Goodreads Review: Time Echo

[bobquasit]

Time Echo by Robert Lionel


My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It didn't take long for me to realize that this was a bad book. I'm not sure which bit of lame dialog first alerted me to that fact, although I do remember that it was a painful redundancy.

But when the author told us that his "nightmarish" future dictatorship (which was actually somewhat ridiculous) was "a thousand times worse than Orwell's 1984"...well at that point I realized that life really is too short to waste on some books, after all.

This book is a relic of a time when there was some out-and-out crap being published in the science fiction field, primarily (I think) because some editors believed that all science fiction was crap - probably because them themselves never read or couldn't understand some of the classics that were being created in the genre.

This is a perfect example of a writer who cannot write.

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Comments

[klyfix.livejournal.com]

I looked this guy up and he's actually Robert Lionel Fanthrope and he wrote a huge number of books and stories under a huge number of names. In the first link I have there they say this:

"In the 1950s Robert Lionel Fanthorpe is said to have written 89 science fiction novels in 3 years (one 158 page book every twelve days). He did this by dictating into a recorder with a blanket pulled over his head."

I've gathered that for all that there were classics written in the fifties it was also a time of massive amounts of mediocre to bad SF. But to take something Gardner Duzois said (at a panel at Arisia; he was quite entertaining) about editing being filtering out the good stuff out of a sewer of submissions a bit sideways, when you have a huge amount of stuff being written by a bunch or writers at least some of it will be good or even great. Hmm, and I'll make a guess that part of the reason for the sheer mass of stuff being written back then was that you could make a living writing for the mags (even novels often first appeared in the magazines; Analog still has 'em occasionally) at a penny a word or whatever. Can't do that these days.