Clive Cussler....

[Scottish Ninja]

I've said it before: Clive Cussler is like crack. You know it's bad for you, but you just can't stop.

Incidentally, I saw a nice little jab at Cussler in Robert Ludlum's book Ambler Warning, so Ludlum is officially my spy novel hero now.

It's fairly obvious, though, that Cussler does at most minimal research into the topics he covers - Pitt hits a bullseye at 200 yards with a Brown Bess? Sure. A shell jams on the USS Iowa and explodes, causing a chain reaction which destroys the ship? Why not? A nuclear bomb the size and form of a car's air conditioner's air compressor? Of course.

In the end, it just gets so bizarre that it does become easier to not read, but I suppose if another one passes in front of me I'll probably pick up it.

[Johnathon_Chance]

One word sums up his stories, FUN! Suspend belief, and enjoy the action. I have all his books, PITT, Oregon, non-fiction, and the Numa files. Sure a lot of the stuff he comes up with is entirely pure fiction, but it is still fun. Afterall, Star Wars is pure fiction too, but we all love it anyway. I know a few of his books make you go hmm, for example, I believe it is atlantis found, where the opener is the asteroid hitting the earth. Makes me go Hmm, you know, I wonder if that really would happen.

A few others in my collection that are really bad books but still fun to read, Wingman novels(extremely bad fiction), Seventh Carrier, and WWIII. In the WWIII novels he had F14's dropping bombs, and at the time, F14's were pure fighters, so I was thinking, Yeah right dude, only later on they started dropping bombs from F14's.