Thanks to the fine folks at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/), I was reintroduced tonight to what is widely regarded in SF fan circles as the worst story ever written: "The Eye of Argon."
TEOA was published in a small magazine in 1970 by one Jim Theis, who was only 16 at the time. All I'm going to say is that there's no excuse for it. It's horrible. For the curious, the copy circulating on the Internet was transcribed from a mimeograph of the original, and is presented with Theis's typos. Regrettably, the accompanying drawings have not been reproduced. (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/eyeargon/eyeargon.htm)
I didn't know one could query bustily until I read TEOA. Thanks, Jim, for opening my eyes, but I really didn't need to know that Grignr has a g-string. Too much information, man.
Perhaps it's not fair to be quite so hard on Jim Theis. In a recent interview, he was rather miffed that TEOA was still being mocked 30 years after its publication, and though he had gone on to get a degree in journalism, he never wrote fiction again. Theis died in 2002, four years before Wildside Press reprinted his immortal classic. His legacy lives on in the form of a TEOA-based game: each participant takes a turn trying to do a decent reading of the text, misspellings and all, but is forced to pass to the next person when he (almost inevitably) cracks up.
If TEOA could get published, maybe there's hope for me yet.
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