sorta like the military aspects of starship troopers but don't like the long political diatribes, read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. In essence, the same book, sans bluster.

I don't think I would entirely agree with that. Joe Haldeman is a Vietnam vet, and the Forever War is an anti-war novel (I actually just re-read it two weeks ago).

Haldeman is more subtle in his approach than Heinlein, who had a habit of rubbing your nose in his moral/political message, but if you think about the Forever War you might recall the following:

• No attempts are ever made to negotiate with the Taurans.
• Mandella had very little ability to influence the outcome of the combat missions. People died almost randomly and often in large numbers no matter what their skills or whether they were good or bad.
• The whole of Earth's economy became dependant on the continuation of the war.
• Earth's society became totalitarian and almost as alien to Mandella as the Taurans themselves.
• The soldiers had no particular feeling of mission - they were all conscripts and mainly just wanted to survive.
• Eventually Mandella had nothing left except the Army, his family, friends, lover, society and even heterosexuality itself have all disappeared into the past.

So, we have Heinelin's message that heroism makes a difference and that it is right to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. And we have Haldeman's message that society and the military are vast impersonal forces which view you and your loved ones as mere resources to be used and discarded.

Robbie changed history and philosophy. Starship Troopers, realistic conservative government. Stranger in a Strange land, realistic personal freedoms. Haldeman wrote one great novel, an ok sequel and a bunch of crap. He is the Orson Scott Card of his generation.

L.Ron Hubbard
his 'scientology' and 'dianetics' mark him as the worst sci fi writer in the history of earth.

Originally Posted by Exarch

L.Ron Hubbard
his 'scientology' and 'dianetics' mark him as the worst sci fi writer in the history of earth.

Got to him before I could.

Originally Posted by Exarch

L.Ron Hubbard
his 'scientology' and 'dianetics' mark him as the worst sci fi writer in the history of earth.

I was thinking the same. I actually sat through the movie Battlefield Earth based on his book. It was awful. And to think this guy also plagued the earth with yet another non-sense religion.

Originally Posted by Exarch

L.Ron Hubbard
his 'scientology' and 'dianetics' mark him as the worst sci fi writer in the history of earth.

I think I have to agree.

I actually bought Battlefield Earth when it came out in paperback many years ago. I had a vague knowledge that L. Ron Hubbard had been one of the more prolific authors of the "pulp" era of the '30's and '40's.

After about 10 pages I could read no more. It was the worst pile of drivel I have ever read in published form. Every character was a stereotype, every plot element was formulaic and derivative and in many cases he could not even be bothered to describe characters individually - preferring to portray them as groups like some macabre cross between a Nazi rally and a Busby Berkley dance set-piece.

I still shudder a the memory of it. Before casting the hated thing aside, I read Hubbard's notes at the end of the book. He started by explaining that he wasn't "just a sci-fi author", but that he could write action-adventure, crime and travelogues with equal facility.

He also admitted that he had "come out of retirement" to write Battlefield Earth in order to help fund Scientology. He gave a short history of how he had founded the cult to promote his psychological theory of Dianetics which had been unfairly pillaried by the establishment.

Hubbard went on to write a 10-volume epic called Mission Earth which holds the dubious record of being the longest novel ever written in the English language. I distinctly recall seeing successive volumes of this appearing at my local bookshop and thinking that they were denying shelf-space to other books that might actually have been worth reading.

John Ringo, I think.

His Possleen series are too much post 11/8 aware. Simply too much biased.

Starship Troopers is the weakest of Heinlein's offerings that I've read, in my opinion (although I quite enjoyed it) and not the best basis to judge Heinlein's work. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land in particular are far superior and both excellent books in my view.

As for my choice of worst author, I'm not so sure, I read more fantasy than sci-fi, particularly in recent memory.

L. Ron Hubbard.

The logic of the Draka Series are also probably one of the very worst examples of alternate history in there. I remember reading one of the paperbacks and thinking "Wow, these guys actually only make it because the author is so clearly on their side - this is really one of the more illogic series out there"...

Seems others agree with me :

http://www.alternatehistory.com/gate...aproblems.html

Another really silly one is Harry Harrison's "Stars and Stripes forever" series, although it isn't strictly science fiction. It is just so apparent that the author chooses to abandon all logic for the sake of his favorite historical fantasy in that deeply silly set of books.

Any author that bases his work around pre-established fictional universes. i.e. Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer and WH 40K, Aliens, Star Wars... With the notable exception of Timothy Zahn, it all reads like amateur fan fiction and/or action movie scripts with slightly less depth.

What is worse still about Hubbard is that he used his crappy sci-fi in his religion!!!!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Xenu, according to science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, was the dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions[1] of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Scientology holds that their essences remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.[2][3]

Frank Herbert I could see creating an interesting religion, but Hubbard's stuff is rubbish.

Originally Posted by Roy Batty

Any author that bases his work around pre-established fictional universes. i.e. Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer and WH 40K, Aliens, Star Wars... With the notable exception of Timothy Zahn, it all reads like amateur fan fiction and/or action movie scripts with slightly less depth.

Peter David writes Star Trek novels and the Apropos of Nothing series.
Arguably the best anti hero in modern fantasy.

It is easy to give an opinion, but much more difficult to know if it has any objective value. Truly bad authors would never get published, so however much you dislike an author, there must be something about them that appeals to people enough to buy their books.

When people lambast an author as "worthless" they can actually mean any of a number of things.

• I didn't understand it
• I don't agree with their morals
• I don't agree with their politics
• The book did not address or emphasize that part of the subject which I consider important.
• The story presents opinions I don't agree with
• I wanted it to be a different type of story

I think there is a distinction between liking/not liking a book and it actually being good or bad.

Heinlein was a good writer, and Starship Troopers a good book. But many people don't like it because they don't agree with the morals and politics portrayed.

Heinlein was a military man (US Naval Intelligence I think) and Starship Troopers was modelled on the Pacific War. The enemy were portrayed as incomprehensible, implacable, unrelenting and insensitive to casualties - just like the Japanese appeared to be.

The tone was set right from the beginning where the protagonist is taking part in a punitive raid against an alien race that has dared to declare its neutrality in the Human-Bug conflict. Heinlein is telling us that this is a war for the survival of Humanity and that therefore winning by any means takes precedence over any other morality.

Heinlein's protagonist learns the lesson that in order to be effective, soldiers have to place their duty above everything, not just their own lives, but even above their own beliefs about right and wrong. In particular, soldiers must trust authority. This sticks in the craw of most of us, brought up in the Western liberal tradition where we feel authority should be questioned and should be accountable.

Heinlein is giving us his conception of the ideal military. The army is the pinnacle of the state, indeed, the entire society is built around the army and only veterans have the vote. The protagonist gives the army his body when he becomes a private, but when he becomes an officer, he gives it his heart and soul too. He knows he can trust those above him because this army is a meritocracy, he knows his superiors share his ethics and will do everything in their power to achieve the objectives without unnecessary losses. The army has become his family. This point is hammered home by the final scene where Rico's new sergeant turns out to be his own father and the blood relationship is superceded by the military one.