So good.

@Randal'Thor I got through A Wizard of Earth Sea and The Tombs of Atuan yesterday. I expect to get through The Farthest Shore during the weekend.

@BESW I just came across this comment in the Wikipedia article about the Inklings: "Meetings were not all serious; the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing."

@BESW And the Wikipedia article about Ros says, "Her works were not read widely, and her eccentric, over-written, "purple" circumlocutory writing is alleged by some critics to be some of the worst prose and poetry ever written."

Yeah, she's definitely not... traditional. But since her unique style was deliberate and calculated, I have a hard time calling it bad. And a lot of the criticism of her work takes undue pleasure in attacking her character and education.

> My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after. (Amanda McKittrick Ros quoted in Nicholas Parsons' The Joy of Bad Verse.)

Not that I'd want to read more than a couple of her sentences at a go.

Ros is no Jim Theis, that's for sure.

But arguably both Jim Theis and Stephenie Meyer have spent time in the same cultural niche that Ros was delegated to.

I'm not familiar with Jim Theis, but the description of his prose on Wikipedia is sufficient as a warning ;-)

The Eye of Argon was the subject of similar "read without laughing" contests at geek-subject conventions for quite some time.

More recently Twilight has been the subject.

Eye of Argon's treatment seems particularly mean-spirited, since it was written by a 16-year-old and published, without benefit of editor or proofer, in a very cheaply produced (as is normal for such things) fanzine.

@BESW Yes, I see that now. I read the rest of the Wikipedia article and the first few sentences of the story.

The OSFAN editors should have sent it back with some writing advice instead of publishing in its unedited form.

I see more parallels between Ros and Meyer; as professionally published authors make money off their books, it's much more legitimate to analyze and critic the work. But both women were also attacked for the audacity of trying to write at all while laboring under the inconvenience of lack of education or training, and the weaknesses of their works are assumed to be reflections of weaknesses of character.

@ChristopheStrobbe Frankly, that's not how fanzines work. They're not magazines or journals or anthologies, and it's on the scifi fandom that so many people were holding a fanzine work to the standards of publications with, you know, budgets and trained staff.

Most zines (fan or not) are (especially in those days) aggressively egalitarian and hold more to living by principles than to some level of professional quality in the product--in fact many of them take pride in their amateur status.

(Last year I made a small study of 'zines in the mid 1960s to early '70s, researching for a tabletop RPG campaign centered on the people writing a zine in and about a Cuban emigrant community in Florida.)

A sci-fi convention in the early 70s could be expected to understand the nature of zines, I think.

Zines, though, you know. Zine history/culture is fascinating.

Especially since very few people have written about it who weren't intimately part of it, so you have to read between the rose-tinted-goggles lines.

Segmented type in 8, 16, 43, and 66.

Not sure! Maybe there's an answer somewhere in the bowels of this Twitter thread.