Yeah, this was going to get long.
There are a number of writers I am extremely critical of. Either I don’t agree with their personal philosophies, I don’t like their writing, or I don’t like their world building. Or sometimes, all three at once. I usually criticize via meta and analysis. I used to write rants/extremely negative meta when I in my twenties and first blogging. I try to avoid ranting nowadays because it generally doesn’t do anything good for my temper, and no one really thinks it’s funny.
This is going to be a short list, because I can’t remember the names of the writers on the long list. (There is no written down long list.)
- Sheri S. Tepper: I was tricked into reading Beauty and I have held a grudge ever since. Her worldbuilding could be fascinating but I bounced hard off of her allegories and philosophical underpinnings. I tended to hate read her work, until I made myself stop.
- L.E. Modesitt Jr.: His protagonists are very similar in outlook, and their outlook and opinion of humanity is very low. IIRC he says they are all very different actually. I do not agree. I also don’t agree with a lot of the worldview present in the books. I tend to like his fantasy books more than his science fiction books.
- S.M. Stirling: He makes too many jokes in the Change series about how so many national parks aren’t worth preserving because they’re ugly. THEY AREN’T MEANT TO BE PRETTY THEY ARE MEANT TO BE HABITAT. This is of course not the only reason I am critical of his writing. There’s also the general conservative nature of his work. He tends to be a bit heavy handed with atrocities and does not write trauma very well. (That is, he does the thing where the victim is presumed to be weaker in mind or spirit and is now permanently and irrevocably broken… He does write lesbian and bi characters, but the bi characters tend to be evil, and the lesbians to pair off into butch/femme dyads.) Also: So much ableism.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley: I actually debated adding this one, because my dislike is mostly based on her personal life and dysfunctions. (And being guilty of child abuse.) But here’s my analysis: Her worldbuilding is inconsistent and murky. Granted it was common for the time period, but she leaned way too hard on gender expectations/duality/gender norms when a good portion of the populace share their genes with nonbinaryintersex aliens. (Or they did. Who knows what the successor author(s) of the Darkover books have done: I sure don’t, and never intend to.) She rewrote bits, and it’s extremely hard to get a halfway decent timeline.
- David Eddings: Conservative writer. Also a child abuser! Misogynistic in that way where women are actually a mysterious unknowable alien/force of nature. This can easily be mistaken for a positive view of women,except for the part where the (male) writer actually has no clue of how women think. (Women think like people, generally speaking.) Also: the worldbuilding has holes in it. In addition: I’m sorry, it may have been hurtful and inconvenient at the time, but Garion’s meltdown was absolutely justified considering he’s been kept like a mushroom and has no idea what the heck’s going on.
- Mercedes Lackey: I used to be a big fan, but I got frustrated with her worldbuilding. I have not been able to read her later books because it feels like a lot of it is phoned in. She also isn’t great at writing trauma, and tends to do the same thing Stirling does. (Character is generally forever broken and can no longer Deal With The World.) Some plot points are not examined too closely in the Valdemar books. (For instance, all the mage kids that were driven insane/to suicide by the vrondi staring at them.) I feel the ChangeChildren get a raw deal as “default evil mutants.” I generally bounced off of many of the Elemental Masters Books, and I am utterly enraged that the hinted triad in the Bard books never became a thing.
- David Weber: Honor Harrington is always right. She is so right, she’s allowed to beat people up because they are wrong. The sun shines out of her ass–and now I’m going to explain how the FTL works on my dick ships. (It’s referred to as a “hammerhead” design. The cover art of the early editions makes them look like flying dildos.) I also have limited patience with his fantasy series and his ancient aliens series and the recurring theme of “we have created a religion to ensure we don’t develop tech that will alert the aliens to our presence!”
- Piers Anthony: I have both liked and disliked his work. I think a lot of his “sexy humor” is kind of creepy and his worldbuilding is wild but doesn’t stand up very well due to it being too complicated. Tends to also have the “women are actually a separate species, whee!” attitude of writers of his time. But my actual beef is that he gets pissy when he’s critiqued (especially by women squicked by his humor which occasionally involves rape jokes,) and pulls a crappy little DARVO.
So there are a lot of writers whose work I am critical of, this is just a very small sample.
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