“Sturgeon’s Law School” by Superversive
I want to direct any readers who have suffered through EYE OF ARGON to look at what Tom Simon has to say about it. He makes an interesting observation that its badness comes from its sober attempt at goodness.
http://www.bondwine.com/essays/sturgeon/sturgeon.html
Here is an excerpt:
Bad as it is—and it is infamously bad, hilariously bad, with the delicious awfulness of an Ed Wood movie or a William Shatner album—it nevertheless shows evidence of skills learned at great cost. It begins in medias res, with a creditable attempt at scene-setting. The plot, such as it is, bears a sort of phantom resemblance to the standard ‘plot skeleton’ taught in how-to-write books: the same kind of resemblance that a five-year-old’s Hallowe’en drawing bears to an actual human skeleton. It is recognizably made up of bones, or a plausible imitation of bones, though they are not connected together in any generally accepted way. The physical description of setting and action are actually fairly good; at least, they are not vague. Vagueness would have helped, perhaps. A good thick layer of muddy prose would have artfully concealed the silliness of Grignr’s exploits with his fifty-pound broadsword, or the sheer primaeval stupidity of the ‘scarlet emerald’.
In fact, ‘The Eye Of Argon’ is not utterly incompetent; it is haunted by a sort of sad ghost of competence. If it were not so good at reminding us of the effect it is trying to achieve, it would not be so killingly funny to see how it fails.
It is a thoroughly bad story, but a readable one—even an entertaining one, if you approach it in the right spirit, like a paying customer at the World’s Worst Film Festival. In fact, it is very like a thoroughly bad but watchable film. Plan Nine From Outer Space is one of the silliest and most incompetent films ever made, but one can see just why it fails, and what it is failing at.
[…]
If ‘The Eye Of Argon’ were fixed—if you cleaned up the execrable dialogue, and fixed the descriptions, and holystoned the prose till it contained no more scarlet emeralds or lithe noses, and gave the characters motivations and personalities, and made the action scenes physically plausible, and replaced the pointless tomato-surprise ending with something that would actually resolve the plot, and generally attached some sense of importance and tension to the whole story, so that the reader could care whether Grignr achieved his quest or not, and was not fatally attracted to the alternative idea of how pleasant it would be to see him get run over by a bus—oh, yes, and if one applied some real skill to replacing names like Grignr and Norgolia with something a human being could read aloud and not be choked with superior laughter—why, then, one would have, not a good story as such, but a good bad story; a serviceable fourth-rate sword & sorcery story, the sort of thing that could have been published in any respectable pulp fantasy magazine of the 1940s, at least in an off issue, when the editor had to choose between printing substandard work and leaving a sheaf of pages blank. Good journeyman half-a-cent-per-word stuff, in other words, and better than a lot that was actually published in those days. And there are still fanzines where such a thing would be publishable.
It would be a colossal waste of time to try to fix ‘The Eye Of Argon’, of course, but it could be done. And that would not be possible if Jim Theis did not have at least a rough visceral notion of what constitutes a good story, and enough of the rudiments of writing skill to bring off a recognizable imitation of one. No doubt poor Mr. Theis composed his parvum opus in a white-hot fever of creative euphoria, and printed it in his apazine with maximum haste, giving him the best possible opportunity to repent at leisure. And no doubt he knew it was not prozine-quality work, or he would most likely have sent it off to Fantastic or F&SF or Weird Bloody Mighty-Thewed Pulp Stories, and it would have vanished into the night with only the bare cenotaph of a rejection slip in the author’s bottom drawer to remind us that it had ever existed at all. He just didn’t know how far his work fell short of publishable quality, and so—he published it. It took a rare and fortuitous combination of lunacy and recklessness to give the world that tale, and fandom one of its most cherished legends.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
