I feel partially responsible for the fact that The Eye of Argon continues to exist. Let me explain.

Years ago, I attended a not-so-good SF convention in California. The con's organizers had apparently not been informed that a good convention requires a) guests and b) programming, and the best I could do was hang out in the hospitality suite and try to seduce a pair of female fans who seemed interested in playing with my scarf (I failed).

The high point of the weekend was something cryptically referred to as an "Eye of Argon Reading," which I discovered consisted of sitting in a circle, passing around a copy of an ancient and incredibly bad sword and sorcery story, and reading until you cracked up totally.

Well, I went because I didn't have anything better to do. As it turned out, it was one of the better decisions I'd made, because the story The Eye of Argon proved to be far beyond anything I could have imagined. Apparently published in some obscure fanzine back in the '70s, it seemed to have been written by a 14-year-old Conan fan who owned no dictionaries or style manuals, but instead had invested his paper route money in about 20 thesauruses. The story was chock-full of bad sentence structure, misspellings, punctuation errors, hackneyed sword and sorcery cliches, and the like. I believe that most, if not all, nouns are modified by a suitably colorful adjective, an impressive feat in an of itself.

Of course, this description could apply to any number of modern bestsellers, particularly those based on AD&D, but what set Eye of Argon apart was the fact that the little so-and-so actually had a pretty good grasp of plot and pacing. It had this kind of "Rain Man" quality - a story badly told and horribly written, but at the same time well planned and plotted. At least one well-known SF professional today claims that the story was no accident, but instead a cunning piece of satire passed off as real fan fiction. I personally don't believe it - NO ONE could write that bad on purpose. Believe me, I've tried.

I fell in love with the story, obtained a copy and carried it back to Portland, where I read it to an enraptured (?) meeting of the local SF club (a group with whom I am no longer associated, btw). The next local convention, oddly enough, was chaired by me, so I was able to do anything I damned well pleased (unless it involved weapons, of course - our local fannish mavens are quite anal when it comes to swords and guns). I chose to rent a big tank of helium, a bunch of balloons, and hold my own version of an "EoA Reading", with the added excitement of reading the story while under the influence of helium. Of course, it was a huge hit, and we've had at least one reading of the story at every subsequent con, sometimes with helium, sometimes without.

And so, The Eye of Argon spread its malign influence across the Pacific Northwest, a fact of which I'm enormously proud. On the flip side, however, the fact that local convention dances all seem to feel the need to play a godawful disco song called Rah Rah Rasputin/Russia's Greatest Love Machine by Boney M is also my fault, but I'll tell that story later.

Well, as a practitioner of the dark arts of sword and sorcery fiction, I realize that I owe a debt to Jim Theis ("EoA"s author) and those like him, for setting the bar so low that it makes me look like Ernest fucking Hemingway. In his honor, I present my own personal Eye of Argon shrine, with the story itself, as well as links to other sites which honor it. With this kind of devotion, I suspect that Grignr the Ecordian and his opaque-nosed girlfriend will survive long into the next millennium and hopefully inspire future generations of would-be sword and sorcery hacks to consider a career at Burger King.

Susan Stepney's SF Page
Contains lots of cool science fictiony stuff, as well as links to other versions of EoA, and a "Babelfish" translation of the first few paragraphs. She even has a little bit of information about the EoA's mysterious author, who has gone on to bigger and better things, though apparently Grignr's infamy led him to give up writing fiction. This, I honestly think, is a shame -- EoA is the work of an enthusiastic if somewhat misguided 16-year-old, and with a few years and some experience under his belt, I'm sure he would have matured into a fine writer. And no, I'm not being sarcastic.

Fandom UK SF archives

MSTed Eye of Argon
What would happen if Mike and the 'bots got ahold of Jim Theis' masterpiece? Wonder no more.

Guybrush, Elaine and Grignr
Apparently, Guybrush Threepwood of the Monkey Island game series has encountered Grignr the Ecordian. The mind boggles.

The Evil Eye
"With a giantlike howl, his huge blood thirsty sword whirled through the atmospere and decapitated two pouncing archers at the kneecaps!" -- It comes close to the greatness of the original, but as far as I'm concerned there's only one Eye.

A Fresh Splash of Vinegar in the Eyes
Fanfic writer Jemima Pereira reviews The Eye of Argon, and probably gives it more attention than it deserves.

The Bottom of the Barrel
The story introduces Grignr the Barbarian, closely resembling Conan but worse-tempered, worse-spelt and harder to pronounce. SF critic David Langford actually went so far as to read EoA and lived to write about it. I would note that I'm the one who came up with combining EoA and helium, so give credit where credit is due...

The Return of Argon's Eye
Cooperative storytelling in the world of Grignr.

Sturgeon's Law School
A surprisingly serious and cogent analysis of EoA: If 'The Eye Of Argon' were fixed-if you cleaned up the execrable dialogue, and fixed the descriptions, and holystoned the prose till it contained no more scarlet emeralds or lithe noses, and gave the characters motivations and personalities… so that the reader could care whether Grignr achieved his quest or not, and was not fatally attracted to the alternative idea of how pleasant it would be to see him get run over by a bus… one would have, not a good story as such, but a good bad story…