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Friday, July 15, 2011

Quite Possibly The Worst Science Fiction Story Ever

The Struggle in Space. Here's an excerpt. Enjoy?
An American plane flies by a window in Clines's apartment, and four black-clad figures leap out. We run and lock ourselves in an inner room. The door is soon riddled with bullets. Smith says we shouldn't worry and aims a small box at us all. It coats us with Omega rays, which make us immune to the bullets. The black- clad men burst into the room and fire at us, but their bullets turn to vapor. The men then call for reinforcements, intending by sheer numbers to defeat us. But I am a veritable Hercules compared to these weak, flabby Americans. I can pick them up a dozen at a time and hurl them out of the way. So we start to battle our way out of the apartment, through this sea of weak capitalists.

8 comments:

  1. Yes, it's pretty dire. Although, I'm pretty sure I've read worse ("The Eye of Argon" springs to mind). The fact that it's from 1928 doesn't help much.

    Speaking of old SF, did you know that Project Gutenberg has a whole bunch of issues of "Astounding Stories of Super-Science" from 1930-1931? Just go to http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/ and search for "astounding". I've been working through them on my Kindle, and while they show their age pretty badly, they are still amusing. I kind of liked the one that was explicitly set just one month from now (August 2011) - he wasn't even *close* as far as predicting technology.

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  2. That's one ripping yarn! Can't wait to see the Commie "Ranch Romances With Dry Gulch Gorky!"

    'Greb Sum Sgy, Pulgrum! All H'ale WUrkging Messes!

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  3. Those are all so formulaic and boring, pat! Boy loves tractor, boy loses tractor, boy wins tractor in the end.

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  4. "Boy loves tractor, boy loses tractor, boy wins tractor in the end."

    True, Brother Cat, but the Western genre requires Boy to leave Tractor and bugger off to the West . . ., or east of Urals, anyway.

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  5. Don't mention "bugger off" and westerns any more. These days it means something quite different than it used to.

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  6. What would Ward Bond say about that?

    Mount! M-O-N-T-E! Mount!

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  7. Are you implying something about the Canadian Mounties?

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  8. Wrong. I wrote the worst science fiction story ever when I was in the eighth grade. It involved an asteroid and duck smuggling.

    You read that correctly.

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