Unfortunately for your quip, it is rabid-atheist John C. Wright who did not like the book, and not because of the Christianity, pro or con, but because of the bad writing.

But even though I answered and disarmed this particular stinkbomb before you lobbed it, you simply had to throw it anyway. Quelle Surprise.

“As though Pullman didn’t quite have the wontons to tackle Christianity head-on.”

Do you honestly think it requires any courage to repeat the mindless, conformist, and historically illiterate anti-Christian bromides that deluge our current culture? I beg to differ.

Having said that, I do completely agree that after the first book it does start to wallow a bit. I also have a problem with the way the books are quite coy about tackling Christianity.  They borrow elements of real-world Christianity and channel Dante quite a bit but they cloak the whole thing in, I think, quite dishonest fantasy fancy dress.  As though Pullman didn’t quite have the wontons to tackle Christianity head-on.

If you want a tale of God-killing then Ennis’ Preacher pulls much the same stunt without the coy fantasy disguises and in a much more straight-forward way.  To paraphrase Voltaire and Nietszche : If God were not already dead it would be necessary for man to kill him.

1. The book I like that everyone else dismisses is THE NIGHT LANDS by William Hope Hodgson.
The critics here have a good point: the whole thing is written in this atrocious faux-Elizabethan monologue, and has no character development, no description, and the sketchiest of plots.

What it has going for it is one awe-inspiring idea: the sun has died, and the remnant of mankind live in a seven-mile-high pyramid of imperishable metal, surrounded by a ring of psionic or magnetic energy, and they are besieged by creatures from some indescribably alien condition of being, motionless and gigantic, who have been surrounding this Last Redoubt, and waiting for its protective energy to fail for uncounted millions of years. At the feet of these monstrosities throng trolls and dire wolves and other creatures adapted to the endless cold and infinite dark, and the dwindling remnant of mankind have forgotten, or have never understood, what inhabit the towers and houses shining silently in the distance, and they do not know what meaning to attach to the vast shapes seen, dimly silhouetted against the volcanoscape beyond, groping slowly toward the pyramid.

Then the hero hears in his mind the telepathic call of a women he loved and lost countless millions of years before, calling for help…

2. The book I cannot understand why it won all the praise and love it did was Phillip Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy: THE GOLDEN COMPASS (or NORTHERN LIGHTS), THE SUBTLE KNIFE, and THE AMBER SPYGLASS. Now, to forestall the typical personal attacks beloved of the Left, let me hasten to add that I was an atheist when I read these books, both loyal and ferocious to my cause, so it was not the irreligious nature of the work that offended me. I liked irreligion; I sought it out. What offended me was the bad writing.

Those who love the books have good cause to love the first book: GOLDEN COMPASS has a plucky heroine, a compelling plot, action, intrigue, escapes, ocy witches, daemon as critters, polar bears in armor, and one of the most memorable of invented worlds to come along in many a year.

It is the plot holes that jarred the ride for me, and, by the third book, AMBER SPYGLASS, I simply felt the author had such contempt for his readers that he had no interest in following up or resolving even a single one of the threads he’d left dangling.

The story was supposed to be about a boy armed with a magic knife whose mission is to kill God Almighty and establish the Republic of Heaven–a properly Miltonian conceit, I admit, on par with Steven Brust’s TO REIGN IN HELL. What comes of it? Nothing. Evil God is a drooling and senile Gollum who dies by mistake while falling out of bed. No republic is started. Instead, the plucky heroine girl commits some sort of assisted suicide on a bunch of ghosts, destroying their otherwise immortal souls. This was for no reason I could fathom, and nothing came of it.

The Heroine was also supposed to be the new Eve, but no new race springs from her. She is parted from the hero, her (underage?) lover by the most arbitrary mechanisms imaginable: the writer simply announces at the last minute that people from other dimensions cannot be together (even though the whole plot hinges on the ghost-populations of the various worlds being flung into outer dimensions where they will be destroyed.)

What, you can kill God Almightly by pushing him out of bed, and you have access to every world in the multiverse, but you cannot get Corwin of Amber to redraw the pattern, all circumvent this one law of nature? You cannot find the Ethicals from Riverworld to reincarnate the ghosts, nor can they remain in limbo as a sort of library for the living, but you have to destroy them? You have the whole multiverse to search from, and you cannot find a trio of Ghostbusters with unlicensed nuclear accerators on their backs to shoot the shadow-beings accidentally created whenever you open a spacewarp with the Subtle Knife? I wish the characters had been as subtle as the knife, and thought of some answers to their problems.

I may be misremembering, but both the Evil Church and the Angels of the Evil God are still in business at the end of the trilogy. No one has accomplished anything. As best I can tell, we were promised a world-changing Twilight of the Gods, and a New Heaven and the New Earth, and we ended up with a lonely girl going to school and promising to be nice.  

It is almost as if the author were trying to pair up the most titanic promises of the most overdramatic wonders he could imagine with resolution that were as Lilliputian and underdramatic as he could imagine. The ending to Dr. Seuss’ I HAD TROUBLE GETTING TO SOLLA SOLLEW deals with the concept of false promises of false hopes leading to inner strength with considerably more wit and fewer words: but in Seuss’ book the broken promise was made to the little fuzzy youth from the Valley of Vung, not to the reader. His expectations were dashed, not the readers.

Imagine if, instead of Aslan returning from the dead, it had ended with Susan and Lucy going to school and promising to be nice. The White Witch is still in business, and it is still cold outside. Imagine is, instead of Sauron the Great, and all his works of darkness, collapsing into ruin, that flinging the One Ring into the Cracks of Doom had done nothing but made Frodo decide to go to school and to be nicer. Morodor is still in business, its factory chimneys fuming.

I found the ending not just tangled and silly, I found it arbitrary, and, worse, it was arbitrary in a way that any competent editor could have told the author to fix: if you want to have it be an unpleasant surprise in chapter thirty that hero and heroine cannot be in the same world, all you have to do is establish that fact, or a clue leading up to it, in chapter three.

Oh, I like <i>Sundiver</i>.  That’s the book that got me interested in Brin. 

 I think Sundiver is perfectly okay, but also not particularly remarkable. I can see people reading it and not seeing anything in it to make them commit to the following five books in the series. Startide, on the other hand, is for my money a much, much stronger book.

I’ll grant you <i>The Silmarillion</i> being a superior work of imagination…but it’s still a shitty read.

If you can get over the cod-Biblical writing style in the opening sections, I think it does end up working very well. It’s also notable for featuring Tolkien’s best use of female characters (Melian, Luthien, Nienor and so forth are much more interesting characters than Arwen and Eowyn) and both his most kick-ass moments (the elves of Gondolin showing how they dealt with multiple balrogs back in the day) and his most surreal (Sauron getting his arse kicked by a wolf).

It isn’t a novel though. It’s more along the lines of The Bible or Metamorphosis, which either works for readers or completely leaves them cold.

Glad to see LoTR listed so much here.

I would add The Demolished Man to my (at least) dislike list.  I just don’t get the hype and if Stars is a worse offender, I think I’ll take a pass.

I’m not so certain authors like Asimov and Heinlein will die away in another 50-100 years.  Authors who have some significant role in a genre like this tend to continue to be talked about, even if it is my a rabid few who keep their names and work alive.  Would be interesting to see though.

I certainly hope people are still reading in 100 years, I don’t think I’d want to live in a world that wasn’t full of readers.

It would be fun to have time travel just to jump ahead 50-100 years and see how many of these books are even remembered, much less argued over by then. (This is assuming enough people still read books at that point, and care enough about them, to find a quorum for a good argue-fest.) I’m hoping ridiculously underrated writers like Patricia McKillip and Robert Holdstock are still remembered, and are read and argued about then. I have a feeling that Asimov, Card, Heinlein, Herbert and many others high in today’s pantheon probably won’t be, entertaining as they can be.

And speaking of great reads, The Silmarillion is fantastic!  It is like reading the very best history book about a group of characters that I’ve really grown to love over the last decade.  I came to all the books after the films and one of the things I take great pleasure in every year is sampling parts of them again and picking up some new (to me) book on Tolkien.  Its only a shitty read Joe if you aren’t interested in the topic.   For someone like me, who is in awe of what Tolkien created, The Silmarillion is a gift.

Adam: Maaaaybe I’ll give Gap a shot.  It’s been years, but I am still so very turned off Donaldson. 

I’ll grant you <i>The Silmarillion</i> being a superior work of imagination…but it’s still a shitty read.

My own personal quirk is M. John Harrison’s much-vaunted Viriconium cycle, which I found to be quite spectacularly awful,

I was almost going to add this to my response, but I thought the first novel in the cycle was pretty good so I couldn’t completely slag off on cycle. Where the story went from that first book, well, I just ceased to care.

Adam Robert’s makes excellent points: why literature screams pretention to some while genre cries folksy is borderline nonsensical. That people can’t genuinely enjoy challenging, literary works is another tired trope.

I’ll add my voice to those who can’t understand why Accelerando is so highly praised; the prose felt leaden, the characters felt like caricatures; I found the book completely unreadable, and haven’t attempted any Stross since.

LOTR is awesome, and the Counsel of Elron is one of my favorite sequences from the first book. I can understand how if someone were reading for a straight and uncomplicated narrative that LOTR would seem like it meandered, but to me this just suggests that there are multiple ways of reading a book and LOTR demands a different one. Similar comments might also apply to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Brin’s Sundiver seems popular but I gave up after a couple hundred pages, I thought the writing was really quite amateur.

This is a fair comment. Sundiver is not a great book, and neither is it will-regarded. Even die-hard Brin fans will usually say it’s his weakest novel. I would suggest giving Startide Rising a go though, which is a much better work. Whilst technically the second book in the six-volume series, it is set 300 years after Sundiver and contains no continuing characters or storylines from it.

@ Joe Sherry: I found the Thomas Covenant series to likewise be awful, but was quite impressed by his Gap Saga. It may be worth a shot, especially as the first volume is extremely short and almost compelling in its bizarreness (especially its difference to the more traditionally-written sequels).

I agree with the assertion that The Silmarillion is superior as a work of the imagination to Lord of the Rings, although I still think that is a decent book (possibly better if the Bombadil chapters were ripped out though).

My own personal quirk is M. John Harrison’s much-vaunted Viriconium cycle, which I found to be quite spectacularly awful, and Nick Harkaway’s recent Gone-Away World, which everyone seems to have loved despite it coming across as a crazed mash-up of China Mieville and Robert Rankin without the talent of either.

On the other side of the coin, I have a great deal of affection for Patrick Tilley’s almost-forgotten Amtrak Wars series, still rate the Forgotten Realms Empire Trilogy (and yes, like Jonathan M I have a lot of time for the Grubb/Novak trilogy, if only for the sentient dinosaur paladins) and find much to admire in Robert Jordan’s often-criticised Wheel of Time sequence (there is much to criticise, but much that impresses as well, at least in the first few books).