Bad books, bad books...

[Napoleon the Clown]

A Separate Peace. John Knowles sucks donkey testicles, and I accurately predicted the fate of Phinneas during the first chapter or so. It's a dry, bland, boring book. Not even worth the paper its Spark Notes are on.

Moby Dick. I gave up on it completely once the whole "Yargh, whales be fish, says I" chapter came along. Seriously, what the fuck. Does anything much beyond "Call me Ishmael. I befriended a cannibal, went sailing with said cannibal under the employ of one Captain Ahab, and encountered a big fucking sperm whale (which is a fish, FYI) that bit off Ahab's leg when he tried to kill it previously. The whale killed Ahab and swam off, never to be seen again. I survived, obviously, but nobody else did." happen even? Gah.

You learn pretty much all there is to know about the American whaling industry of that time period.

If I gave a damn about the whaling industry I'd skip the narrative and get a damn history book.

[Surlethe]

It is better than the original- having the sermons in the back makes room for actual plot. In the original, we have two characters- Ishmael, the telepathic mountain gorilla who was captured from the Congo, shown at a zoo than traveling show before being bought up by a man who had lost his family to the Holocaust and spending his time in a gazebo learning together. Of, and he helps raise the mans kid who graduates six years early for a PhD- telepathic teachers help. Than he decides to figure out how the world works and bestow his wisdom, meets the protagonist and fakes his death to get the clingy guy off him so he can move back to the Congo.

The protagonist is a 40ish guy who lives alone in an apartment, is disillusioned and looking for guidance, self employed... and that is it. We don't even learn his name!

The book flows easily enough, although most of it consists of a person sitting in a chair having a telepathic communication. The most annoying thing is the rave reviews and award the book won- Turner Tomorrow Fellowship.

The worst part about the book was its Luddite message: "Hey, folks, civilization doesn't work; we'd all be better off as hunter-gatherers again!" When I read it, it took me all of two seconds to figure out what was wrong about it and why it was wrong.

[Count Chocula]

John Norman's Gor "men's adventure" books. Kind of like Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars meets the S&M rack at the local porno store. I read, I'll admit, six or eight of the series when I was 13, i.e. before I had sex or any meaningful interactions with the opposite sex. I glanced through the first book a couple months ago, and it was....just...painful to read.

Also, the entire Left Behind series. I read the first two books, and just couldn't do it any more. The writing style is appropriate for eighth-graders (reasonable considering the intended audience ) and I find the entire Rapture theory simply ridiculous. Stephen King did a much better job with his virus-induced Rapture and Randall Flagg as the Devil in The Stand, which I thought was both a great book and movie.

[Norseman]

I remember a book where some intrepid explorers discover a huge dyson sphere. Afterwards one of the explorers accidentally witness the death of a senior corporate executives child, and realising he's doomed he flies off to the dysonsphere with his son and some of his crew.

That's just backstory though. Once they get there they begin to explore the dysonsphere, and colonists start spreading out. They get to a place far away from any gate, and run across an alien city where the natives come up to them in countless different vehicles; all of whom were handbuilt. When the exploration craft crashes what do you think the crew does?

Go on guess!

If you guessed that most of the crew began to weave strawhats, farm the soil, and bring in crops, trying to live on the land, then you're right. If you said patch together some jet aircraft from the wreckage and fly home, and indeed this was possible, then you're wrong.

In fact it seems that living on the Dysonsphere made you want to live off the land, build things with your own hands, and because of the enormous space there wasn't any mass produced stuff! This apparently was a natural consequence of having endless land to move into.

Can't remember the name but even as a child I found it incredibly annoying.

[Edi]

Samuel, I've read all of Dan Brown's books, to my regret. So I know exactly how bad the lot of them are.

I think RedImperator once blasted Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy to smithereens. After his review, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

[Gaidin]

Dune 7 and Dune 8.

I was amazingly able to read the Legends of Dune trilogy and get some small amount of entertainment out of it(mostly in relation to the start of House Atreides and House Harkonnen). I even enjoyed the prequel trilogy. These I couldn't even finish. There's something about having those two asshat's writing being a direct sequel or relation to Herbert's books as opposed to a story set a few decades(or millenia as the case may be) earlier that make it worse.

[Eleas]

Without even going into the obvious choice of Goodkind, Robert Jordan, et al, I have to second Raxmei's mention of Hell's Gate. I usually buy David Weber books because they're light fare. As in, extremely light, like communion crackers. Thus, I tend to forgive his glaring weaknesses as a writer because he manages to entertain on a reptilian level. Sure, the pointless soliloquys are as wearying as they are formulaic, but precisely because they are so formulaic, they're easy enough to skim until something goes bang - which is where Weber is at his meagre best. I wouldn't have had any problems with Hell's Gate if it contented itself with being the literary equivalent of a low-budget popcorn movie.

But alas, that was not to be. Somewhere along the line in the fusion between Weber and his co-author, they decided the book was to be Serious Business, and thus should have Complex Character Interaction. This, for anyone who has read Weber before, is an eye-roller; Weber has numerous times shown himself as simply incapable of creating nuanced characters, and Linda Evans seems to confuse overlong descriptions for psychological depth. Also, as Raxmei said, the characters just aren't very likeable in their own right. Together, the two authors do a very good job of taking an okay premise and running it into the ground.

Another book that honestly appalled me was Thief With No Shadow, by Emily Gee. According to the back cover, it was about a thief gifted with supernatural powers who steals an object, for which she becomes hunted, forcing her to take on her most impossible job yet. That's a good premise, I remember thinking - cocky thieves in over their heads, the promise of dire retribution, shit like that. Maybe she'd wuss out in the face of some trite love subplot in the end, of course; it'd be a cheap copout, but if the rest of the book was good, I'd weather it.
The book wasn't good. In fact, there was nothing in it that could be construed as good. How to begin? The eponymous Thief With No Shadow wasn't even a thief by trade, and spent the entire book whinging about how low she was for being forced to steal to save her sick brother. The obvious love interest actually had me confused for part of the book, because he was so thoroughly and utterly unlikable that Mahatma Gandhi would have been hard-pressed not to strangle him with barb-wire cord. The world was uninspiring, the prose lacklustre and grey, and instead of the medievalish "look out for yourself" attitude I had practically taken for granted, we got the standard poorly-camouflaged Renaissance Faire attitude popularized by the likes of Robert Jordan and Jean M. Auel, in which everyone acts like 20th century blue-collar Americans on a Sunday trip because that's the only way humans behave.

In the end, of course, the main character renounces her wayward, thieving, evil ways, forsaking the supernatural "Wraith" blood that give her all these nifty abilities but is treated like some sort of Original Sin, and with it divesting herself of any remaining scrap of dignity and character. Luckily, it's implied that she's now slated to marry the lead asshole, thus making her a real woman at last. As for the asshole, I particularly like the gratuitous sexual molestation scene (where he was being fucked by fire lizards) including the words, "he was not a woman, [and therefore] could not be raped." It's just a tasteful piece of literature all around.

God, I hated that book. I never could figure out how it was that I paid to read it, as opposed to the other way around.

[Civil War Man]

Samuel, I've read all of Dan Brown's books, to my regret. So I know exactly how bad the lot of them are.

I'm sorry. I read 3, and as a result have the same experience.

I read Angels and Demons, and thought, "That was pretty entertaining."
I read DaVinci Code, and thought, "Okay, that wasn't as entertaining, and I suspected that the professor would be evil, but I can see why some people would like it."
Then I read some other book by him, I think called Digital Fortress or something, and thought, "Didn't I already read this book? No wait, the DaVinci Code was about art, not spies. Also, cryptography doesn't work that way."

For those who have not read Dan Brown yet, I will now spoil every single book he's ever written.

Someone involved with some academic community is mysteriously killed. A friend or associate of his, a middle-aged brown-haired member of that academic community, is brought in to help decipher the mysterious aspects of the death because they are directly related to his academic specialty. As it turns out, some fanatic and freakish assassin did the killing, and the middle-aged brown-haired man finds himself frantically fleeing with a hot younger woman so that the two of them won't be the freakish assassin's next victims. While on the run, they are helped by a smart and friendly man who may or may not already be friends with the hero. During the climax of the book, the smart and friendly man turns out to be the bad guy, but his evil machinations are foiled by the middle-aged brown-haired hero, and the smart and friendly man more often than not dies messily. As does the assassin. Then the middle-aged brown-haired hero has sex with the hot younger woman.

The End.

[Dahak]

I think RedImperator once blasted Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy to smithereens. After his review, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

And that's even generous.
This trilogy is so mind-boggingly boring that watching paint dry is a thrill ride by comparison.
I usually read all books I buy (out of the possibly stupid idea that I paid for them...), and I have been stupid enough to buy the trilogy in one go. Stupid me... I read the last one by skipping a hundred or so pages and looking if something happens. It didn't.
If you fancy looking at maps and like to read phone books, then this might be the book for you. It has endless description of valleys, hills, mountains, mesas, plains, and any other possible form of geography you could find on Mars. It really reads like a map of Mars with some thinly veiled "story" put on top as to pass as a novel.
Basically no one of the main characters changes during the huge amount of time this trilogy covers. In the end you just wish for them to die horribly...

[Guardsman Bass]

I think RedImperator once blasted Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy to smithereens. After his review, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

And that's even generous.
This trilogy is so mind-boggingly boring that watching paint dry is a thrill ride by comparison.

Parts of it are certainly boring as fuck, especially in the later books when Robinson gets obsessed with writing long, drawn-out descriptions of sex scenes and landscape (especially through Nirgal). I'd say Red Mars actually isn't too bad, and Green Mars has some great characters, but Blue Mars can suck donkey balls, and it does.

I usually read all books I buy (out of the possibly stupid idea that I paid for them...), and I have been stupid enough to buy the trilogy in one go. Stupid me... I read the last one by skipping a hundred or so pages and looking if something happens. It didn't.
If you fancy looking at maps and like to read phone books, then this might be the book for you. It has endless description of valleys, hills, mountains, mesas, plains, and any other possible form of geography you could find on Mars. It really reads like a map of Mars with some thinly veiled "story" put on top as to pass as a novel.
Basically no one of the main characters changes during the huge amount of time this trilogy covers. In the end you just wish for them to die horribly...

Ann actually improves quite a bit later on, although at the same time you get a cut-off of the interesting Art-Nadia arc, and Sax turns into a obsessed idiot.

[Jade Falcon]

Regarding Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars series, I remember seeing a review of Ben Bova's Mars book and the reviewer tore it to pieces while gushing over KSR's Red Mars. Frankly while Bova might have some stereotypical characters, his books were far more entertaining. Red Mars was a book that was as ponderous to read as Stephen Donaldsons Thomas Covenant series.

I'll second Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books. A guy I know thought they were the best thing ever, and frankly I found them downright boring.

There was a series that started out not bad, but I can't remember the authors name, I'm sure it was a female writer, that revolved around characters called Sunrunners. Ah, found it on Wiki, its a series by Melanie Rawn.

Oh, and while Star Trek novels had good, bad and average writers, avoid anything by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, you have been warned. I think this pair were the Kevin J Anderson of Star Trek.

Finally, before I knew who L Ron Hubbard really was, I tried to read his Mission Earth series. I got to midway through book 2 and just stopped myself from committing suicide.

[Sidewinder]

Richter 10. Arthur C. Clarke's name is on it, but I have serious doubts that he had anything to do with it aside from maybe tell the other author about the general idea he had. Partly because he was already well in decline when the book was written, and also partly because the book utterly sucks in totally different ways from Clarke's usual weaknesses.

I didn't read 'Richter 10' when it was on the "New Books" shelf at the local library (in the mid-90s, when I was a teen), but I doubt it's worse than Clarke's other works, which I read because he was regarded as a gold standard in sci-fi.

God, that was a mistake.

The first was 'The Sentinel', a short story that served as the foundation on which '2001: A Space Odyssey' was built. It was interesting; aliens put an artifact on the moon so humans will find it when we're ready to leave Earth and explore the galaxy, maybe even meet the aliens who built the artifact.

Then 'Rescue Party', in which aliens come to Earth to save some humans before the sun goes supernova and destroy the planet, only to find we already evacuated the planet in search of a new homeworld. You know the brain bug about telepaths with hive minds and how they're superior to us creatures who can't literally think as one, like computers doing parallel processing? Clarke planted one of the seeds here. Then there's the would-be rescuers marveling at human enginuity and joking, "We only outnumber them [humans] 20 million to one," and how 20 years later, no one thought it was funny. Fortunately, those are its only serious insults to my intelligence.

Then 'A Meeting With Medusa', about a cyborg who explores Jupiter and finds organic life forms there. It was okay if you skip the last damn chapter, because Clarke has the cyborg think weak, vulnerable humans will be superseded by robots, and it's the cyborg's job to serve as an ambassador between the two races. What, we suck because we're weak, vulnerable humans?

Then 'Imperial Earth'. Fuck, I might as well change my name to von Sacher-Masoch! Or maybe Schizophrenic, considering how I fell for all the bullshit about how Clarke is a towering figure in sci-fi and all that. Basically, the USA in Clarke's vision of the future, has computers select the most qualified candidate for public office; the machines specifically look for candidates who must be dragged kicking and screaming to their offices, the idea being someone without personal ambitions is someone who can't be corrupted. Democracy? Clarke thinks we can't be trusted with that. Apparently, his reading comprehension so bad he missed "except all the others that have been tried," after reading Churchill's quote, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government."

'3001: The Final Odyssey'. Here, Clarke's utopianism reaches levels so ridiculously high, he makes Gene Roddenberry look like Games Workshop. Cloned Velociraptors as de facto pets who're more threatened by children than they're threats to children? And why rip off Michael Crichton? For all his flaws, Crichton at least realizes that Velociraptors are carnivores who'll likely view children as dinner.

Finally, '2001: A Space Odyssey', which I read for a class in college. Not as bad as its sequels, but it's the first sign Clarke's ideals are turning into delusions. The brain bug about biological creatures evolving into energy beings? Guess who built the monoliths?

[The Yosemite Bear]

A Separate Peace. John Knowles sucks donkey testicles, and I accurately predicted the fate of Phinneas during the first chapter or so. It's a dry, bland, boring book. Not even worth the paper its Spark Notes are on.

Moby Dick. I gave up on it completely once the whole "Yargh, whales be fish, says I" chapter came along. Seriously, what the fuck. Does anything much beyond "Call me Ishmael. I befriended a cannibal, went sailing with said cannibal under the employ of one Captain Ahab, and encountered a big fucking sperm whale (which is a fish, FYI) that bit off Ahab's leg when he tried to kill it previously. The whale killed Ahab and swam off, never to be seen again. I survived, obviously, but nobody else did." happen even? Gah.

The worst thing about "A seperate Peace" is that you didn't get any choice in reading it, WE HAD TO as part of the High School Correculum.

[Metatwaddle]

Twilight bothers the hell out of me, possibly because everyone around me seems to enjoy it. (RI would like me to point out that he is not included in this generalization. He thinks it's hilariously awful, too.)

I'm slightly above the target age for Twilight, and that might be why I do not like Twilight nearly as much as my sister (who is 17). And I say that as someone who really enjoys fantasy books of all kinds: high fantasy, urban fantasy, YA fantasy, and anything in between. My reaction to Twilight is about 70% unadulterated scorn and lit snobbery, 10% fascination at the cultural phenomenon it has spawned, and 20% laughing my ass off. (That last part usually rises when I have had a few drinks.)

The writing style is rife with clunkers and cringe-inducing "romantic" dialogue. Seriously, it's really bad; you may have heard about "Do I dazzle you?"/"Frequently." My sister also read out loud the sentence, "It was anguishing." ("It" refers to Bella not being able to see Edward. Please, never use "anguishing" as an adjective. It can be a verb, although that's really clunky writing and you probably shouldn't do it if you can avoid it, but it cannot be an adjective.)

I have other problems with Twilight, too. For one thing, much of the book is hopelessly banal high-school drudgery. We do not need so many scenes set in the cafeteria, and we don't need to know about Bella's acquaintances and admirers if they are going to be mere cardboard cutouts. It isn't confined to the school, either. At one point, we get a few paragraphs about what she eats for dinner, and how she unloads the groceries and changes into sweats and pulls her hair up into a ponytail. Not necessary!

For another thing, the story makes my inner feminist very sad. Bella is a girl with no personality besides "shy" and "smart" (although we never see this except for a few references to how she reads Shakespeare for fun) and "clumsy" (not a personality trait) and she feels like an outsider in her high school. Just like, I don't know, every single teenager who has ever been to high school. Her entire inner life - and we know this because the story is told with first-person POV - revolves around her boyfriend. She's very submissive to him, only arguing with him feebly and halfheartedly, and she doesn't seem to have any real desires to do anything that doesn't involve him. There's no "Edward, I'll talk to you later; I'm in the middle of a really good part of Hamlet," or "Hey Edward, I'm meeting my friend Jessica; I can't see you tonight." Everything revolves around being with Edward and only Edward; the rest of her friends might as well not exist. Edward, for his part, can seem pretty domineering. At one point in the book, Bella faints during biology class (she's squeamish about blood), and later that day she tries to drive home from school. She and Edward are not dating at this point. Well, he manhandles her in the parking lot, and physically restrains her from driving home. Now, if a casual male acquaintance tries to force you bodily into his car and cites some excuse about your "condition" (i.e. you fainted a couple of hours ago, and have since drunk some water and had some crackers), and promises to have his strange sister (whom you also don't know) bring your truck home, you DO NOT assume he has your best interests at heart. Yet Meyer presents this as an example of Edward's Tall-Dark-Handsome-and-Dangerous nature, and his commitment to Bella's well-being. This is not good.

And finally, I have a big problem with Meyer's characterization. I'm not quite sure whether to say Bella and Edward are Mary Sues or not. What I can say is that both of them have serious flaws that are not recognized as flaws by the author, the other characters, or the universe of the story. We've already discussed that Edward is domineering and that Bella doesn't recognize it. Bella, for her part, is rather self-absorbed and standoffish to most people, refusing the friendly conversation of her classmates. Yet the classmates' efforts persist; they continue to see her as an intriguing new girl who is worthy of their time. Practically all the minor characters worship Bella.

However, I know people who have been aware of all these problems, yet still enjoyed the book as the literary equivalent of Pixie Sticks laced with glitter. If that's your thing, go ahead. Plenty of intelligent, well-read people alternate their serious reading with trashy romance novels, including Twilight. But if you want well-written, thoughtful fantasy books, I think you should look elsewhere.

[Stark]

Is Twilight really any more incomprehnsible than Harry Potter? I don't mean the HP phenomenon, I mean the first book or two, which were complete ass. Kid liked them anyway, because their standards are different. Turns out bad books can be liked by children??! Who knew.

[Samuel]

Is Twilight really any more incomprehnsible than Harry Potter? I don't mean the HP phenomenon, I mean the first book or two, which were complete ass. Kid liked them anyway, because their standards are different. Turns out bad books can be liked by children??! Who knew.

These people have the answer:
http://www.anti-shurtugal.com/wordpress/

[Guardsman Bass]

Twilight definitely had some issues with the Edward-Bella relationship. What's hilarious is that if you read the partial draft that Meyer put on the internet of Midnight Sun - basically Twilight told from Edward's viewpoint - he even realizes that he's getting into stalker territory with the following arounds, what Metatwaddle mentioned, plus the whole, you know, crawling into her room at night and watching her sleep. * Yet he continues to do it anyways, and she eventually sort of gives in (I say "sort of" because that would imply that she struggles).

*This kind of especially creeps me out because we had something like this actually happen a year before I first moved on campus. When I first moved into the on-campus apartment I shared with the RA, I noticed that the RA room had extra locks - locks that could only be locked from the inside, and could not be opened from the outside. I asked my roommate (then the current RA) what the deal was, and he told me that the previous RA - a woman - had been stalked to some degree by a guy before they got him. This guy (who lived in the same building) actually broke into her apartment, broke into her room, and would stand above her while she slept, and occasionally masturbate.

[The Yosemite Bear]

sounds like an anime protagonist....

[starslayer]

Mayabird, I don't remember the moon base in Richter 10, though I skipped the last hundred or so pages, and just read the end. God, that book got seriously brain damaged.

My biggest nomination goes to the Neanderthal Parallax series. Dear sweet God, those books make a mockery of science and evolution. First, quantum computers trigger travel between universes. A Neanderthal comes through (they were the ones who built the first quantum computer in a parallel universe), and we're off. It turns that they are a peaceful people who haven't waged war in centuries, despite being our tech level. They don't appear to have heavy agriculture (!), their last war killed 700 people (!), and we are just generally absolute barbarians compared to them.

They have helicopters, but not airplanes, quantum fucking computers and now travel to parallel universes but no nuclear reactors, and in fact don't even know how to produce large quantities of heavy water. They believe the universe has always existed due to "plasma lines" or some such bullshit that bear a striking resemblance to Earth's auroras, when their astronomers should be screaming from the rooftops about the Big Bang, and because of these lines they think the universe is a place of complete harmony, love, and general understanding.

This isn't even getting to their society. They have total surveillance all the time, which magically is not accessed except in the case of suspicion of a crime, so they aren't a police state (which they should by rights be). They have forced sterilization of both the offender and anyone who shares half his/her genes as their sole punishment for violent crimes, on the theory that they can successfully remove aggression from the gene pool. They have also actively pursued eugenics programs in their past, and they are generally accepted as a good, even many years afterward! Oh, and as I mentioned earlier, they're portrayed as the good guys. The villains are complete caricatures; in the third book, we get a guy named Jock Krieger, who as you can obviously tell by now will try to xenocide the Neanderthals through an Ebola virus modified to only target them, never mind the fact that Ebola is an RNA filovirus, and will thus happily mutate very readily to target Homo Sapiens. Yeah. Don't read these books.

[speaker-to-trolls]

^I think someone on this board once summed up the philosophy of those books thusly: "humans are bad, men are worse, and if you're a white male you may as well just kill yourself right now, because you do not deserve to exist". I will make a point to avoid these books because I think Neanderthals are cool and don't want to associate them with magical hippies (ps: if 'neanderthals are cool' seems a bit too juvenile, I genuinely think it's fascinating to think that another species like us existed in the past and imagine how they might have resembled and differed from us).

[Samuel]

^I think someone on this board once summed up the philosophy of those books thusly: "humans are bad, men are worse, and if you're a white male you may as well just kill yourself right now, because you do not deserve to exist". I will make a point to avoid these books because I think Neanderthals are cool and don't want to associate them with magical hippies (ps: if 'neanderthals are cool' seems a bit too juvenile, I genuinely think it's fascinating to think that another species like us existed in the past and imagine how they might have resembled and differed from us).

If I get some time I might attack those, but I'm going to do Ismael first but I have finals

I see you haven't had the... pleasure of reading Calculating God, another of his books.

Edit: I call reviewing calculating God. I'll hit it after the weekend.

[Stark]

Samuel, man, I need to start submitting fiction reviews. I'll show THEM a crap fantasy novel!

[Sidewinder]

I think someone on this board once summed up the philosophy of those books thusly: "humans are bad, men are worse, and if you're a white male you may as well just kill yourself right now, because you do not deserve to exist".

And people wonder why the GOP is so damn popular in the US.

The answer: They've been going, "USA is number one! We Americans are the greatest people on Earth! It's only natural that other people listen to us! If you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself!" while the stereotypical liberal has been criticizing his/her own nation and its people. What do you think will make the average American feel better about him/herself?

PS: You may substitute "US" and "American" with any other nation and nationality, and "GOP" with any other political group that exploits nationalistic pride. The Japanese definitely go, "Japan is number one! We Japanese are the greatest people on Earth!" while the French go, "France is number one! We French are the greatest," etc., etc., etc.

[Xess]

Turtledove is another author who makes his heroes perfect and antagonists idiotic beyond belief. Whichever side he wants the reader to support he makes perfect, (it is invariable America or at least the good americans) and the other side comically incompetent. His work is full of double standards, his World War series has a human kid raised by aliens being a fruitcake but the aliens raised by humans to have no visible troubles whatsoever. And he goes on to say that one's genetics don't matter in the same series, real nice hypocrisy there Harry.

[Junghalli]

I will make a point to avoid these books because I think Neanderthals are cool and don't want to associate them with magical hippies (ps: if 'neanderthals are cool' seems a bit too juvenile, I genuinely think it's fascinating to think that another species like us existed in the past and imagine how they might have resembled and differed from us).

The first two books were fairly cool, it was only the last one where he just ripped off his pants and started wanking to his Mary Suetopia like crazy all over the book. It was kind of jarring how the first two books were relatively OK and then in the last one he just hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer about his politics.

His work is full of double standards, his World War series has a human kid raised by aliens being a fruitcake but the aliens raised by humans to have no visible troubles whatsoever.

In fairness, in the last book we get to see those aliens when they're grown up, and one of them is implied to be a rather psychologically messed up individual (the one who became a game-show host).

But yeah, I had way less sympathy for Sam Yeager than the author seemed to.