LEAST FAVORITE
The Lord of the Rings. It's actually a bleak story and not humanistic at all. Magic is leaving the world, Frodo is never gonna recover, and by the way technology is evil. Really, I end up rooting for the orcs.
The Culture. This is one case where the sci-fi writer does have a sense of scale. Problem is, it's not a scale I can relate to. They're super post-scarcity, fights are won by superintelligent Minds, and everything is so overpowered I could puke.
Star Wars. I'm still a fan, I'm just not a superfan. The original trilogy was great, the prequel trilogy was better as a single movie, and the expanded universe had its low points. Maybe a lot of low points. It's basically a fantasy setting dressed up as science fiction.
Mainstream comics. The complete refusal to break with past continuity is just ridiculous. So many crises and secret wars and blatant patch jobs. Why not have five- or seven-year runs where they follow a hero from beginning to end? Give the current fans some closure, then reboot the story for the new fans.
Worm. It's a webnovel set in a world of superheroes. Of course I wanted to like it. Problem is, the writing is absolute crap. The author is self-taught, and it shows. The author is also obsessed with sheer wordcount, and that shows too. The whole thing reads like a first draft, which it most likely is.
As for that last one, I once sat down with what some consider to be its best fight scene in Worm. I edited it with an eye toward brevity and "show, not tell" and managed to cut it down to 29% of its original wordcount. So basically the whole series uses three times as many words as it needs.
What bothers me is that the fans are both numerous and highly vocal. It's like there's an entire class of people who not only care little for the art of writing, but who may even view it with contempt. Among these people is Isaac Asimov.
Asimov refused to make major, second, or non-editorial revisions ("like chewing used gum"), stating that "too large a revision, or too many revisions, indicate that the piece of writing is a failure. In the time it would take to salvage such a failure, I could write a new piece altogether and have infinitely more fun in the process". He submitted "failures" to another editor.
Or as an obvious fan puts it:
Isaac Asimov may be the worst great writer I can think of.
His prose is workmanlike at best, his characters are emotional ciphers, his dialogue is functional at best, his plots are more like giant puzzles than any credible unfolding of events involving real people, and style-wise he blithely breaks every rule of Good Writing.
He doesn't care. And know what? Neither do I.
With millions of other readers, I get involved in his mysteries-in-space narratives. I get excited along with his thin but engaging characters in the intellectual challenges he poses. I enjoy racing through his good-natured novels and stories almost as much as I suspect he enjoyed writing them—you can practically hear him chortling over his plot twists and big ideas as he types them. When you read Asimov, you're reading a fellow geek, a non-artsy type who has succeeded in pulling off the wonderful trick of producing something that resembles a literary work. Correction. Something that is a literary work. Better than, in some cases.
For his writing exemplifies one great literary quality of style that many a would-be "literary" writer could benefit from: clarity. At an early point in his career he decided he wanted—more than anything—readers to understand what he wrote. And so he wrote as clearly as possible for more than fifty years.
Which is utter bullcocky. You can be clear and still produce beautiful prose.
