Oh, saints preserve us, this is the worst science fiction I have ever read. It is the worst writing I have ever read. I would use it for toilet paper, but I don't want it anywhere near my asshole.

I foolishly bought the first book, A Matter For Men, to have something to read while I was eating lunch. The book was so astonishingly bad, such an outrageously feeble tie-sucking ripoff of late Robert Heinlein that I threw it out the window of my dorm room. Several days later, guilty that it was still there in the moat, I fished it out and used it for a doorstop. A friend wanted to read it, and I tried to warn him, but in vain. He hated it too. Now I use it as a backstop for drilling holes, in hopes of destroying it before somebody else reads it.
There are actually several more books in the series. I live in fear that someone will buy me one of them "as a joke". It would not be "funny".
I feel personally offended by David Gerrold. If I go to hell when I die I know that I will be in the cell between David Gerrold, who will read endlessly from his own books while preening in the mirror, and Henry Kissinger who will be reciting his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech while fondling his pendulous breasts.
A polarizing series of books that take place during the invasion of an alien ecology. They're real sci-fi, but sections of the books range from preachy to just pure fromage (and that's coming from soneone who LIKES them). Consists of four books, ranging from 1981 to 1994. Supposedly, David Gerrold is planning at least 7 at this point. The four books are A Matter For Men, A Day For Damnation, A Rage For Revenge, and A Season For Slaughter.

The books deal with concepts of worldview, communal intelligence, terraforming, and mind-altering substances. Other than that, they're just pure adventures, and probably not the best ones at that.

When considering David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr series, one must always keep in mind that somehow, somewhere, an editor bought this book for exorbitant sums of money. Simply bad science fiction is rather hard to come by, simply because people won't buy it. On that reasoning, one can't simply dismiss the series as bad literature.

I read all four of the extant Chtorr books, sometimes with a sense of dogged perseverance usually reserved for English Literature; at times, they were thrilling, and at others I skipped entire chapters while waiting for the plot to resume.

One of Gerrold's damning literary sins is that he periodically (we're talking every four chapters or so) arranges an aside during which a character can lecture, uninterrupted, for pages on end about sociology, philosophy, ethics or ecology. The ecology lectures were the most tolerable, considering the books are about the ecological takeover of earth by an alien mastermind. The rest, however, were particularly tedious, considering that many of them were flashbacks with no relevance to the plot of the novels. The plot, as it were, seems to go in circles of blowing-things-to-pieces-and-then-wooing-the-gorgeous-redheads. The most interesting character, I fear, is Ted/Tanjy, who would have made an infinitely more interesting protagonist than Gerrold's--who does nothing but whine, allow himself to be manipulated, blow things up, and apologize for his failures.

I suppose what published these books was Gerrold's very good descriptive flair. When he's not preaching to the reader, there's a very real emotional and tactile subtext to the works; I for instance almost cried during a scene halfway into, I believe, the second book. That was when Ted, to whom I had become emotionally attached, cuts off a last conversation with the protagonist to go 'on duty' with the Telepathy Corps--an experience that will eradicate his personality within months. But other than a few points of emotional tension, Gerrold's characters are unilaterally flat, almost stereotypical--to the point where he could have rewritten the cast roster as shady government agents #1, #2, #3; military grunts #1 - #27, hot chicks #1 and #2, scientists #1, #2, and #3 ad nauseum.

In the face of all this, even I have to wonder why his texts sold. Even the titles seem to transgress on good literary taste. Even Heinlein is better than this.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.