What do you think?
Rate this book
Galaxy 666
They had reached the very limits of space. Nothing lay ahead except the evil planet, waiting to destroy. NOTES FROM CAPTAIN BRONET'S It looked like a lizard, or a snake with legs. It had a large flattish head, three eyes set in triangular formation, and a round food-intake in the centre of the "face." There was no chin. The head perched high on a mottled, leathery neck. The skin on its back was ribbed and corrugated. This creature was the first living thing we encountered on the sinister planet...
- GenresScience Fiction
Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
55 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 11, 2018
This novel, which some contend to be one of the worst ever written, is not the sort of thing I would usually seek out; I passed it by in a thrift shop while unaware of its cult status, and afterwards was consumed by curiosity, until I happened to find it in the state library catalog. At the beginning the novel approaches Ed Wood/Battlefield Earth-territory, more than justifying its reputation with ridiculous pseudo-futuristic patois, the constant repetition and restating of phrases, awkward, convoluted metaphors (the gasoline-soaked ball from Plan 9!) and out of the blue digressions on divers random subjects. However, there is more to it than just that; there are references to the likes of John Bunyan, Aleister Crowley, and M.R. James, not to mention bits of dry wit that suggest the author's awareness of the silliness, and as the novel goes on a wonky visionary atmosphere gradually develops that makes it feel like an oddball cousin to fantastic allegories like the Perelandra books or A Voyage to Arcturus. In fact, if a pulp writer read Arcturus, Solaris, and Weinbaum's 'Martian Odyssey' and was then made to rewrite them under hypnosis, maybe you'd have this. Or perhaps its more like what would result if a european absurdist with a limited grasp of the english language watched a lot of Star Trek and was inspired to produce a work based upon the experience. In any case, this is a book that steadfastly refuses to conform to standard modes of description and interpretation, and while it may not be 'good' in the conventional sense, it isn't necessarily terrible, either. Admirers of the psychotronic and outre will find a lot to appreciate here. 2.5 stars, if the standard star rating system can be said to apply. . .
October 24, 2017
The byline of the novel, Pel Torro, is one of the many pseudonyms of Lionel Fanthorpe, who authored around 180 of the cheap-ass novels put out during the 60s by an imprint called Badger Books. The Badger Way was simple: they had a file full of cover art. Send a cover art painting to an author, commission them to write a book of around 160 pages in length by thus-and-such deadline.
Lather, rinse, and definitely repeat. Badger churned out trash-level-lit prices for the masses, and they did it hard and fast; Fanthorpe himself, at the height of his productivity, it's said, turned out an 158-page novel on the average of once every twelve days. And, for almost literally half-pennies on the word; legend also has it that he earned only about $20 for the manuscript of Galaxy 666. And, by God and by gravy, he wasn't going to miss that word-count or deadline; more than one thesaurus died so that Fanthorpe's output could continue. That's why, instead of action, there's long meandering discussions of topics that wind round on themselves, cruising on a never-ending flow of synonyms and adjectives until they disappear, Ouroboros-like, into their own maw; landscapes overdescribed to the point of oblivion, and characters who continually acknowledge and reacknowledge each others points. In a Fanthorpe work, there's not so much a plot as a daisy chain of scenes where things happen until they stop, separated by discussions that strip-mine the English language until it's utterly denuded.
The result is as you see it; a short novel that's as tough and doughy as any classic (reading such a short book shouldn't tire out the intellect so, but here, it does), and so audacious in its badness and lack of craft that it transcends mere badness in the way that Ed Wood's movies transcend storytelling to kick art to a new, higher, and wholly unnecessary plane.
I own a copy of Galaxy 666 and say without much fear of contradiction that it is indeed like the SF-lit cousin of Glen or Glenda; simultaneously embracing its own ineptitude while totally indifferent to it, an adventure of reading that you stick to not because it's story fascinates in any way but because you just can't believe the places this space puppy is going. It's always asking you to hold its beer. Also, like Glen or Glenda, even though its badness is mesmerizing, the story is utterly flat and a crashing bore, and even though it's a short novel, it's such an exhausting experience on completion that one realizes that one will never read it again.
I have a copy on my shelf. It's not there to be reread, but rather as a trophy.
A rather unnecessary one perhaps. But there it is.
Lather, rinse, and definitely repeat. Badger churned out trash-level-lit prices for the masses, and they did it hard and fast; Fanthorpe himself, at the height of his productivity, it's said, turned out an 158-page novel on the average of once every twelve days. And, for almost literally half-pennies on the word; legend also has it that he earned only about $20 for the manuscript of Galaxy 666. And, by God and by gravy, he wasn't going to miss that word-count or deadline; more than one thesaurus died so that Fanthorpe's output could continue. That's why, instead of action, there's long meandering discussions of topics that wind round on themselves, cruising on a never-ending flow of synonyms and adjectives until they disappear, Ouroboros-like, into their own maw; landscapes overdescribed to the point of oblivion, and characters who continually acknowledge and reacknowledge each others points. In a Fanthorpe work, there's not so much a plot as a daisy chain of scenes where things happen until they stop, separated by discussions that strip-mine the English language until it's utterly denuded.
The result is as you see it; a short novel that's as tough and doughy as any classic (reading such a short book shouldn't tire out the intellect so, but here, it does), and so audacious in its badness and lack of craft that it transcends mere badness in the way that Ed Wood's movies transcend storytelling to kick art to a new, higher, and wholly unnecessary plane.
I own a copy of Galaxy 666 and say without much fear of contradiction that it is indeed like the SF-lit cousin of Glen or Glenda; simultaneously embracing its own ineptitude while totally indifferent to it, an adventure of reading that you stick to not because it's story fascinates in any way but because you just can't believe the places this space puppy is going. It's always asking you to hold its beer. Also, like Glen or Glenda, even though its badness is mesmerizing, the story is utterly flat and a crashing bore, and even though it's a short novel, it's such an exhausting experience on completion that one realizes that one will never read it again.
I have a copy on my shelf. It's not there to be reread, but rather as a trophy.
A rather unnecessary one perhaps. But there it is.
January 15, 2026
I've read several times over the years the opinion that this may be the worst science fiction novel ever professionally published, so I resolved to give it a try. My conclusion is that it is indeed pretty bad, but it's not really -that- bad, by the seven green moons of Gongle. It's weirdly repetitive and redundant and repeats itself a lot and says the same thing over and over again, and it's doesn't really have a satisfactory conclusion (the intrepid space explorers escape Galaxy 666, but they don't get back to their starting place to tie up the opening narrative or resolve the mysteries), but it does have some amusing bits of dialog... whether by design or accident I'm not sure. I thought perhaps it was a mis-marketed attempt at a tongue-in-cheek children's book but then noticed the ad pages at the end for other books from the same publisher, many of which were decidedly not for children. (Aside: The Lady from L.U.S.T. series looks amusing, or, as their ad reads: "Sexciting, Sexuberant, and Sexational." It seems that Eve is the hero, agent Oh Oh Sex of the League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists, in tasty titles like The Hot Mahatma and Five Beds to Mecca. The series was written by Gardner Fox under a pseudonym, and I wonder what fireworks world have resulted if she'd met up with the The Man from S.T.U.D., a similar-sounding series written by Paul W. Fairman under a different pseudonym?) Anyway, back to Galaxy 666... (See how it makes your mind wander?) I'm not sure why these far-future people kept referring to Earth's 20th century culture and phrases. A few of my favorite lines: page 89 "It was like going for a ride on the back of an animated haggis." Page 118 "The only thing we can do is to let things simmer. The only thing we can is to wait here and sit it out. The only thing we can do is to play the waiting game." Page 98 "The tunnel along which Oski began to sprint ran tortuously back upon itself until he felt like an insect that has inadvertently found itself doing the Danse Macabre on the interior of a solid-walled hollow annulus with triangular cross-section, which has been given the Mobius half-twist." Page 90 "He felt for all the world like a moose that has suddenly been shot, carried home, stuffed, and used as a hat rack." Page 25 "She could nip in and out of the Warp like a high-speed sewing machine making nylon dresses. She could dive through hyper-space with considerably more ease and grace than a seal on far distant earth could dive through water for the amusement of patrons in the big marine zoos and aquariums." Page 19 "The problem, then, in words of one syllable is this. The computer refuses to give any kind of concrete or logical answer about Galaxy 666, because the computer itself is loaded with contradictory information; in fact, the information is so varied and so contradictory that there is no possible gestalt of any kind which the computer can detect." Page 8 "If that computer has got a sense of humor it must be rocking itself off its rivets!" Page 13 "Milka began tucking into magellanic pseudopods with schurgle grass and chipped funkleweed. Blon began carving a deliciously cooked leg of hurkle-beast with oogonga sauce." And on page 7 we learn that "By the seven green moons of Gongle" is a strong oath for a spaceman to use. But that's enough... it was a poorly written book, but I've read worse... Recommended for fans of movies featured in early seasons of MST3K, by the seven green moons of Gongle!
June 16, 2021
This is the sort of thing I might have written at the age of 12 - offbeat, innovative, and completely lacking in direction.
It is about two scientists, Ischklah and Korzaak, who team up with a space captain and a cadet to explore a planet in Galaxy 666, an area of space that resists all definition. It is a solidified entropy, a place of chaos, and they can neither chart it or navigate it because all of their machinery fails. This could very well have made an interesting story (as in, say, "House of Leaves" or "The Fall of the House of Usher").
The problem is that Pel Torro, aka Lionel Fanthorpe, is one of the worst writers in history. Almost every sentence is just subject-verb, everyone speaks in a monotone, and Torro lacks the ability to describe anything in the book. This leads to some hilariously bad metaphors and redundancies:
"I watched while the old astra-cruiser and the five other capsules went plummeting into that sun like an old hen followed by her chickens, like a swan and five little cygnets swimming over a waterfall to destruction." (13)
"They were tossing now, like a cork that had been tossed into a roadside Niagara, disappearing down a drain like a tiny singing bird being buffeted by a particularly ferocious gale against which its tiny pinions were practically useless." (65)
"Twinkling, flickering and glimmering, the rocks turned to spangled tinsel as the light ate into them like fireflies eating into a summer twilight." (119)
"A challenge is only stimulating when it is a challenge to which a man can rise. A challenge is only a challenge when there is a possibility of overcoming the obstacle that it represents. When the obstacle in a challenge is surmountable, then there is the thrill of conflict, whether it be mental or physical. But this was just crazy. This was a computer problem, yet it was not a computer problem. The problem lay outside the computer." (21)
"He moved swiftly and purposefully, for he was a swift and purposeful man." (149)
"The others were falling beside him - four lifeless men in a lifeless ship! Four blind men in a blind ship; four deaf men in a deaf ship, four mutes in a mute ship." (60)
"There are things in concealment here. It's like walking on the edge of an ambush all the time. It's as though the whole place were strangely camouflaged, as though it were a mask, a visor, or a veil drawn down over a face that it was better one did not see. Somewhere something is hiding, lurking, skulking. This planet is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Under the wool, or behind the masquerade, there is an impostor. Who or what it is I do not know. It's an obfuscating planet; it's a disguised planet. This whole galaxy is a strange mystery, a mystery to which we seem to be no nearer a solution than when we were back in the happier parts of the empire. It's a furtive planet, it's reticent. I get the feeling that it's screening, that it's hiding something." (86)
"The things were odd, weird, grotesque. There was something horribly uncustomary and unwonted about them. They were completely unfamiliar. Their appearance was outlandish and extraordinary. There was something quite phenomenal about them. They were supernormal; they were unparalleled; they were unexampled. The shape of the aliens was singular in every sense. They were curious, odd, queer, peculiar and fantastic, and yet when every adjective had been used on them, when every preternatural epithet had been applied to their aberrant and freakish appearance, when everything that could be said about such eccentric, exceptional, anomalous creatures had been said, they still remained indescribable in any concrete terms." (102)
"How do we know that thing is real?...It might be a vision, a dream, a nightmare, a phantom. Perhaps we are seeing a ghost ship. It's a mirage, a shadow, a vapor. It's a visual fallacy, a delusion, an hallucination." (99)
Throughout the novel I got hints of the author discovering strange ideas and possibilities, fallacies and contradictions of life, but the author was utterly incapable of committing these ideas to a coherent story, or telling that story in a way that meant anything to me.
It is about two scientists, Ischklah and Korzaak, who team up with a space captain and a cadet to explore a planet in Galaxy 666, an area of space that resists all definition. It is a solidified entropy, a place of chaos, and they can neither chart it or navigate it because all of their machinery fails. This could very well have made an interesting story (as in, say, "House of Leaves" or "The Fall of the House of Usher").
The problem is that Pel Torro, aka Lionel Fanthorpe, is one of the worst writers in history. Almost every sentence is just subject-verb, everyone speaks in a monotone, and Torro lacks the ability to describe anything in the book. This leads to some hilariously bad metaphors and redundancies:
"I watched while the old astra-cruiser and the five other capsules went plummeting into that sun like an old hen followed by her chickens, like a swan and five little cygnets swimming over a waterfall to destruction." (13)
"They were tossing now, like a cork that had been tossed into a roadside Niagara, disappearing down a drain like a tiny singing bird being buffeted by a particularly ferocious gale against which its tiny pinions were practically useless." (65)
"Twinkling, flickering and glimmering, the rocks turned to spangled tinsel as the light ate into them like fireflies eating into a summer twilight." (119)
"A challenge is only stimulating when it is a challenge to which a man can rise. A challenge is only a challenge when there is a possibility of overcoming the obstacle that it represents. When the obstacle in a challenge is surmountable, then there is the thrill of conflict, whether it be mental or physical. But this was just crazy. This was a computer problem, yet it was not a computer problem. The problem lay outside the computer." (21)
"He moved swiftly and purposefully, for he was a swift and purposeful man." (149)
"The others were falling beside him - four lifeless men in a lifeless ship! Four blind men in a blind ship; four deaf men in a deaf ship, four mutes in a mute ship." (60)
"There are things in concealment here. It's like walking on the edge of an ambush all the time. It's as though the whole place were strangely camouflaged, as though it were a mask, a visor, or a veil drawn down over a face that it was better one did not see. Somewhere something is hiding, lurking, skulking. This planet is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Under the wool, or behind the masquerade, there is an impostor. Who or what it is I do not know. It's an obfuscating planet; it's a disguised planet. This whole galaxy is a strange mystery, a mystery to which we seem to be no nearer a solution than when we were back in the happier parts of the empire. It's a furtive planet, it's reticent. I get the feeling that it's screening, that it's hiding something." (86)
"The things were odd, weird, grotesque. There was something horribly uncustomary and unwonted about them. They were completely unfamiliar. Their appearance was outlandish and extraordinary. There was something quite phenomenal about them. They were supernormal; they were unparalleled; they were unexampled. The shape of the aliens was singular in every sense. They were curious, odd, queer, peculiar and fantastic, and yet when every adjective had been used on them, when every preternatural epithet had been applied to their aberrant and freakish appearance, when everything that could be said about such eccentric, exceptional, anomalous creatures had been said, they still remained indescribable in any concrete terms." (102)
"How do we know that thing is real?...It might be a vision, a dream, a nightmare, a phantom. Perhaps we are seeing a ghost ship. It's a mirage, a shadow, a vapor. It's a visual fallacy, a delusion, an hallucination." (99)
Throughout the novel I got hints of the author discovering strange ideas and possibilities, fallacies and contradictions of life, but the author was utterly incapable of committing these ideas to a coherent story, or telling that story in a way that meant anything to me.
April 14, 2015
Pel Torro aka Lionell Fanthorpe has done something pretty extraordinary with this book: he has cretaed the literary equivalent of "Plan 9 from Outer Space". There's no similarity in plot (it's sort of a "Star Trek"-knockoff, in fact) and the author clearly lacks Ed Wood's earnestness, but it does achieve that same kind of larger-than-life badness that makes you almost want to celebrate it rather than condemn it.
Where else will you find a book that includes an imaginary chess game? Where else will you find the revered and aged "warp men" sipping their "alco" and sharing old war stories? Where else will you find a thoroughly explored universe full of numbered "galaxies" (in actuality, solar systems)?
Was this book hard to read? No, it was easy... except for all the times I had to stop and say "what?" and read over a passage again. The low rent adventures on the "apocryphal planet" contain a lot of dialogue and a few weird sideways implications. Characters have odd names, like Beehan and Ickslah (which isn't at all rare in sci-fi, but it's still funny).
I guess this was one of a couple of cheapo sci-fi paperbacks at the time that tried to cash in on the popularity of the original Star Trek. In this case it seems especially half-assed since the cover art has more to do with Star Trek than does the book. The starship, "The Space Greyhound", has a crew totaling 4, and they spend a lot of time smiling and shouting course corrections.
I read this book during a period of unemployment, when I'd sit up all night reading because I hadn't "had time" to finish a book in years. This one nearly killed me on reading altogether, actually. Still, I have never forgotten "Galaxy 666" and its strange radioactive badness, which I guess Fanthrope made a good living churning out with regularity.
Where else will you find a book that includes an imaginary chess game? Where else will you find the revered and aged "warp men" sipping their "alco" and sharing old war stories? Where else will you find a thoroughly explored universe full of numbered "galaxies" (in actuality, solar systems)?
Was this book hard to read? No, it was easy... except for all the times I had to stop and say "what?" and read over a passage again. The low rent adventures on the "apocryphal planet" contain a lot of dialogue and a few weird sideways implications. Characters have odd names, like Beehan and Ickslah (which isn't at all rare in sci-fi, but it's still funny).
I guess this was one of a couple of cheapo sci-fi paperbacks at the time that tried to cash in on the popularity of the original Star Trek. In this case it seems especially half-assed since the cover art has more to do with Star Trek than does the book. The starship, "The Space Greyhound", has a crew totaling 4, and they spend a lot of time smiling and shouting course corrections.
I read this book during a period of unemployment, when I'd sit up all night reading because I hadn't "had time" to finish a book in years. This one nearly killed me on reading altogether, actually. Still, I have never forgotten "Galaxy 666" and its strange radioactive badness, which I guess Fanthrope made a good living churning out with regularity.
October 6, 2023
I only picked up a copy of this because the title amused me. I had no idea it was regarded by many science fiction fans as the worst science fiction book ever written. Thus I read it virginally, without the influence of any outside opinion and without expectations. I discovered it is probably the worst science fiction book I've ever read. Good lord, did the author get paid by the adjective? I believe I read somewhere since that he more or less did. I would recommend a simple thesaurus instead.
June 8, 2013
Pel Torro (aka Bron Fane, Leo Brett, John E. Muller, Devero Spartacus, Mel Jay, Karl Zeigfried, etc. was a pen name of the British hack writer Lionel Fanthorpe) seems to have gathered a small cult following. I decided to give it a shot because some considered it to be the worst science fiction novel ever written, a sort of the literary counterpart to Plan 9 From Outer Space. Perhaps I lack their sense of humor but all I can see is just bad writing (and by "bad" I mean boring verbose repetition with no noticeable competency in imagination, not the really super OMG bad that results in spewing-whatever-you-have-in-your-mouth hilarity) and desperation (Fanthorpe reportedly produced almost two books every week).
May 29, 2021
I read a review that claimed this was the worst science fiction novel ever written, so of course I had to read it. The review said that this novel was to literature what PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE was to cinema. Well, that is an insult -- to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. My God, this was just AWFUL! The plot is thin (astronauts go to a galaxy where strange and scary things are reputed to happen) and their ship crashes on a planet and encounters alien slug-like beings. But worse than the plot are the dialog and ridiculously wordy descriptions. Well, I think that I, and anyone else who managed to read this, deserves an award -- something like a gold statuette of an exploding brain. By the way, Pel Torro is one of many pseudonyms used by Lionel Fanthorpe, an Anglican priest and writer (and, from all accounts, a very nice guy, so I actually feel kind of bad about writing this). The perverse side of me is considering finding and reading more of his books.
January 30, 2024
Reading and weeding from my father's collection. I did not know when I started it that this novel is a contender for the worst science fiction ever written. You can tell it's a pulp contract piece because there's lots of useless philosophical debates and 20th Century jargon thrown in simply because one of the crew is a historian. The plot also leaves much to be desired because it relies on dualism. We have an ordered world therefore there must be a place of pure unpredictability. Somehow a non-humanoid species discovers it when we do, and we have to figure out how to communicate with them to escape. I'd like to give this novel another half star for the cephalopod creatures simply because there aren't enough stories about non-humanoid aliens.
May 16, 2019
Terrible. Don't bother
January 4, 2014
Please keep in mind there is no hatred in this review. I bear no animosity to the author nor anyone else involved with getting this book to publication, but I would ask them WHY???
Before reading this I had already read many reviews of this 'classic' book - all bad. In fact, they typically refer to it as the worst SF book ever written. They might be wrong. It might be the worst book ever written. Period. But as a collector of old and often forgotten SF books, I HAD to have this and the only delay in buying a copy was waiting for a copy that was in great shape, the original release (case art-work(?) is important), and a reasonable price (I'm not TOO bad of a cheapskate but how much are you willing to pay for something universally recognized as shite??). And I found one finally on good old eBay and had it mailed over from England back to where it belonged in the good ol' US. Personally, I think they owe me something for ridding them of it but...
OK, so how bad is it? Well, it's hard to make a list and be complete because the author does one thing after another wrong and he does have a decent number of words to work with (and he is VERY efficient about cramming as much crap as possible into a small space - kind of a talent in itself actually. I couldn't pull it off.) The plot, if we admit there is one, is just silly and pointless. The characters aren't even stick figures and the dialog - "By the seven green moons!" - Oh, pardon me, I just uttered what is considered the worst curse there is in that universe. Yeah, it's like that. Oh, and I know it is because the author told me so and characters even discuss how serious it is to say. Yeah, it's like that, too. Oh, and when we're over in the alien ship with the aliens (I am getting dangerously close to the author's style because he would say something like, paraphrased, the alien aliens were the most alien of aliens anyone had ever occurred and their alien ship just seemed so alien. Get it?)- where was I? Right, well the aliens use that same curse even though they have never met humans before. Huh? What the heck is the deal with green moons being so bad and why seven of them??
How bad is it, really? I've read some worse things in writer's groups but no one expected those to get published. I think that is the real mystery of this particular book, why would some one publish this 'stuff'? There were much better books to be found in that time period in the 5-for-$1 bin at Woolworth's. If you're old enough to relate to that image you will know exactly what I mean. For the younger crowd think the free 30-page 'novel' you can download from Amazon, and the worst of those.
Here's the kicker though - it's not even bad in the way that you can laugh at it. It is not funny at all. It's boring, mindless, and numbing. You have to shut down your own brain to keep reading it. Note I didn't say something like 'slip into a fantasy world of your imagination' and I didn't say 'take the ride' or anything like that. Rather what I said is more akin to dying, being revived and having a memory of looking at a bunch of boring words in the afterlife. No bright lights, no music - just drying plaster. Hell, not even drying on the wall, more like spilt on the floor. That is the real sin of this book - being boring. BORING. BORING. To the point that you have been sucked dry of feeling and aren't even upset at the lost time this book stole from you. How does that happen?
Get this book ONLY if you need it to occupy a special place on your shelf of collectible SF. Even then I wouldn't place it too close to anything important, we wouldn't want another book to become infected with whatever happened to this one.
Before reading this I had already read many reviews of this 'classic' book - all bad. In fact, they typically refer to it as the worst SF book ever written. They might be wrong. It might be the worst book ever written. Period. But as a collector of old and often forgotten SF books, I HAD to have this and the only delay in buying a copy was waiting for a copy that was in great shape, the original release (case art-work(?) is important), and a reasonable price (I'm not TOO bad of a cheapskate but how much are you willing to pay for something universally recognized as shite??). And I found one finally on good old eBay and had it mailed over from England back to where it belonged in the good ol' US. Personally, I think they owe me something for ridding them of it but...
OK, so how bad is it? Well, it's hard to make a list and be complete because the author does one thing after another wrong and he does have a decent number of words to work with (and he is VERY efficient about cramming as much crap as possible into a small space - kind of a talent in itself actually. I couldn't pull it off.) The plot, if we admit there is one, is just silly and pointless. The characters aren't even stick figures and the dialog - "By the seven green moons!" - Oh, pardon me, I just uttered what is considered the worst curse there is in that universe. Yeah, it's like that. Oh, and I know it is because the author told me so and characters even discuss how serious it is to say. Yeah, it's like that, too. Oh, and when we're over in the alien ship with the aliens (I am getting dangerously close to the author's style because he would say something like, paraphrased, the alien aliens were the most alien of aliens anyone had ever occurred and their alien ship just seemed so alien. Get it?)- where was I? Right, well the aliens use that same curse even though they have never met humans before. Huh? What the heck is the deal with green moons being so bad and why seven of them??
How bad is it, really? I've read some worse things in writer's groups but no one expected those to get published. I think that is the real mystery of this particular book, why would some one publish this 'stuff'? There were much better books to be found in that time period in the 5-for-$1 bin at Woolworth's. If you're old enough to relate to that image you will know exactly what I mean. For the younger crowd think the free 30-page 'novel' you can download from Amazon, and the worst of those.
Here's the kicker though - it's not even bad in the way that you can laugh at it. It is not funny at all. It's boring, mindless, and numbing. You have to shut down your own brain to keep reading it. Note I didn't say something like 'slip into a fantasy world of your imagination' and I didn't say 'take the ride' or anything like that. Rather what I said is more akin to dying, being revived and having a memory of looking at a bunch of boring words in the afterlife. No bright lights, no music - just drying plaster. Hell, not even drying on the wall, more like spilt on the floor. That is the real sin of this book - being boring. BORING. BORING. To the point that you have been sucked dry of feeling and aren't even upset at the lost time this book stole from you. How does that happen?
Get this book ONLY if you need it to occupy a special place on your shelf of collectible SF. Even then I wouldn't place it too close to anything important, we wouldn't want another book to become infected with whatever happened to this one.
November 25, 2023
A notoriously bad book, and not even in an enjoyable "so bad it's funny" way. It's chock full of weird wonky passages, such as this doozey:
--------------------------------------------
LOL, what? The author can't just say, "Ischklah and Korzaak thought it over", eh?
Just avoid this word-salad train wreck book, please. :)
--------------------------------------------
There was silence, as though the men were aware
that they had come very close to the truth behind the
place.
Ischklah and Korzaak, the problem solvers, had
absorbed into themselves the idea that Bronet was
trying to put over. Words are only vehicles in which
ideas can ride. Ischklah and Korzaak had stopped the
vehicles, taken the ideas out of them, and made them
their own, refurnished them with new vehicles, with
new thought carriers, and locked them away in their
own minds, as part of their own memories, of their
own personalities.
The silence lasted a considerable time; then Ischklah
said: "We can't stand here forever."
"No," agreed Korzaak, "we've got to do something".
LOL, what? The author can't just say, "Ischklah and Korzaak thought it over", eh?
Just avoid this word-salad train wreck book, please. :)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews