Many people can assemble the available evidence, weigh it carefully in the light of past experience, and make a rational, sensible decision. Many more of us are sensible…most of the time. Then there are those who cannot turn down a dare, cannot gauge risks rationally, cannot listen to useful advice. Bad for them, but sometimes amusing for observers, and often just what an author needs to generate plot, suspense, and excitement.
Here are five SFF novels that involve appalling judgment.
Fortuna by Kristyn Merbeth (2019)
The crew of the trading vessel Fortuna struggle to survive in the Nova Vita system. There is little room for independent traders here. And if the Fortuna were to go bankrupt, none of the rival worlds on the brink of war would offer refuge. Still, one would think that the Kaiser family (who own and crew the ship) would have each others’ backs when governments disappoint. Alas, Captain Scorpia Kaiser is nothing if not unreliable, whether she’s drinking on the job or indulging paranoid suspicions that her estranged brother’s return means the loss of that which Scorpia covets most: command of the Fortuna.
Appalling judgment: Scorpia.
***
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay (2013)
One might expect the fact that eleven of Kitai’s dynasties have tottered to their doom would inspire Twelfth Dynasty Emperor Wenzong to embrace caution. Yet the Emperor is deaf to caution; he’d rather indulge martial dreams of regaining territory lost to barbarians. One might expect the military prowess of the neighboring barbarians to inspire Kitai’s nobility to focus on common defense. Instead, they revel in endless plots to gain power at the cost of rival aristocrats. The empire as a whole has a bad habit of killing off their competent generals (who might threaten a coup).
The warlike Altai have enough sense to see that the empire is ripe for the plucking.
Appalling judgment: everyone but the Altai.
***
The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn (2003)
The interplanetary trader River of Stars has been lucky…so far. It works low-profit routes, has little cash to spend on repairs, and neglects maintenance. Eventually maintenance arrears catch up with the craft when a critical pump is disabled by asteroid debris. This setback might not be fatal for a competent crew. Unfortunately for the River of Stars, Captain Hand has assembled one of the least competent crews since the Méduse set off for Africa. This is all that is needed to turn calamity into catastrophe.
Appalling judgment: Captain Hand.
***
Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle (1983)
The whole of the galaxy is within reach of the ships of the Dominion of Earth. Earthlike worlds are not rare and neither are alien civilizations. Faced with the task of contacting millions of worlds, the Dominion’s diplomatic services are perpetually understaffed. Thus, the decision to dispatch naïve, inexperienced Lynne de Lisle Christie as ambassador to Orthe. After all, Orthe is just another primitive world. How much trouble could Lynne get into? Since the Dominion has fundamentally misread the situation on Orthe, the answer is “quite a lot.”
Appalling judgment: the Dominion AND the ambassador.
***
Stray Souls by Kate Griffin (2012)
A city the size of London requires constant upkeep, physically and supernaturally. Its occult community does its best to keep London life on an even keel. Well…it usually does its best. In this case (a god has vanished), Midnight Mayor Mathew Swift probably should have asked the most experienced and powerful adepts to handle the problem. Instead he hands the problem off to inexperienced shaman Sharon Li. She’s newly imbued with shamanic abilities and her occult support group (a hypochondriac vampire, an art-loving banshee, a necromancer with skin issues, a socially awkward troll, an off-model exorcist, an almost-shaman who never quite passed his exams) doesn’t inspire confidence.
Appalling judgment: Mayor Swift, and possibly Sharon Li and her pals for taking on the task.
***
No doubt there are even better examples of bad judgment that you are even now leaping to the keyboards to mention in comments. In my defense, I believe that I can opine on poor judgment from a position of lengthy personal experience.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Appalling judgement: sending Miles Vorkosigan to visit his grandmother on Beta Colony.
Is it ever a good idea to send Miles anywhere? I suppose the clear benefit is if he’s sowing chaos far away, he is not sowing chaos here.
Only five? You were spoiled for choice!
Rin from Rebecca Kuang’s “The Poppy War” is probably the current queen of bad judgement.
I tried to read Fortuna and couldn’t even finish it. Besides showing bad judgement, I couldn’t stand to be in the head of a character who was basically a whiny twelve-year-old.
The Oerthe series is all-around excellent, tho Ancient Light was a huuuuuge downer.
I was leaving room for a piece on normalization of deviance, the expert’s path to thrilling adventure.
Really, about half the horror book in the world.
“I’ll go down and take a look in that really dark spooky place…”
“We’ve got to stick together! You go that way…”
I really must reread Golden Witchbreed some time because I know I read it but I can not remember even a bit of what you’re talking about. I did not even recall it was by Mary Gentle; it’s been years decades.
I would nominate The Stars My Destination. Gully Foyle was about the most vile and erratic protagonist I ever met in fiction.
8: I need to find copies of Tepper’s Ettison series to review. In Blood Heritage, Badger Ettison is saved from a certain demonic doom by a young woman who knows a lot more about the occult than Badger does. In the sequel, The Bones, the same woman warns him of another occult peril, which of course Badger dismisses as silly women’s superstition. Three guesses as to whether the protagonist of a horror series who only just survived dark forces is correct to reject the idea that the occult is real.
The late Stephanie Clarkson and I used to amicably disagree over Tepper, mainly because apparently the Teppers she read didn’t have idiots as their main characters.
GRRM’s A Storm of Swords, highlighted by a major character’s decision to blow off an arranged political marriage and the resulting consequences thereof. I could go on with innumerable additional judgment errors throughout ASOIF but this will do for now.
There’s a very specific form of bad judgment more common when obligatory sex scenes were popular, in which characters in legitimate fear of imminent death, would nevertheless pause while fleeing to bone. This generally was not as fatal as it should have been.
(In horror, sex = death, at least for minor characters. If their introduction was a sex scene, they were almost certainly doomed. One wonders how the birth rate is maintained in horror universes)
1) Actually, Miles’ decision to fine Elena’s mother for her was stunningly ill-advised. He had enough information to figure out that something was deeply amiss. For that matter, his decision to put Bothari in charge of getting information from a prisoner was also bad… like evilly bad.
The Wreck of the River of Stars was the one I expected to be here – and so it was. The crew apparently worked well when Captain Hand was there with a stabilizing … Hand, but with him gone, disaster was inevitable
Everything done by Elaida in the Wheel of Time series reflects terrible choices and appalling judgments.
Bad judgment is weaponized against the hero in Bujold’s Curse of Chalion…
Large sections of Le Morte D’Arthur are this. Sometimes there’s enough obscure magic and or allegory going on that you can’t fault the knights for not realizing that what they’re doing is a bad idea- and sometimes they decide to cheer up a heavily armed weeping knight by surprising showing him his lover asleep in another man’s arms.
Somebody already mentioned WoT but I always felt Harry Potter and the OotP was a great example of this…it’s one of those books where being in Harry’s head is understandable but so frustrating.
(Not to mention the judgments of people like Fudge and Percy Weasley).
This thread is making me feel like an under-achiever!
I now have a new goal to aspire to.
Just saying.
Nicholas Seafort rarely gets to execute good judgement in the face of an overwhelming desire to slavishly follow the rules. And almost all of his choices are terrible ones.
Pretty much any mission Larry Niven’s Hanville Svetz is sent on involves a serious lapse in judgement on the part of his supervisors.
@ 18 Lisamarie, I’ve always felt that all the bad in OotP was caused by Dumbledore’s refusal to adult & have an actual conversation with Harry before it all hit the fan.
@22 – also true! We just watched the movie actually (my kids are getting into it) and plenty of bad decisions/lack of communication all around.
I was seriously expecting Toby Daye to feature here – the first three books of the series especially suffer from her making APPALLINGLY bad choices, continuously with a total lack of self awareness that is gobsmacking.
@Lisamarie, Half Blood Prince frustrates me just as much as Order of the Phoenix because of Harry stalking Malfoy, I keep wanting to scream at him: “Just because you’re probably right doesn’t make this behaviour okay!”
I’m more forgiving of Harry because he was a teenager and all teenagers are frelling stupid, even if they are ‘The Chosen One;. There were plenty of adults around him that could have prevented a lot of the messes in the books if they had just stepped up and acted like adults.
The worst decision in the Vorkosigan series is Serg’s invasion of Escobar. It’s so dumb it was probably enough motivation for the assassination plot by itself.
Honestly it was appalling judgement by Dumbledore to leave Harry as in the dark as he was, especially in HBP and DH. The damage to Harry’s psyche was bad enough, but him trusting three teenagers to figure out what he barely told them is unbelievable. The trio are 5% less smart and/or courageous, and Voldermort rules the wizarding world forever.
An awful lot of C.J. Cherryh seems to fit the bill — Rimrunners, Heavy Time/Hellburner, Merchanter’s Luck, 40,000 in Gehenna, the Chanur books, etc., etc. Oh! And the Rusalka trilogy! … Although in some cases, there might be some room for disagreement as to exactly WHOSE choices were the truly terrible ones, and WHOSE judgment was most appalling.
To be fair, terrible judgment (regularly compounded by injury, lack of sleep and the rather strange nonhuman entities that share his brain) is pretty much Matthew Swift’s stock in trade. It tends to work out for him, though – one way or another.
If we’re talking protagonists with appalling judgment who make terrible choices, I’ll add Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to the list. For both of them.
@2: You act like interstellar space is any barrier to Miles’ ability to spill chaos everywhere. I think the events of Warrior’s Apprentice in particular argue that Miles causing chaos far away *can* cause chaos back home, too.
I see the Wheel of Time has also already been mentioned, as is only right and just. One might also nominate more or less the entirety of Magic the Gathering’s storyline, too :v
Can you imagine the consequences if everyone between Miles and the throne died?
@27: I thought the causality worked the other way – suckering Serg into a stupid invasion was a key element of the assassination plot (without the plot, Serg would certainly have done other evil things, but things that would not have killed him while also discrediting his political allies)
Atticus makes bad decisions aplenty in the Iron Druid Chronicles, with the worst and most disastrous ones basically filling the entire third book. (I love the series anyway.)
And pretty much every single one of Lovecraft’s stories to one degree or another, but “In the Vault” (a relatively minor short story) really is explicitly driven by its protagonist making an appalling choice.
To cut off the feet of a dead man so he can be buried in a shorter, cast-off coffin.
@10: Gully Foyle was an utter nobody who became a vengeful somebody after being repeatedly abused; unlike the characters Nicoll lists, he can’t be expected to behave sanely — and he’s better than some of the other characters.
@13: That’s such a cliche that there’s a zombie-fighting game you might have run across, in which one of the zombie player’s cards is “This could be our last night on earth!” — with predictably distracting results. One assumes that some of the population finds safer times/places to breed, and only the willing-to-split-up-parties of their offspring go monster-hunting.
@24: spending 14 years as a koi might cause most of us to forget survival skills.
A late friend used to refer to what he called “idiot plots” — novels that would be short stories unless several people acted like idiots. Unfortunately I didn’t save any of his examples. OTOH, ISTM that Laumer’s Retief is a variant of this column’s theme — he only goes in after some hidebound incompetent of a diplomat has put his foot in it. (Always his — Laumer was a long way from woke.)
I’d also cite Biggle’s All the Colors of Darkness, in which an alien surveillance team makes a hash of trying to handle a sudden technological development on Earth. (Whited out just in case anyone hasn’t read it and cares to.)
@33 My mistake, the Escobar invasion was a setup from the beginning. So it was an even stupider decision for Serg to take part in it.
A lot of what happens in the Silmarillion can be laid at the door of, shall we say, suboptimal choices by Feanor and his sons.
Trying to remember if the guy in a certain musically titled book who wants us to dismantle planets of the inner Solar System for raw materials actually intended it to be all of them.
@40 Thanks for totally vaguebooking – now I want to read this, but can’t figure out the book.
Clark Ashton Smith’s “Devotee of Evil” has this remarkable passage:
This turns out not to be an entirely good idea.
Anakin Skywalker may have made one or two bad judgement calls.
If you read Dracula as a Victorian techno-thriller, then the Count’s decision to leave his cozy castle in Eastern Europe and wind up tangling with a group of amateur hunters who are able to coordinate with type-written reports and phonographic recordings, and pursue him by steamship and railway, was, in retrospect, not terribly wise.
@43 – as did many of the Jedi Council. Watching the prequels and Clone Wars is sometimes like watching a slow moving train wreck (I love them, btw).
One of the nice things about Gideon the 9th is that aside from Gideon and Harrow most of the cast is only given one opportunity each to indulge in serious lapses of judgements. Gideon and Harrow do make up for the rest…
@40, 41: I don’t know if the author is still reading, and I may have misunderstood in detail, so you can have a hint, which is: “Come On Eileen”. (This song title and lyrics are probably not related to the story.)
Oh! The planet Golgafrincham in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, whose Ayn Rand readers in a very 2020 way – in 1978 – devised multiple contradictory rumours of the end of the world, and a giant Ark spaceship, to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population without officially committing murder (presumably) of people on the author’s personal hate list: hairdressers, insurance salesmen, management consultants, telephone sanitisers, all shipped off, in cold sleep thankfully. The other two-thirds, of course, stayed at home and lived full, rich, and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone. And really, their hair must have looked awful.
Like now.
Meanwhile, we folllow the superfluous population on the B Ark. In fact, this was happening a couple of million years ago and we ARE the superfluous population of the planet we happened to crash on. We called it… Fintlewoodlewix.
@hoopmanji in 29, I see many Cherryh stories as psychologically scarred people making personal choices in complicated situations. To qualify for “making terrible choices” there has to be a right one. Did Tully betray mankind? Or did he stand on the side of interstellar civilization? Yeager was runnig without sleep or rest, yet her plan to find herself a berth on Loki might have worked if India hadn’t shown up.
@49 — In the case of Chanur, at least, I was thinking of the trilogy when (spoilered)
Humans decided to send a fleet of warships to the Compact, stirring up both the Knnn and the Kif in the process
And once Yeager was on the Loki, she certainly made some suboptimal choices about how to settle in as part of the crew, although yes, everything was very complicated.
cecrow @43: re “Anakin Skywalker may have made one or two bad judgement calls”, so might George Lucas.
Every decision Gideon makes in Gideon the 9th.
I mean she had delightfully appalling judgement, but it literally all appalling.
The Wreck Of The River of Stars is like a train wreck in slow motion. As he introduces the characters you see how this is going to all go wrong. One characters knows that people won’t assign him to something he’s not capable of… and another knows that if he assigns something and it’s beyond that person’s capabilities, they’ll tell him. Fantastic book.
And thanks for telling me about a Midnight Mayor book I didn’t know existed!
The Children of Hurin. Over at the Mythgard Academy the unit with which we measure the number of bad choices someone makes is the Turin…
Appalling judgement: holding a houseparty in Shirley Jackson’s Hill House.
A recent example would be ‘And the last trump shall sound” by Harry Turtledove, James Morrow and Cat Rambo.
@54: shouldn’t that be the nanoTúrin, the SI unit being too large to be convenient for most ordinary applications?
Given the opportunity I would have displayed appallingly bad judgment by betting large sums of money that you would have included Space Vikings on this list.
@54
Feanor and his heirs (and followers) also make a few slightly misguided decisions as well.
@58 – I would have bet the same on Song of Ice and Fire. I mentioned it above but I thought I’d be one of MANY.
I’m currently re-reading The Murderbot Diaries. Not sure if it merrits an inclusion of this list. I am not as critical of decision making of the protagonist as it itself is.
But I wonder if any of the works mentioned above would give me a similar enjoyment? Like Merbeth’s Fortuna or The Wreck of the River of Stars by Fynn?
I think they can pretty much retire the trophy after Alastair Reynolds’ “Galactic North”, in which a series of well-meaning decisions cause the destruction of virtually all life in the Revelation Space universe. Not with a bang, either. One solar system at a time.
All the votes for various Vorkosigan novels just confirms my fine judgement in deciding never to read another after my first two tries.
Memory, another Miles Vorkoisgan book – which starts out with Miles having a seizure, accidentally severing a hostage’s legs during a hostage rental mission, and then lying to Illyan about that.
Also, @63 – yes, it starts out with a stunning error in judgement, and then Miles more than redeems himself. Try more Vorkosigan books, they’re great!
The only one here I’ve read is Golden Witchbreed. But whose was the appalling decision? I only read the book recently, after reading Liz Bourke’s review of it (if I recall correctly), so it is relatively fresh in my mind. It has many odd things in in, not just the title. But would have sending someone more experienced not have been a greater disaster? Mmm.
Mirror Dance by Bujold is Mark at his absolute dumbfuckiest. I love it.
Let us not forget Thomas Covenant.
Fitz in Robin Hobbs’ books i the standout for me in poor judgement and bad decision making.
The Star Kingdom series by Lindsay Buroker starts off with a brilliant roboticist making a nearly indistructable robot. He hands over all the plans because the King assures him they will only ever be used as defense to protect the Kingdom. Then they send the robots they made after him.
@@@@@ 6: “The Orthe series is all-around excellent, tho Ancient Light was a huuuuuge downer.”
Oh, LORD. It is an EXCELLENT series, but Ancient Light is the downer to end all downers.
It’s probably the most tragic story I have ever read. It DESTROYED me.
In the case of River of Stars it is inspired by real-world events – yes people really do act that foolishly.
@53, the impressive thing about the _Wreck_ is that (almost?) all the decisions made by characters during the actual story are, by their own lights, reasonable. Most of them even talk to each other about said decisions — with a few, critical exceptions, which lead to disaster.
It’s also notable that the character James (like half the characters) correctly highlights as having appalling judgement gets hardly any story time: his disastrous hiring policies are enough to doom the ship, without even considering anything else the man himself may have done.
Frank in Cat’s Cradle. There’s a doozy.
I propose that as a matter of policy, youths – however defined in that world – be excluded from consideration. Adults should know better, youths are still learning.
@63 auspex: I encourage you to consider trying some Vorkosigan because Bujold is a good writer with excellent insight into human behavior and her ability to crystalize an insight into an easily-understood scene or description is second to none. It’s true that in some books, characters demonstrate some very bad judgement (the beginning of Memory, one of my favorite books every, is one example) but not always. Both Shards of Honor and Barrayar (I forget the omnibus name) don’t particularly; if you’re willing to deal with a gifted writer learning her craft, start with Shards of Honor.
Bujold’s Curse of Chalion, which is not a Vorkosigan book, is one of the very few books that suck me in on the first page and spit me out on the last, having utterly immersed me in that world between times. The only other books to have that effect on me are The Blue Sword and Ender’s Game.
Speaking as someone who once found themselves enveloped in a fuel-air explosion of his own making, I find this hard to believe.
@63/auspex:
If you don’t like ’em you don’t like ’em, but I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. Bujold’s one of the finest SFF writers out there. You might be more interested in the Sharing Knife tetralogy, the Penric novellas, or the Five Gods worlds you bounce off the SF/”it seemed like a good idea at the time” stuff in the Vorkosigan stories.
I’d say almost all of Lev Grossman’s Magicians series is basically bad call after bad call after bad call until pretty much the absolute last couple of chapters of the last book.
#36 Chip… My first thought when I saw the title of the article was “Everyone except Retief!”
Adults making bad judgement calls about the information they do or do not provide to children or adolescents is a very common trope. Some call it treating them like mushrooms. Keep them in the dark and feed them crap.
The stories almost always have the kids discover something that is very critical to what the adults are involved in, and nearly always the adults have completely missed it.
As an example “Spider-Man: Far From Home”. Peter discovers who is re-purposing Chitauri technology into human usable weapons. Tony Stark and the rest of the Avengers have no clue who, but it’s the very man they’re trying to find. Meanwhile they keep telling Peter to essentially sty home and patrol his neighborhood for bike thieves.
Much of the movie involves Peter’s attempt to get someone to pay attention to what he need to tell them, climaxing in Peter’s discovery of the weapons deal about to happen on the ferry. Again Tony and friends brush Peter off instead of paying attention and telling Peter, “Oh, yeah. Good detective work. You’ve found *our* sting operation and you showed good judgement coming to us instead of the police or trying to tackle it yourself. Do you want to join in the fun? Do exactly what I tell you and it’ll be good experience for you.”
But noooo. Tony goes all mushroom treatment on Peter yet again – then has the gall to *blame Peter* for the disaster that at its root is really his fault.
The flip of this is adding that the adults do know what the kids know, but continually brush off the kids without listening to them because “They’re just kids. What could they know?” instead of listening then informing the kids they already know that and avoiding having the kids attempt to take matters into their own hands when the clueless adults won’t pay attention.
Why are plots like this so commonplace? Because they happen in the real world very often thanks to adults making horribly bad decisions about what they think kids can or cannot know, or should or shouldn’t know – when what the adults should be doing is asking the kids what they know and making better informed decisions about what they should tell kids.
But of course when the mushroom treatment happens in the real world it usually doesn’t involve ferry boats being sliced in half and airplanes being crashed.
@charlie Stross – you’ll have to let us know if having the Black Pharaoh run your nation-state is a case of good or bad judgement :)
I’m put in mind of Roger Ebert’s “Idiot Plots”: “The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot,” although I don’t think he was the creator of the term.
When the plot is driven by characters making terrible decisions that are actually plausible and reasonable based on what the character knows, I can find these stories tense and compelling and even worthy of a reread.
When the characters make terrible choices that could only seem reasonable to someone simultaneously drunk, high, strung out, and profoundly sleep deprived because that’s what has to happen in order for the plot to happen, the book becomes a wall banger.