(a disparaging term for) an adventure story that features violent exploits
[spoonerism of blood and thunder; in use since at least the 1870s to refer (literally and figuratively) to violence]
While you had not sunk to thud and blunder levels—you have never done that—you were, nevertheless, maintaining a decidedly low standard, and though you still stood out like a shining beacon among the other unspeakables on the stands, you were not getting anywhere at a terrific rate.
The story starts out in fine Cummings style, then gradually works into a bunch of bunk ‘thud and blunder’ gore.
Oh yes, I see Wellman is bringing Captain Future back next issue. I hope it is good. Some of CF aren’t, and Wellman has such a style of his own. He is good but…his big sute if [sic] picturing the viewpoint of other races. I hope this next story don’t drop into that kine of thing. CF has to [sic] much of a thud and blunder past for such a thing.
‘Hammer and Sickle,’ the only other fiction in this issue, is the first installment of what is described as a serial: its thud-and-blunder moved me not.
Perhaps conscious that someone might then mistake Bulmer for a thud-and-blunder writer, Equinox describe this as a ‘classic novel which was the first to incorporate the ideas of undersea farming,’ an assertion which will be of some interest to Arthur C. Clarke.
It was one of the world’s worst thud and blunder novels set in the far future—it makes Star Wars look tame—and they bought it.
She had enjoyed his thud and blunder stories when she was about twelve.
Hubbard writes a kind of science fiction that we call ‘thud and blunder’, stories for crackpots and juveniles.
The story then degenerates into an FX orgy of endless combat sequences, car chases, explosions, action cliffhangers, and so forth…. Worse still, this massively overlong thud and blunder denouement takes place in three intercut dreams interacting arbitrarily and pretty much incoherently.
antedating 1940
Astounding Stories
Removed from the site after evidence arose establishing its mundane origins.
Bill Mullins re-suggested the entry, and submitted a variety of cites.
Last modified 2021-02-12 16:31:06
In the compilation of some
entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
in OED.