The Fifth Sorceress: Comically Bad.

[nikolai]

I have read a lot of bad fantasy, but this is absolutely horrific. The characters are cardboard, the world does not make sense and the writing is terrible. If anyone else wants to bear witness to this horror I would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Classic discussions on other boards include:

• The Fifth Turd (a shocking publishing revelation) http://www.sffworld.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5789; and
• The Fifth Sorceress is the worst book ever http://pub26.ezboard.com/fasoiaffrm7.showMessage?topicID=1092.topic.

And a fan site is http://fifthsorceress.tripod.com/front.htm.

Greetings all, and welcome to the Robert Newcomb fan page. The high fantasy genre attracts a lot of attention on the internet. Thousands of fans have labored to set up web pages dedicated to their favorite books, authors, and series. Until now, however, no one has taken the time to establish a site for Robert Newcomb.

I can't imagine why, since what's he's accomplished is no minor feat. Thousands of bad fantasy novels have been written. Some are so agonizingly awful that they've caused readers to recoil in horror, experience physical pain, and/or repeal their long-held opposition to book burning. But when Newcomb's debut effort The Fifth Sorceress was published in 2002, virtually every critic and audience member who read it immediately declared it to be worst novel ever written. The achievement of such a title does not come easily. It requires a peculiar mix of bad ideas, a unique absense of inspiration, and an utter lack of writing skills. Thus, in tribute to this unequaled attainment, I present this web site.

 

[DaveStebbins]

It's been discussed in the past few weeks here as well.

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=73082

-Dave

 

[Nightfall]

Yeah if you thought that was bad, Gates of Dawn is ever WORSE. I would have rather sloughed through the depths of Hell with Dante than read THAT tripe again.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'll give almost anything a go. And my sense of reality is very elastic; I'm very much a 'you buy the premise, you buy the bit' person. But Fifth Sorceress... I just could not get past the premise. It's too utterly contrived even for me, and by gosh, I'll accept some extreme bending of reality. Fifth Ring: same thing. It just... jars. It lurches. It feels like a merchant trying to force a wagonload of pig iron through mud.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I tried to read this book, I really did. I tried and failed around page 100.

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

Is there a reason all of the linked discussions/pages no longer exist?

Hmmm... I smell a conspiracy. Or perhaps there were just a few copies of the novel lying around, who knows?

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Is there a reason all of the linked discussions/pages no longer exist?

Hmmm... I smell a conspiracy. Or perhaps there were just a few copies of the novel lying around, who knows?

The "fan page" has a typo in the URL - take off the last "]" so it looks like this: http://fifthsorceress.tripod.com/front.htm and it works.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

The "fan page" has a typo in the URL - take off the last "]" so it looks like this: http://fifthsorceress.tripod.com/front.htm and it works.

And I just noticed that the other two also have the bracket as part of the URL. Try http://pub26.ezboard.com/fasoiaffrm7.showMessage?topicID=1092.topic and http://www.sffworld.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5789 instead.