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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Upbeat_Ruin on 2024-10-01 17:34:03+00:00.
The world is full of infamously bad works of fiction. I don't mean fanfics like My Immortal or legolas by laura either; I mean original books that somehow made it to a publisher and ended up in printed and bound form, for unsuspecting readers to pick up. Some are bad on purpose, like Atlanta Nights. That trainwreck of a book was an elaborate troll campaign by a team of authors to expose a vanity publisher as just that. Or Naked Came the Stranger, a book created as “proof” that publishers will greenlight any slop that comes their way, because sex sells!
And then you get books that were not in fact satire. They are shamelessly, gloriously bad. Things like Theresa the Empress or the Maradonia saga, published by authors who legitimately thought they were penning masterpieces. Look, I'm not going to be harsh on them. I don't believe that talent is a fixed trait. Everyone who writes has the chance to be a good author if they study the components of a great work, put their heart into it, and are willing to find and correct the mistakes they make. I'll get a little more into this later, because I firmly believe that the author and story I talk about here had the potential to be great.
Back in the year 1970, nerds shared their fanfic and amateur novellas by means of meeting up at conventions or by mailing zines. God bless 60s women mailing their Spirk fanfics to each other – we owe modern fandom as we know it to them. One such zine was called OSFAN, the zine for the Ozark Science Fiction Association in St. Louis, Missouri.
Enter the main character of this story. No, not the protagonist, the author. His name was Jim Theis. In the late 60s, he was a starry-eyed teen who loved the Conan the Barbarian series, the codifer of the sword-and-sorcery genre of the age. Wanting to emulate the epic series, Theis wrote a short story, entitled it The Eye of Argon, and sent it off to be published to a zine. It was accepted, and it appeared in OSFAN-10.
The basic plot of Eye of Argon is as follows: Grignr the barbarian, freshly escaped from an altercation in the city of Crin, rides across the desert and fights off two enemy soldiers before arriving in the city of Gorzom. He wooes a prostitute, Carthena, at a tavern, but gets into a battle with hostile local soldiers. Following the fight, he's arrested and taken before the city's prince, who sentences him to the mines. He languishes in the dungeon and fights a giant rat while the evil Cult of Argon secretly prepares to sacrifice a young woman. Grignr escapes his captors and slips through the secret entrance that goes to the cult's lair. He slays the cultists and rescues the woman, who is revealed to be Carthena. He takes the gem known as the Eye of Argon as he and she escape the palace. Outside the palace, the gem turns into a slug monster, which Grignr narrowly defeats before it gives him a strange vision and disappears. Dazed, he takes Carthena back home with him to Ecordia.
Now you might say, “That sounds a little dull, but I wouldn't say it's the WORST thing I'd ever read.” Well, what put Eye of Argon on people's Hilariously Bad Books radar is that its prose is the most violently purple thing you've probably ever read. Allow me to share an excerpt.
The paunchy noble's sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance. His lips trembled with malicious rage, while emitting a muffled sibilant gibberish. His sagging flabs rolled like a tub of upset jelly, then compressed as he sucked in his gut in an attempt to conceal his softness. [chapter 2, pp 116 in my copy]
Prince Agaphim is fat, in case you haven't noticed.
That's how the novella is narrated, for seven chapters, at approximately 11,600 words total. This merciless battery of the thesaurus leads to phrases that are either redundant (“the stygian cloud of dark ebony”) or self-contradictory (how, exactly, does someone's face flush pale or pastily light up to cherry red?) The titular Eye isn't a ruby, mind you – it's a scarlet emerald! The armor and weapons wielded by characters change their form and culture of origin between scenes. For example, the blades that Argon's cultists hold are described as “poinards”, lightweight long daggers from Europe, in one scene; in another, they change into “scimitars”, which are West Asian/North African in origin. Agfand, Prince Agaphim's crooked advisor, somehow dies twice during the story (once in Chapter 2, then again in Chapter 7.5). On top of all this, there are plenty of spelling errors, dropped spaces, and misused or missing punctuation.
Most works of amateur fiction fade away into the sands of time, but not so for the Eye of Argon. Exactly how or when it began to circulate in nerd-dom is unknown, but the catalyst is believed to be when sci-fi author Thomas N. Scortia shared a copy to horror author Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. One way or another, the story found its way into the hands of sci-fi convention goers, who made a sport out of seeing how long someone could read it aloud without bursting into laughter. Some leveraged the mockery into a charity function, with donations being made to stop the reader from continuing their recitation.
The Eye of Argon received a printed edition in 1987 and then again in 1995, with the latter version being attributed to “G. Ecordian” instead of Jim Theis. This may be because the authorship of the story was called into question for a while. The widely-distributed copy did not credit Theis, leading some to believed that it was actually an elaborate piece of satire, possibly a group effort like Atlanta Nights. In a 2003 interview with Ansible UK, author David Langford claimed that Samuel R. Delany and some students at a Clarion workshop put together Eye of Argon as an exercise to see how intentionally bad of a work they could create.
That turned out to be completely false, so either Langford or Delany is full of it. Richard W. Zellich, who ran the Archon convention in the St. Louis area, maintined in Usenet posts from the early 1990s that Jim Theis was the true author. According to him, Theis was indeed a real person who attended the convention several times. Furthermore, in 1994, a fan named Richard Newsome provided his transcription of an interview with Theis in OSFAN-13 (which will be relevant again later.) This proved to be the smoking gun that proved Theis really did write the story.
Also for a time, the ending of Eye of Argon was considered lost. The publicly available copy was the Scortia-Yarbo edition, which cut off abruptly with Grignr attempting to excise the goo monster from his leg. This was because the ending was printed on the final page of Scortia's fanzine, which had fallen off the staples. From this copy all the others had sprung. So for thirty years, nobody knew how Grignr's deadly struggle with the slime monster had resolved. Finally, in 2005, the stars aligned and a librarian at Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library at Eastern New Mexico University discovered a treasure even greater than the many-fauceted scarlet emerald: a complete copy of OSFAN-10! This edition had the long-lost ending everyone had hoped for! The lucky librarian, Gene Bundy, sent the copy to Lee Weinstein, one of the people involved in the quest to prove Theis's authorship. The online edition of Eye of Argon eagerly added the lost ending to their website, and in 2006, Wildside Press published a complete edition on paperback. This appears to be the copy that pops up when you search for “Eye of Argon” on Google. For some reason, the cover art is just a photo of an acid pool in Yellowstone Park. It doesn't appear that the Theis estate gets royalties when copies of this edition are sold.
As for Jim Theis himself, he went on to pursue a degree in journalism, and he wrote one other fantasy short story, Son of Grafan. According to an interview with Hour 25 in 1984, Theis stated that the mockery he'd received for Eye of Argon had scared him away from writing any more works of fiction. Although he'd tragically been chased away from his dream, it seemed he lived a contented life nonetheless: he earned his journalism degree, presumably had a career in that field, got married, and had two children. Sadly, he passed away at only 48 in 2002, having had heart trouble. In his obituary, he's described as a beloved father, husband, and son. His family requested donations to the American Heart Association in his memory.
I am a firm Theis defender. He was 16 when he wrote the Eye of Argon. Were you a great novelist at 16? No, you weren't. Neither was I. When I look at Theis's story, I see my own early writing: underdeveloped characters, excessively florid prose, and somewhat simple plots that don't meaningfully reconnect with earlier events. The difference is that my writing was tossed up on Fanfiction.net and eventually deleted, or it still lingers on my Google drive and the assorted USB sticks around my house. Theis had the guts to send his off to be published in a fanzine. And it got accepted, so someone thought it was decent enough to show to the world. He didn't do anything wrong. He was a teenager who wrote a clunky story and got bullied for it. That's why I don't make fun of his work.
And in retrospect, is it really that bad? The characters are underdeveloped, but hell, they were made up by someone with an underdeveloped teenage brain. Grignr ...
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