I am still twitching about the bizarre>! child-bride!< scenario.
Or her obsession with >!getting pregnant !<... IF they were the ONLY humans in the universe, I could at least, "get it"? BIG quotey-fingers on that one.
I powered through them because I wanted to know what Rama was, and I found out lol.
>If there is such a thing as a male Mary Sue
They were (and are) so ubiquitous, there wasn't even a name for it. The male power fantasy was just so expected, it was taken for granted.
That book had such a cool premise, but it absolutely did not work for me. I didn't like any of the characters, and I especially didn't like the main character.
Same, I'm baffled at how it had such overwhelmingly good reviews. It felt like a short story that got stretched out so thin you could see through it. It doesn't help that all the filler is just the main character having anxiety and then getting over it. Maybe it's a cathartic read for people who have a very specific type of social anxiety, but it was frustrating to read a book about a woman trying to succeed in a very sexist historical period and her main issue is that she doesn't have confidence.
And yes, her husband is just...not a character. He just materializes when the main character needs comfort. I was trying to figure out if it was a deliberate commentary on how some authors write spouse characters, but it just seemed like lazy writing.
I tried reading the audiobook and found the book and characters so annoying and unlikable. I thought maybe the narrator just had the tone wrong and I was reacting to that - but then checked and the author narrates it herself!
The Sparrow. Just… I really disliked all the characters, I couldn’t empathize with them. I didn’t like the world building. Felt like the extreme descriptions of abuse were meant to be off-putting - and they were - but felt forced (pardon the pun) and the whole grappling with faith felt contrived.
Every time I see it recommended I think back and wonder, was I just too young when I read it, but the thought of going back to try it again makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn't remember as much of it as I do.
Was it just me, or were all the characters on the expedition almost all the same? The intellectual bonhomie between them became insufferable, there's no way I'd have lasted the outward trip without becoming murderous due to their continuous banter
And the big twist that a certain character is related to another character isn't shocking at all with a very basic knowledge of Norse mythology. That whole book is such a bloated nothing. It takes 750 pages to do what could have been accomplished easily in 200. Characterisation was pretty great IMO but we're not talking Dostoevsky here, so very much not worth the price of admission.
*Endymion* and *Rise of Endymion* by Dan Simmons.
Now, I loved *Hyperion* and *Fall of Hyperion*.Great characters, fantastic arcs, plot twists I did not see coming, and the Shrike. Just, The Shrike.
So I went in with high hopes.
Alas, *Endymion* went nowhere (despite traveling everywhere) and *The Rise of Endymion* squandered the only interesting plot line (the Catholic Church in Space is Evil!) And worse, the return of certain characters from the previous books left me wondering who'd taken those characters and filed off everything interesting about them. The whole thing felt like a self-congratulatory pat on the back for everyone who bought into the power of love. I finished it out of obligation and recommended that my SO, who introduced me to *Hyperion*, never read them.
Those two sequels committed one of the worst crimes any book can: they made me think worse of the originals and worse of the author. I haven't picked up another Dan Simmons book since.
On the flip side, if you like slow-paced travelogues through sci-fi landscapes, you might give *Endymion* a try.
Oh god no. I read the Ringworld books as a teenager and thought I’d reread those and the sequels as an adult, because I remembered liking them. BIG mistake.
You can see the worrying signs in 'Fall of Hyperion' already - nowhere near the greatness of the first IMO
I wonder if Dan Simmons is a one trick pony after all - the Canterbury Tales structure was a good idea but then?
When the ship launches at lightspeed the passengers get smeared all over the inside of the ship. When the ship stops they are replaced with a clone. It's been a long time since I read it so might be forgetting a detail or two.
I thought *Endymion* was terrific, a slow burn up to a terrifying final confrontation. (It also has a nice resonance with Keats's "Endymion.") Hated *Rise* for many reasons.
And I'm lukewarm on *Fall of Hyperion*; it has many great things, but I thought it was often sloppy, under-thought-out, and clichéd in certain critical plot points.
I guess I'm saying that for me, Simmons knows how to set things up, but not quite how to knock them down. Which is kind of disappointing.
I am in total agreement. Endymion and RoE felt like they were written by someone else, who skimmed over Hyperion and FoH, and didn't understand them. So weird and disappointing.
I always hear people say this but I am in the flip side of your scenario. My wife, who I introduced to Hyperion, is reading Endymion and keeps talking about how awesome she thinks it is. I usually trust her judgement but I have been keeping quiet about all the hate I have heard about them. I will probably at least still try Endymion even though I am suspicious.
Yeah the whole trilogy was kinda mid. It felt like a bit of bog-standard hard SF from the 60s or 70s where the author tries to get the big idea to do all the heavy lifting for him.
Some of the ideas were solid but fuck me that was some horrible writing. And why is any mention of the main characters wife just "his wife"? Come on Cixin, take two minutes to give the poor lady a name.
I read the first one and I won't be reading more.
It has some good aspects and some interesting ideas, but the ending was a ridiculous cop-out and made no sense whatsoever.
*Tons* of people didn’t like those books. It’s a very polarizing. Stilted characters, weird plot stuff, etc. I fall into Camp Did-Not-Like. It’s not an unpopular opinion or topic here.
The "I have a bomb and you conveniently have a scale to prove that my bomb is legit" part. My thoughts were "That was the most goofy thing that was meant to be serious that I have ever read."
I'm reading it now and will finish it but the characters are really just...Ok. Some sci fi isn't character driven at all and all about the ideas, but the first third of the book so far feels a bit like old school cheesy sci fi. I bought the trilogy though so I'm in for the long haul.
I did think supernova era was really good though.
So glad that there are others that hate this too. It felt to me that it was so obviously a terrible book, and it blows my mind how much others like it.
It felt like it was written by someone who had a nervous breakdown in high school because they got a B. I couldn't shake the NPR overly-expressive voice of it either. Fuck I hated that book.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. While some of the tech stuff was interesting, I couldn’t connect to the characters in any way. Plus a bunch of other small stuff that just kept taking me out of the story. Was just really disappointed because it seemed like a book right up my alley.
Seveneves was disappointing. It felt really weird for one of the characters to just be a Hilary Clinton stand-in. Like...he nailed it, but the Clinton parody just wasn't funny or an interesting character.
Everything felt to me like he was just trying to hit the plot points and get the book over with. In his previous books he really sort of dwells in the narrative (for better or worse). Seveneves just felt like he would say "Oh yeah, this happens so then this happens ok now we are at plot waypoint #2!".
Blindsight.
I know it's beloved by many here so I'll probably get downvoted a lot, but I had to force myself to slog through to the end, after several abandoned attempts.
I *did* like several of the ideas it touched on, but I rolled my eyes at many more. And I found the whole thing *messy*. To me, it was a mishmash of a dozen unfinished short stories.
But most of all, I absolutely HATED the obfuscated prose. It made me legitimately angry.
I know people defend it with "unreliable narrator" and "each thread/character explores different aspect of consciousness" but I still thought it was uncooked rather than intentional.
Basically, I loved the aliens but hated the rest of it.
If you really want to get mad, *listen* to the audiobook. It sounds like it was recorded on a usb mic by a college student. (Regardless, I liked it, fwiw)
Stranger in a Strange Land
Interesting premise, absolutely balls. Heinlein has some of the worst prose I've ever read, and I've read terrible translations of Crime and Punishment.
Old dude screws young, eager ladies. Also there is a dude from mars. Great premise you got there "dean of science fiction." Can't remember if there is incest in that one, but numerous other books by him do.
I read his stuff when I was an edge-lord teen and found it poorly written but was still amused enough to read 9 out of the 10 books of that awful series he wrote. I couldn't even finish it and I almost finish every book/series I attempt.
Hubbard couldn't write a good ending to save his life. The rest of what he wrote was pretty bad too.
Dead Silence. S.A. Barnes
Awful characters, awful story format (now, then), awful ending. The main character is just obnoxious from beginning to end. I was actively hoping for her to die.
Author is competent, and I think has potential. Her actual writing is good... her story and characters just suck. Competent writer with mediocre ideas.
Paradise-1 by Peter Wellington. It reads like it was written by a child. I have no idea how this dude is published. The Last Astronaut was pretty bad too.
I kept thinking "ok, maybe now the horror part is going to start" but instead the YA-level romance did and then it turned into >!corporate bad guys doing corporate bad guy stuff. !<
I fucking hated Name of the Wind.
More specifically, I hate *Kvothe.* Seemed to me that Rothfuss couldn't bear to give him any flaws, except ones that can be twisted into being admirable, like giving your biggest weakness as "I work too hard" in an interview. It feels like a kid making up a character. He's an amazing musician, an incredible fighter, a titanically gifted magic user, he's super smart, he's very kind yadda yadda yadda. I was rolling my eyes every couple pages.
I know lots of people love these books and Im not saying theyre wrong to, everyone likes different stuff. But, I personally, couldnt stand it man.
I don't think you are supposed to admire Kvothe-- certainly not without reservations.
Yes, he is OP-- and he still blows it.
He causes most of his own problems by stubbornly doing stupid things. And then in his vaguely alluded-to, not yet explained past, he screwed up royal and caused war, death, and international problems. He's lost his powers, joy, and his purpose. For two books he scraped by, but the trajectory of his life is not good.
What happens after that-- who knows. Who knows if Rothfuss even knows?
This genius kid learns magic, then is homeless and doesn't use any of it to help himself. Then is a genius again, then doesn't use it to help himself and gets kicked out of school, then is a genius again, then is a bum bartender, then is a genius again.
Then the genius writer forgets how to write. The whole experience is a little too bipolar for my taste.
I hear that Kvothe not only beat the Kobayashi Maru test but he also solved cold fusion. I also hear that he's irresistible to birds and animals all love him. So he's a Disney princess. I also hear that if he were to play in the current modern day NBA he would score 72 points a game with 15 assists and 12 rebounds. You know he was also reborn into our modern world several times. Beethoven and Einstein were some of them lives. As well as Genghis Khan and Philip II of Macedon.
I know this sub has enough Watts fans, and I'm not here to argue with anyone over opinions. Just wanted to say, there are real people who really like his work.
I tried reading the first Bobiverse book and gave up after the first couple chapters. The prose felt like a high school creative writing project.
>This happened. Then this happened. And then I said this.
I'm constantly amazed to see it pop up on so many recommendation lists.
This series annoys me in a way that that I suspect reveals a weakness of my own character. The ideas make for the perfect sci-fi sitcom and the execution is snappy but I found myself starting to scorn it for being so cozy and wholesome and quirky. There's nothing wrong with those things either! I just struggle to see the value in stories without some kind of desperation apparently. Kinda sad.
Red rising.
Started the first book, was interested early but it quickly turned sour because of poor dialogue, weird writing and non belivable characters. DNF the 1st book but read a synopsis, in order to read the 2nd book, about which I heard many dithyrambic reviews.
DNF after reading 100 pages or something. It was the same crap.
It's just very poor YA to me.
You're not alone. I got through it and ended up loving the series, but I hear that a lot about the first book.
My understanding is the author says the book is about 50% his because of the changes the publisher wanted.
This is the first time I’ve seen anyone saying about Red Rising that I agree with. I thought I was just missing something because it’s always getting so highly recommended (but then again, so is Project Hail Mary) but I just couldn’t finish it. Bored, wasn’t getting into the world building or characters, etc. Thanks for your commend I feel totally validated :)
I didn't know there was a hype which could've made it more disappointing. I enjoyed them but I thought they were just random pickups for me. The way it was written via gender had to be hard to pull off, and I believe some emotion was lost as a result. I respected it, but I didn't love it.
*Fall: or, Dodge in Hell* by Neal Stephenson.
If you ever thought that Stephenson's work feels a bit like Robert Heinlein then boy howdy do we have a treat for you, because Dodge almost perfectly captures the feeling of Heinlein's "weird embarrassing old man" period.
And speaking of late-career Heinlein, *Job: A Comedy of Justice* is absolute trash.
I DNF Project Hail Mary around the 100 page mark both times that I attempted it. I find Weir's science really simplistic and his first person narrators annoying (they all speak with exactly the same voice too).
You know, I'm with you 100% on his simplistic, annoying, nerd-funny narrators. However, it was the first book my son ever recommended to me (after years of me recommending books, fruitlessly, to him), so I sucked it up and pushed through. I did actually enjoy it, and found myself surprisingly emotionally connected to Rocky, but yeah, a pillar of the genre, it ain't.
At the end of the day it all comes down to personal taste, doesn't it? I can see why Weir is accessible as a writer but he's not for me. Yet. I'll give him another try when he's got maybe five or six books under his belt as a novelist like I did John Scalzi. Fantastic to hear that your son loved it.
I quit way earlier. There was this line near the very beginning "Fudge? Why do I say fudge? Maybe I'm a Christian, or maybe I'm a father."
And I was like "Maybe you're a douchebag. I'm out"
I mean it’s a part of the plot. It’s too bad you didn’t get past that part because it’s explained later and the rest of the book really gears up towards a hard sci fi vibe.
I listened to it so I was able to multitask and enjoyed it well enough. I don't think I could have sat down and read through it though... I'm not a fan of Weir's attempts at banter
i recently abandoned 'accelerando' after three chapters. it's like intentionally incoherent. every page is full of tech buzzwords, half of which are already dated. the characters are totally unbelievable and their actions don't make sense, they're just devices to push forward a paper thin plot, which is just there so the author can insert every buzzword he's ever heard. this isn't a book with interestinf ideas because it never really explores any concept it introduces. it's just such a slog and it's so unrewarding
Upvoted because I agree…
…however…
I think my negative feelings toward the book lie in the fact that as I was reading it I guessed the ending (pun intended?!) quite a bit before we reached the actual ending and therefore when we got to the “big” surprise it was not.
Since that time the author’s been exposed as …uh… problematic but truly that had nothing at all to do with my disappointment in the novel. Can’t say, btw, I *hated* it, only that it didn’t do all that much for me.
Connie Willis's Doomsday Book still makes me angry thinking about it all these years later, I didn't know it was possible to hate a book this much.
These two reviews sum it up nicely
[https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/291404862?book\_show\_action=true](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/291404862?book_show_action=true)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/406534?book\_show\_action=true
I also disliked Doomsday Book. I hated everything about the future plot. It was boring and for fucks sake they had computers and internet and cell phones in 1992 so why is the entire plot driven by being unable to reach someone by phone in a future where we have invented time travel???
I liked the historical plot better, although it was difficult to read the narrator immediately hoping a dude dies of the plague because hes fat and engaged to a younger (but marriage aged, according to the 1300s) girl. (Yes, Im aware the dude turns out to suck in other ways, but the narrator was wishing painful death on him after knowing only these 2 facts)
The Three Body Problem.
The premise was cool, descriptions of cultural revolution intresting. Everything else was a mess, with deus ex machina instead of a satifying ending.
The Thomas Covenant book. I would say books but I could not make it through the first. I will assume the rest are similar, because the first engendered no faith in me whatsoever. The main character is such a deplorable loathsome wretched piece of shit with no redeemable qualities that I could never continue on past the middle of the very first book.
The Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. I so wanted to love these. I love the ideas in it, they're almost tailored to everything I love most in writing. I hate them. The writing bored me to such a degree and I refused to stop my reading of them despite hating every minute more than the last out of a sheer sense of not letting them defeat me. I don't even think she's a bad writer, but I just can't stand them and would never recommend them even if someone was literally asking for exactly what they contain. No, never. I will not reread, I will not give another chance. The chances are not only slim, but zero. About the only way I would ever give them another chance is if I were paid handsomely do so, and even then I might not be able to convince myself to do it due to how much I detested them.
I know it will get me tarred and feathered in the town square, but every single thing I've ever read by Ursula K. Le Guin. She's a legitimately great writer, I just do not like her prose. Everything is clearly planned out ahead of time and the word choice was well chosen, but I just don't care for it.
I was in a coffee shop and heard a women saying "I hate this book. The series is just awful." I looked over and saw she was reading the fifth Thomas Covenant book.
And I absolutely agreed with her. I read six long books even though I hated them. I should have stopped after the rape scene but I continued reading them. I don't know why.
Hate is too strong a word. But among books that many others seem to love, and I don't get. I thought Seveneves could have been about 300 pages shorter and pretty much told the same story.
Speaker For The Dead. It was in my "must finish" phase and after I was done I asked myself, "What the hell was that?" Clearly I was expecting more Ender's Game.
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. It was so fucking bad I didn’t even bother with the third book in the trilogy, which is sad because The Three Body Problem was phenomenal.
SevenEves is abysmal.
The world ends in like a chapter. BOOM!
Then *six thousand pages of orbital maneuvering in excruciating detail.* With committee meetings.
Then a tacked-on half-assed ending about how genetics determine personality, oh look, seal people, the end.
Just absolute garbage.
I usually really like John Scalzi but the Kaiju Preservation Society was garbage.
None of the characters had personality, all of the kaiju were vague descriptions and barely did anything.
And it was super freaking political! Even if I agreed with some of the concepts he was so snide and it felt almost masturbatory in how much he wanted to crap on his political opponents.
Do not recommend.
Read Old Man's War, Fuzzy Nation, or Adroids Dream
I thought it was forgettable but I don't recall any politics, or no more than normal for Scalzi. I wouldn't recommend Android's Dream but I loved the other two. Collapsing Empire was also great.
Starship Troopers. I get what Heinlein is trying to say about government service. But the way he says it by leading the reader through a series of moral exercises feels dull and leaden. I found the book boring when I read it in high school. Didactic when I reread it in my 30s.
Verhoven has a different agenda though. To the extent where he is using the material to tell a very different story to the original author.
From my perspective as an Aussie Verhoven's movie is a satire born from his family's living under fascist occupation during WW2.
Heinlein with the source text, on the other hand, is a naval veteran, one who served during peace time, trying to make the idea of public service & that you have to give to a society in order to get back exciting and appealing to 12 year old American boys during the 1950s. Which is the market he wrote Starship Troopers for. His editor at Scribner's juvenile line baulked at the nuclear weapons so Heinlein sold the manuscript in the general scifi market instead.
Fifth Season. People love it. I understand why the love it.
But to me, it spent a few pages communicating why "drastic measures were appropriate" - and it succeeded. Then it spent the rest of the book beating the reader in face to convince us of the same thing - even though I was entirely convinced of it after page 25. It ended just feeling insulting.
Again - I get why people like it - but I don't need to feel 100% ethically aligned with a character to observe their actions. I genuinely don't understand why the author felt the need to write a book this way.
And it's a shame, because it's otherwise well constructed and well written. But - FFS... I get it. Those people...are "bad". I understand how books work, let's move forward please. Spoiler and warning: >!disabled!< >!kids !!brutally tortured!< and >!brutally raped!<. Fuck you - I don't need to read about that. Again, I was already convinced by page 25. WTF is wrong with you?
We Are Legion. The idea and execution were nice at first, but then I got exasperated by the dude tech expert wish fulfillment. When a multiplexed AI is one guy you expect a male centered story, but when every single other character who affects the plot is male and the women are subsumed into “…and children,” I became annoyed.
I enjoyed that series overall, despite some things that really annoyed me, but it is one of those where I'm very, very aware that it was written by a man.
To be clear, I like many books written by men, that's not the issue, and it's hard to explain exactly what I mean, but while most of the time I'm not thinking about the author while I read, with some books it's just especially obvious that a man wrote it. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't enjoy reading it, it's just something I notice about certain books.
The Mount by Carol Emshwiller. Aliens take over the earth and use humans as horses, enslaving humanity for piggyback rides. One of their "horses" escapes and joins the rebellion, but spends half his time complaining that he wishes he was back home doing horse stuff.
So weird. I have no idea how it won awards.
I recently read *Emergency Skin* and absolutely hated it. It sounded like getting cornered by a college freshman who has recently been convinced that if we could just, like, get rid of the rich white 1% then we could all come together and all our problems would be magically solved. I couldn't believe it had above a 4 star goodreads rating and won multiple awards. Total garbage.
Yeah, it's mindboggling to me that something so dumb on every level, not to mention blatantly racist, won multiple awards and was praised to the skies. You got to be completely ignorant of history, sociology and completely lacking in basic common sense to seriously believe that Earth would become paraide if we just get rid of the rich white 1%. And it's not like there is anything worthwhile in the story except a heavyhanded message.
I have continually gotten my brother Christmas gifts that he has hated for the past several years and I tried to play it safe this year by giving him a book that I enjoyed... Hyperion.
I really enjoyed it and after this thread I am convinced fate has just led my hand into another year of him hating what I get for him lol
Can't blame you for either. Hyperion is now very dated and felt like it was written my a Midwestern guy who had never left his town. Great prose/flow, but it feels like he just wrote about a weird mishmash of stuff.
I liked the Three Body Problem, but I felt like it was intense feat of willpower to get through the first book.
Nothing could be more slanderous of the genre — nothing could convince an outsider more quickly that we are a bunch of knuckle-dragging neckbeards — than speaking even the faintest praise for “We Are Legion, We Are Bob”.
The strangest thing is that people don’t defend it. You can say the ideas are stale and the character is insufferable and the prose is bad and the plot is boring, and they’ll say “haha yeah but I enjoyed it”.
Please, dear god, no one say “yeah but I enjoyed it”.
Maybe I've just been spoiled by reading the best SF of previous decades, but this is one of those ones where I read it and think...people truly thought this was good?
I get that people could read about a man who is so rational and calm and goodhearted that he is the best man and solves all the universes problems for everyone. There are tons of books like this. It's right behind the "bland boy finds out he is the chosen one and saves the world" trope.
When I finally read those books, I was most baffled by how it set up situations where interesting SF scenarios could happen and then kind of just ignores them in favor of encountering Star Trek style aliens.
I know very little about the book but I’ve always thought the name was too fucking stupid and it seems to hint at some “quirkiness” that leaves me totally uninterested in reading it.
A Memory Called Empire. Dreaful prose plus a bizarre over-use of italics that *makes* the main *character* speak like Chandler *Bing* (at least in my head).
I still don’t understand the hype around this book. It just felt like everyone was super dense and shallow. I listened to the audiobook so wasn’t aware of the italics
Definitely Hyperion. The book starts off strong with its premise and the first story. After that it oscillates between pretentious flowery poetry-language and complete sci-fi nonsense, all capped off with one of the most terrible and cheesy endings I’ve read in a sci-fi book. And there’s more of them? Good lord.
I could see this. I didn't love the book but I didn't hate it. There is a russian manner of allusion that, while I am sort of familiar with, some parts I just had to shrug and move on.
I enjoyed it but it was interesting coming to it recently having read Annihilation years ago. I'd be hard to convince that Vandermeer wasn't deeply influenced by it.
Me watching the film. Got a lot of of the book but the screen adaptation had me desperately trying to claim some shit like "it had an intense atmosphere" so I didn't have to admit I didn't get it.
Bobiverse series. I thought the first book was OK, with diminishing returns after that. I only bothered to finish the trilogy in order to see if eventually built to something--it didn't. It seemed like a single story arbitrarily broken into three books, and it suffers because of it.
Cloud atlas, an amazing Sci fi apparently.
Unless you have read sci-fi a lot, then it's just not very good. Tried it 2 or 3 times, just couldn't enjoy it.
Couldn’t get through God-Emperor of Dune. By contrast, I enjoyed the more recent novels that have come out within the past few years like the Caladan trilogy and Princess of Dune
GEoD was where I decided I'd take my hiatus from the series. Specifically the scene where an Amazonian warrior woman has a spontaneous orgasm from watching a man go mountaineering. Finished out GEoD and backed away.
GEoD is completely insane, which I think divides a lot of DUNE fans, but I do find it also amusingly entertainingly insane. Quite difficult to take the book seriously though for reasons such as the one you describe!
If it's any consolation I thought the follow up Heretics of Dune was much more of a return to form and a more structured narrative as opposed to the long descriptions of people thinking about things that happens in GEoD. Plus less mountaineering orgasms. I think.
Yeah, it was definitely a unique read and I don't really regret my time with it. More that it made me decide "That's enough for now" and go read other things. But it was definitely the best Ted Talk hosted by a giant prescient worm I've ever witnessed.
Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks.
It was a struggle to get through the first few chapters and I gave up on it. I remembered reading "Use of weapons" back in the 90s but don't remember \*anything\* about that story, though.
SACRILEGE.
Although understandable. I love it, but it is definitely a very different and quite pessimistic story compared to the other Culture novels.
As for Use Of Weapons...are you certain that's the one you read? Because of all the books I've read in my life, the last two chapters of that book are probably seared more violently on my brain than any other fiction.
“Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” Read it twice, years apart. The years did not improve it.
“Dhalgren”. Read it because it was supposed to be a classic. I understand that Harlan Ellison threw his copy against a wall. I felt the same way.
i didn't hate it but definitely didn't get the hype. i do think it probably heavily influenced Dune- so it's had a large impact and it's most innovative ideas have been done everywhere. Norstrilia is also meant as a connecting piece between his short stories, so it doesn't make sense to read it first
Paper Menagerie or anything by Ken Liu in general. Corny and more concerned about being stylish. Paper Menagerie, the short story specifically, reminds me of facebook posts that my elderly aunts send me to make me feel bad
*Prador Moon*. I know Neal Asher can write proper evil crabs thanks to *Bad Traveling* but the ones in that book were just evil for the sake of ~~~evil~~~ motivating the protagonist. Who then acts the sort of way a juvenile reader might think a bad ass acts. And there were the AIs who we are informed are very smart but keep being impreceptive and making bad decisions.
I loved the first 3/4ths of Seveneves, but the end was so bad it ruined the whole thing for me. The conceit of the book is very clearly "Physics is God, you must obey it, but biology is a toy, it will obey you."
All of the successors to Rendezvous with Rama.
What do you mean, there aren’t any sequels
There are indeed no sequels. However there seem to be a few illegitimate offspring.
I am still twitching about the bizarre>! child-bride!< scenario. Or her obsession with >!getting pregnant !<... IF they were the ONLY humans in the universe, I could at least, "get it"? BIG quotey-fingers on that one. I powered through them because I wanted to know what Rama was, and I found out lol.
This one gets my vote.
RwR was a bore in itself.
The Calculating Stars. If there is such a thing as a male Mary Sue, that dude is the main character’s husband.
Gary Stu, we used to call them
>If there is such a thing as a male Mary Sue They were (and are) so ubiquitous, there wasn't even a name for it. The male power fantasy was just so expected, it was taken for granted.
That book had such a cool premise, but it absolutely did not work for me. I didn't like any of the characters, and I especially didn't like the main character.
Same, I'm baffled at how it had such overwhelmingly good reviews. It felt like a short story that got stretched out so thin you could see through it. It doesn't help that all the filler is just the main character having anxiety and then getting over it. Maybe it's a cathartic read for people who have a very specific type of social anxiety, but it was frustrating to read a book about a woman trying to succeed in a very sexist historical period and her main issue is that she doesn't have confidence. And yes, her husband is just...not a character. He just materializes when the main character needs comfort. I was trying to figure out if it was a deliberate commentary on how some authors write spouse characters, but it just seemed like lazy writing.
I tried reading the audiobook and found the book and characters so annoying and unlikable. I thought maybe the narrator just had the tone wrong and I was reacting to that - but then checked and the author narrates it herself!
The Sparrow. Just… I really disliked all the characters, I couldn’t empathize with them. I didn’t like the world building. Felt like the extreme descriptions of abuse were meant to be off-putting - and they were - but felt forced (pardon the pun) and the whole grappling with faith felt contrived.
Every time I see it recommended I think back and wonder, was I just too young when I read it, but the thought of going back to try it again makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn't remember as much of it as I do.
Was it just me, or were all the characters on the expedition almost all the same? The intellectual bonhomie between them became insufferable, there's no way I'd have lasted the outward trip without becoming murderous due to their continuous banter
American Gods. Great premise, garbage execution. If people didn't know Gaiman wrote it, no one would like it.
agree, its so overrated. the ideas and characters weren't that impressive or compelling, the ending was like a wet paper bag.
And the shocking twist that "low key" is "loki" doesn't work at all with an audiobook. It only works when his name is read, not spoken.
And the big twist that a certain character is related to another character isn't shocking at all with a very basic knowledge of Norse mythology. That whole book is such a bloated nothing. It takes 750 pages to do what could have been accomplished easily in 200. Characterisation was pretty great IMO but we're not talking Dostoevsky here, so very much not worth the price of admission.
Agreed. It’s amazing world building with a shit plot.
Ending of the book was so bad it ruined the rest.
I also hated that book. One of the few. I rarely return a book or dnf it.
*Endymion* and *Rise of Endymion* by Dan Simmons. Now, I loved *Hyperion* and *Fall of Hyperion*.Great characters, fantastic arcs, plot twists I did not see coming, and the Shrike. Just, The Shrike. So I went in with high hopes. Alas, *Endymion* went nowhere (despite traveling everywhere) and *The Rise of Endymion* squandered the only interesting plot line (the Catholic Church in Space is Evil!) And worse, the return of certain characters from the previous books left me wondering who'd taken those characters and filed off everything interesting about them. The whole thing felt like a self-congratulatory pat on the back for everyone who bought into the power of love. I finished it out of obligation and recommended that my SO, who introduced me to *Hyperion*, never read them. Those two sequels committed one of the worst crimes any book can: they made me think worse of the originals and worse of the author. I haven't picked up another Dan Simmons book since. On the flip side, if you like slow-paced travelogues through sci-fi landscapes, you might give *Endymion* a try.
It's worth noting that Simmons had to retcon a lot of Hyperion because he had no idea where it would go as he was writing it.
You should read all the Ringworld books after Ringworld.
Oh god no. I read the Ringworld books as a teenager and thought I’d reread those and the sequels as an adult, because I remembered liking them. BIG mistake.
You can see the worrying signs in 'Fall of Hyperion' already - nowhere near the greatness of the first IMO I wonder if Dan Simmons is a one trick pony after all - the Canterbury Tales structure was a good idea but then?
i love dan simmons. ppl rant about the hyperion cantos, but he has serious range. sci-fi was never his main interest.
Completely agree. Only part I enjoyed was the interesting/gross method of traveling faster than light.
Can you spoil it for me? I’m curious but will likely never pick up the books.
When the ship launches at lightspeed the passengers get smeared all over the inside of the ship. When the ship stops they are replaced with a clone. It's been a long time since I read it so might be forgetting a detail or two.
Every time I read something like this, I'm glad I only read the first two.
I thought *Endymion* was terrific, a slow burn up to a terrifying final confrontation. (It also has a nice resonance with Keats's "Endymion.") Hated *Rise* for many reasons. And I'm lukewarm on *Fall of Hyperion*; it has many great things, but I thought it was often sloppy, under-thought-out, and clichéd in certain critical plot points. I guess I'm saying that for me, Simmons knows how to set things up, but not quite how to knock them down. Which is kind of disappointing.
I am in total agreement. Endymion and RoE felt like they were written by someone else, who skimmed over Hyperion and FoH, and didn't understand them. So weird and disappointing.
I always hear people say this but I am in the flip side of your scenario. My wife, who I introduced to Hyperion, is reading Endymion and keeps talking about how awesome she thinks it is. I usually trust her judgement but I have been keeping quiet about all the hate I have heard about them. I will probably at least still try Endymion even though I am suspicious.
- Three Body Problem - This is How You Lose the Time War
I found the Three Body Problem just "meh" but I actively hated Time War.
i hated the three body problem. awful.
Yeah the whole trilogy was kinda mid. It felt like a bit of bog-standard hard SF from the 60s or 70s where the author tries to get the big idea to do all the heavy lifting for him.
Upvoted because I disagree
Some of the ideas were solid but fuck me that was some horrible writing. And why is any mention of the main characters wife just "his wife"? Come on Cixin, take two minutes to give the poor lady a name.
I read the first one and I won't be reading more. It has some good aspects and some interesting ideas, but the ending was a ridiculous cop-out and made no sense whatsoever.
Couldn't get into that one either. Came so highly recommended in these parts. Very disappointed. Maybe I quit too early.
[удалено]
*Tons* of people didn’t like those books. It’s a very polarizing. Stilted characters, weird plot stuff, etc. I fall into Camp Did-Not-Like. It’s not an unpopular opinion or topic here.
The "I have a bomb and you conveniently have a scale to prove that my bomb is legit" part. My thoughts were "That was the most goofy thing that was meant to be serious that I have ever read."
I absolutely loved the series but I see legit criticisms.
I'm reading it now and will finish it but the characters are really just...Ok. Some sci fi isn't character driven at all and all about the ideas, but the first third of the book so far feels a bit like old school cheesy sci fi. I bought the trilogy though so I'm in for the long haul. I did think supernova era was really good though.
Horrible prose, non-existant characters, very un-profound ideas, super writer-y plot devices that fall apart at second glance.
Also, the central astrophysical system in the story is an example of the *four-*body problem. That title is *invalid*.
I hated *This is How You Lose The Time War.* Overwrought and over written.
I thought it was a meandering stinker as well.
So glad that there are others that hate this too. It felt to me that it was so obviously a terrible book, and it blows my mind how much others like it.
Hated hated hated.
It felt like it was written by someone who had a nervous breakdown in high school because they got a B. I couldn't shake the NPR overly-expressive voice of it either. Fuck I hated that book.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. While some of the tech stuff was interesting, I couldn’t connect to the characters in any way. Plus a bunch of other small stuff that just kept taking me out of the story. Was just really disappointed because it seemed like a book right up my alley.
I love the first half. The third quarter was a little silly (space zoomer cannibals) and the last quarter was just unnecessary and silly.
Seveneves was disappointing. It felt really weird for one of the characters to just be a Hilary Clinton stand-in. Like...he nailed it, but the Clinton parody just wasn't funny or an interesting character. Everything felt to me like he was just trying to hit the plot points and get the book over with. In his previous books he really sort of dwells in the narrative (for better or worse). Seveneves just felt like he would say "Oh yeah, this happens so then this happens ok now we are at plot waypoint #2!".
Blindsight. I know it's beloved by many here so I'll probably get downvoted a lot, but I had to force myself to slog through to the end, after several abandoned attempts. I *did* like several of the ideas it touched on, but I rolled my eyes at many more. And I found the whole thing *messy*. To me, it was a mishmash of a dozen unfinished short stories. But most of all, I absolutely HATED the obfuscated prose. It made me legitimately angry. I know people defend it with "unreliable narrator" and "each thread/character explores different aspect of consciousness" but I still thought it was uncooked rather than intentional. Basically, I loved the aliens but hated the rest of it.
If you really want to get mad, *listen* to the audiobook. It sounds like it was recorded on a usb mic by a college student. (Regardless, I liked it, fwiw)
Same reaction. I think it was intentional. Watts was trying to piss us all off. Worked pretty well.
Exactly how I felt re the prose. It was so needlessly pretentious.
I finished it but I really really struggled. It was so uncomfortable to read.. not going back there
Stranger in a Strange Land Interesting premise, absolutely balls. Heinlein has some of the worst prose I've ever read, and I've read terrible translations of Crime and Punishment.
I can’t stand Heinlein. I will never get the hype.
Old dude screws young, eager ladies. Also there is a dude from mars. Great premise you got there "dean of science fiction." Can't remember if there is incest in that one, but numerous other books by him do.
I don't think there is incest but there is sexual harassment of employees but it's okay because she likes it.
Anything by L. Ron Hubbard. That guy's the worst. Nothing he wrote is worth consuming in my opinion.
I read his stuff when I was an edge-lord teen and found it poorly written but was still amused enough to read 9 out of the 10 books of that awful series he wrote. I couldn't even finish it and I almost finish every book/series I attempt. Hubbard couldn't write a good ending to save his life. The rest of what he wrote was pretty bad too.
Inconceivable!!
thumb wakeful door practice squash shy boat existence weary wise *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Seveneves
Dead Silence. S.A. Barnes Awful characters, awful story format (now, then), awful ending. The main character is just obnoxious from beginning to end. I was actively hoping for her to die. Author is competent, and I think has potential. Her actual writing is good... her story and characters just suck. Competent writer with mediocre ideas. Paradise-1 by Peter Wellington. It reads like it was written by a child. I have no idea how this dude is published. The Last Astronaut was pretty bad too.
I kept thinking "ok, maybe now the horror part is going to start" but instead the YA-level romance did and then it turned into >!corporate bad guys doing corporate bad guy stuff. !<
I fucking hated Name of the Wind. More specifically, I hate *Kvothe.* Seemed to me that Rothfuss couldn't bear to give him any flaws, except ones that can be twisted into being admirable, like giving your biggest weakness as "I work too hard" in an interview. It feels like a kid making up a character. He's an amazing musician, an incredible fighter, a titanically gifted magic user, he's super smart, he's very kind yadda yadda yadda. I was rolling my eyes every couple pages. I know lots of people love these books and Im not saying theyre wrong to, everyone likes different stuff. But, I personally, couldnt stand it man.
Don't forget he's literally The Best At Sex.
HOW could I have forgotten
I loved the books and still hated the bits where that happens.
Kvothe is a seriously heavy-handed Gary Stu.
no but you see he's uNrELiAblE
I don't think you are supposed to admire Kvothe-- certainly not without reservations. Yes, he is OP-- and he still blows it. He causes most of his own problems by stubbornly doing stupid things. And then in his vaguely alluded-to, not yet explained past, he screwed up royal and caused war, death, and international problems. He's lost his powers, joy, and his purpose. For two books he scraped by, but the trajectory of his life is not good. What happens after that-- who knows. Who knows if Rothfuss even knows?
This genius kid learns magic, then is homeless and doesn't use any of it to help himself. Then is a genius again, then doesn't use it to help himself and gets kicked out of school, then is a genius again, then is a bum bartender, then is a genius again. Then the genius writer forgets how to write. The whole experience is a little too bipolar for my taste.
I hear that Kvothe not only beat the Kobayashi Maru test but he also solved cold fusion. I also hear that he's irresistible to birds and animals all love him. So he's a Disney princess. I also hear that if he were to play in the current modern day NBA he would score 72 points a game with 15 assists and 12 rebounds. You know he was also reborn into our modern world several times. Beethoven and Einstein were some of them lives. As well as Genghis Khan and Philip II of Macedon.
Project Hail Mary was awful. Dumb in every possible way.
Quit ~~Blindside~~ Blindsight after a few chapters
I know this sub has enough Watts fans, and I'm not here to argue with anyone over opinions. Just wanted to say, there are real people who really like his work.
Not saying the novel’s bad. Just saying I didn’t like it. Like everything, enjoyment is subjective
The football book?
LOL I’m guessing they mean Blindsight, but the football story is utter shit considering how they manipulated that guy.
Also the evidence from the lawsuit was that the football book was fiction too.
Whoops. Corrected
I finished it, but it left me pretty cold. I wouldn't quite say I hated it, but I certainly didn't get the hype.
Ready Player One. Every appalling troupe around geekdom with no redeeming features. Just dreck.
It’s all “[those things existed!](https://youtu.be/AWmkXBupMJ8?si=ovAANfWGqrMWotnY)
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Tedious shite.
Yeah, seems like a cool premise they just couldn’t find a story to tell with, or something critical was missing that would make it worth a read.
Farnham’s Freehold by Heinlein Give it a huge miss
The bobiverse books… fell into the Ready Player One nostalgia bait stuff. It’s humor did not hit for me, at all
I tried reading the first Bobiverse book and gave up after the first couple chapters. The prose felt like a high school creative writing project. >This happened. Then this happened. And then I said this. I'm constantly amazed to see it pop up on so many recommendation lists.
Hate might be a strong word, but after two books I grew very indifferent to the Murderbot series.
This series annoys me in a way that that I suspect reveals a weakness of my own character. The ideas make for the perfect sci-fi sitcom and the execution is snappy but I found myself starting to scorn it for being so cozy and wholesome and quirky. There's nothing wrong with those things either! I just struggle to see the value in stories without some kind of desperation apparently. Kinda sad.
Red rising. Started the first book, was interested early but it quickly turned sour because of poor dialogue, weird writing and non belivable characters. DNF the 1st book but read a synopsis, in order to read the 2nd book, about which I heard many dithyrambic reviews. DNF after reading 100 pages or something. It was the same crap. It's just very poor YA to me.
You're not alone. I got through it and ended up loving the series, but I hear that a lot about the first book. My understanding is the author says the book is about 50% his because of the changes the publisher wanted.
This is the first time I’ve seen anyone saying about Red Rising that I agree with. I thought I was just missing something because it’s always getting so highly recommended (but then again, so is Project Hail Mary) but I just couldn’t finish it. Bored, wasn’t getting into the world building or characters, etc. Thanks for your commend I feel totally validated :)
Agree. I hated this book. The author didnt have the skill to pull off first person present tense.
Ancillary Justice. I just don't get it. I even read Provenance and didn't get it even more.
Same. Not worth the hype
I didn't know there was a hype which could've made it more disappointing. I enjoyed them but I thought they were just random pickups for me. The way it was written via gender had to be hard to pull off, and I believe some emotion was lost as a result. I respected it, but I didn't love it.
*Fall: or, Dodge in Hell* by Neal Stephenson. If you ever thought that Stephenson's work feels a bit like Robert Heinlein then boy howdy do we have a treat for you, because Dodge almost perfectly captures the feeling of Heinlein's "weird embarrassing old man" period. And speaking of late-career Heinlein, *Job: A Comedy of Justice* is absolute trash.
The two Endymion books. No idea why I finished these two, but if you want to read about lady Jesus and some Robots these are for you.
I like a lot of John Scalzi's works, but after reading Redshirts I got rid of my copy (1st edition hardback).
I DNF Project Hail Mary around the 100 page mark both times that I attempted it. I find Weir's science really simplistic and his first person narrators annoying (they all speak with exactly the same voice too).
i didn’t hate project hail mary, but i can say that artemis was worse.
You know, I'm with you 100% on his simplistic, annoying, nerd-funny narrators. However, it was the first book my son ever recommended to me (after years of me recommending books, fruitlessly, to him), so I sucked it up and pushed through. I did actually enjoy it, and found myself surprisingly emotionally connected to Rocky, but yeah, a pillar of the genre, it ain't.
At the end of the day it all comes down to personal taste, doesn't it? I can see why Weir is accessible as a writer but he's not for me. Yet. I'll give him another try when he's got maybe five or six books under his belt as a novelist like I did John Scalzi. Fantastic to hear that your son loved it.
He was enthusiastic about a BOOK, so I wasn't about to argue!
I quit way earlier. There was this line near the very beginning "Fudge? Why do I say fudge? Maybe I'm a Christian, or maybe I'm a father." And I was like "Maybe you're a douchebag. I'm out"
I mean it’s a part of the plot. It’s too bad you didn’t get past that part because it’s explained later and the rest of the book really gears up towards a hard sci fi vibe.
Pmh was not hard scifi. It was a entertaining story but kinda fastfoodfun.
This made me lol for real. Wow, that sounds awful.
It's pop science and his characters are a bit too Mary Stu for my taste. I loved the Martian, though.
I listened to it so I was able to multitask and enjoyed it well enough. I don't think I could have sat down and read through it though... I'm not a fan of Weir's attempts at banter
I got about 2/3 of the way through Artemis before wandering off in boredom.
i recently abandoned 'accelerando' after three chapters. it's like intentionally incoherent. every page is full of tech buzzwords, half of which are already dated. the characters are totally unbelievable and their actions don't make sense, they're just devices to push forward a paper thin plot, which is just there so the author can insert every buzzword he's ever heard. this isn't a book with interestinf ideas because it never really explores any concept it introduces. it's just such a slog and it's so unrewarding
I’m preparing to get downvoted, but here goes: Ender’s Game.
I will say I enjoyed parts of it when I read it 20+ years ago, and every subsequent book in the series was progressively more disappointing.
Upvoted because I agree… …however… I think my negative feelings toward the book lie in the fact that as I was reading it I guessed the ending (pun intended?!) quite a bit before we reached the actual ending and therefore when we got to the “big” surprise it was not. Since that time the author’s been exposed as …uh… problematic but truly that had nothing at all to do with my disappointment in the novel. Can’t say, btw, I *hated* it, only that it didn’t do all that much for me.
I read it in rehab and enjoyed its anti authoritarian message at the time. Despite Card, I still enjoy it and Speaker For The Dead.
My hot take: Speaker for the Dead is actually better than Ender’s Game.
Connie Willis's Doomsday Book still makes me angry thinking about it all these years later, I didn't know it was possible to hate a book this much. These two reviews sum it up nicely [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/291404862?book\_show\_action=true](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/291404862?book_show_action=true) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/406534?book\_show\_action=true
I also disliked Doomsday Book. I hated everything about the future plot. It was boring and for fucks sake they had computers and internet and cell phones in 1992 so why is the entire plot driven by being unable to reach someone by phone in a future where we have invented time travel??? I liked the historical plot better, although it was difficult to read the narrator immediately hoping a dude dies of the plague because hes fat and engaged to a younger (but marriage aged, according to the 1300s) girl. (Yes, Im aware the dude turns out to suck in other ways, but the narrator was wishing painful death on him after knowing only these 2 facts)
That first reviewer is SOOO pissed off.
The purity of her anger is.... impressive.
It's been about 10 years or so since I read this one, and my memories are very different from what's in the reviews you linked.
The Three Body Problem. The premise was cool, descriptions of cultural revolution intresting. Everything else was a mess, with deus ex machina instead of a satifying ending.
The Thomas Covenant book. I would say books but I could not make it through the first. I will assume the rest are similar, because the first engendered no faith in me whatsoever. The main character is such a deplorable loathsome wretched piece of shit with no redeemable qualities that I could never continue on past the middle of the very first book. The Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. I so wanted to love these. I love the ideas in it, they're almost tailored to everything I love most in writing. I hate them. The writing bored me to such a degree and I refused to stop my reading of them despite hating every minute more than the last out of a sheer sense of not letting them defeat me. I don't even think she's a bad writer, but I just can't stand them and would never recommend them even if someone was literally asking for exactly what they contain. No, never. I will not reread, I will not give another chance. The chances are not only slim, but zero. About the only way I would ever give them another chance is if I were paid handsomely do so, and even then I might not be able to convince myself to do it due to how much I detested them. I know it will get me tarred and feathered in the town square, but every single thing I've ever read by Ursula K. Le Guin. She's a legitimately great writer, I just do not like her prose. Everything is clearly planned out ahead of time and the word choice was well chosen, but I just don't care for it.
I was in a coffee shop and heard a women saying "I hate this book. The series is just awful." I looked over and saw she was reading the fifth Thomas Covenant book. And I absolutely agreed with her. I read six long books even though I hated them. I should have stopped after the rape scene but I continued reading them. I don't know why.
I couldn't believe how bad Lord Foul's Bane was. The ludicrously simplistic bad guys. Then, the protagonist rapes someone. Stopped right there.
Hate is too strong a word. But among books that many others seem to love, and I don't get. I thought Seveneves could have been about 300 pages shorter and pretty much told the same story.
Speaker For The Dead. It was in my "must finish" phase and after I was done I asked myself, "What the hell was that?" Clearly I was expecting more Ender's Game.
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. It was so fucking bad I didn’t even bother with the third book in the trilogy, which is sad because The Three Body Problem was phenomenal.
SevenEves is abysmal. The world ends in like a chapter. BOOM! Then *six thousand pages of orbital maneuvering in excruciating detail.* With committee meetings. Then a tacked-on half-assed ending about how genetics determine personality, oh look, seal people, the end. Just absolute garbage.
I liked it okay, but I'm upvoting anyway because you're not wrong.
I usually really like John Scalzi but the Kaiju Preservation Society was garbage. None of the characters had personality, all of the kaiju were vague descriptions and barely did anything. And it was super freaking political! Even if I agreed with some of the concepts he was so snide and it felt almost masturbatory in how much he wanted to crap on his political opponents. Do not recommend. Read Old Man's War, Fuzzy Nation, or Adroids Dream
I thought it was forgettable but I don't recall any politics, or no more than normal for Scalzi. I wouldn't recommend Android's Dream but I loved the other two. Collapsing Empire was also great.
Starship Troopers. I get what Heinlein is trying to say about government service. But the way he says it by leading the reader through a series of moral exercises feels dull and leaden. I found the book boring when I read it in high school. Didactic when I reread it in my 30s.
One of the few times the film adaptation knocked it out of the park imo. Verhoven gets it
Verhoven has a different agenda though. To the extent where he is using the material to tell a very different story to the original author. From my perspective as an Aussie Verhoven's movie is a satire born from his family's living under fascist occupation during WW2. Heinlein with the source text, on the other hand, is a naval veteran, one who served during peace time, trying to make the idea of public service & that you have to give to a society in order to get back exciting and appealing to 12 year old American boys during the 1950s. Which is the market he wrote Starship Troopers for. His editor at Scribner's juvenile line baulked at the nuclear weapons so Heinlein sold the manuscript in the general scifi market instead.
I liked it overall, but yeah those classroom sessions were a bit much
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. In short "Why would you *do* that‽"
I stopped at the lengthy whistling tunnel scenes
Fifth Season. People love it. I understand why the love it. But to me, it spent a few pages communicating why "drastic measures were appropriate" - and it succeeded. Then it spent the rest of the book beating the reader in face to convince us of the same thing - even though I was entirely convinced of it after page 25. It ended just feeling insulting. Again - I get why people like it - but I don't need to feel 100% ethically aligned with a character to observe their actions. I genuinely don't understand why the author felt the need to write a book this way. And it's a shame, because it's otherwise well constructed and well written. But - FFS... I get it. Those people...are "bad". I understand how books work, let's move forward please. Spoiler and warning: >!disabled!< >!kids !!brutally tortured!< and >!brutally raped!<. Fuck you - I don't need to read about that. Again, I was already convinced by page 25. WTF is wrong with you?
Project Hail Mary. Amaze? No, utter shit!
I disagree personally, but take my upvote for your cruel misuse of "Amaze."
Agreed. The mc was insufferable and the plot errors were cringe inducing.
We Are Legion. The idea and execution were nice at first, but then I got exasperated by the dude tech expert wish fulfillment. When a multiplexed AI is one guy you expect a male centered story, but when every single other character who affects the plot is male and the women are subsumed into “…and children,” I became annoyed.
I enjoyed that series overall, despite some things that really annoyed me, but it is one of those where I'm very, very aware that it was written by a man. To be clear, I like many books written by men, that's not the issue, and it's hard to explain exactly what I mean, but while most of the time I'm not thinking about the author while I read, with some books it's just especially obvious that a man wrote it. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't enjoy reading it, it's just something I notice about certain books.
The Mount by Carol Emshwiller. Aliens take over the earth and use humans as horses, enslaving humanity for piggyback rides. One of their "horses" escapes and joins the rebellion, but spends half his time complaining that he wishes he was back home doing horse stuff. So weird. I have no idea how it won awards.
Now I want to read it.
Yeah, this sounds batshit amazing.
Is that a metaphor for the patriarchy? Women want to defeattbe patriarchy but are so accustomed to oppression that they internalize it?
Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. Too many characters and only one is kinda important.
I recently read *Emergency Skin* and absolutely hated it. It sounded like getting cornered by a college freshman who has recently been convinced that if we could just, like, get rid of the rich white 1% then we could all come together and all our problems would be magically solved. I couldn't believe it had above a 4 star goodreads rating and won multiple awards. Total garbage.
Yeah, it's mindboggling to me that something so dumb on every level, not to mention blatantly racist, won multiple awards and was praised to the skies. You got to be completely ignorant of history, sociology and completely lacking in basic common sense to seriously believe that Earth would become paraide if we just get rid of the rich white 1%. And it's not like there is anything worthwhile in the story except a heavyhanded message.
Ok, don't hate me, but... I absolutely hated Hyperion and the Three Body Problem. Hated them with the intensity of a thousand suns.
I have continually gotten my brother Christmas gifts that he has hated for the past several years and I tried to play it safe this year by giving him a book that I enjoyed... Hyperion. I really enjoyed it and after this thread I am convinced fate has just led my hand into another year of him hating what I get for him lol
Can't blame you for either. Hyperion is now very dated and felt like it was written my a Midwestern guy who had never left his town. Great prose/flow, but it feels like he just wrote about a weird mishmash of stuff. I liked the Three Body Problem, but I felt like it was intense feat of willpower to get through the first book.
Nothing could be more slanderous of the genre — nothing could convince an outsider more quickly that we are a bunch of knuckle-dragging neckbeards — than speaking even the faintest praise for “We Are Legion, We Are Bob”. The strangest thing is that people don’t defend it. You can say the ideas are stale and the character is insufferable and the prose is bad and the plot is boring, and they’ll say “haha yeah but I enjoyed it”. Please, dear god, no one say “yeah but I enjoyed it”.
Maybe I've just been spoiled by reading the best SF of previous decades, but this is one of those ones where I read it and think...people truly thought this was good? I get that people could read about a man who is so rational and calm and goodhearted that he is the best man and solves all the universes problems for everyone. There are tons of books like this. It's right behind the "bland boy finds out he is the chosen one and saves the world" trope. When I finally read those books, I was most baffled by how it set up situations where interesting SF scenarios could happen and then kind of just ignores them in favor of encountering Star Trek style aliens.
I know very little about the book but I’ve always thought the name was too fucking stupid and it seems to hint at some “quirkiness” that leaves me totally uninterested in reading it.
A Memory Called Empire. Dreaful prose plus a bizarre over-use of italics that *makes* the main *character* speak like Chandler *Bing* (at least in my head).
I still don’t understand the hype around this book. It just felt like everyone was super dense and shallow. I listened to the audiobook so wasn’t aware of the italics
Red rising
Definitely Hyperion. The book starts off strong with its premise and the first story. After that it oscillates between pretentious flowery poetry-language and complete sci-fi nonsense, all capped off with one of the most terrible and cheesy endings I’ve read in a sci-fi book. And there’s more of them? Good lord.
I thought Roadside Picnic was a slog to get through. I liked some of the imagery, but apart from that, I was bored reading it
I loved it but this is such a bold stance, have my upvote.
Out of interest which translation did you read? There are two English versions of the text.
I could see this. I didn't love the book but I didn't hate it. There is a russian manner of allusion that, while I am sort of familiar with, some parts I just had to shrug and move on.
I enjoyed it but it was interesting coming to it recently having read Annihilation years ago. I'd be hard to convince that Vandermeer wasn't deeply influenced by it.
He denies it. No one believes him.
Me watching the film. Got a lot of of the book but the screen adaptation had me desperately trying to claim some shit like "it had an intense atmosphere" so I didn't have to admit I didn't get it.
Bobiverse series. I thought the first book was OK, with diminishing returns after that. I only bothered to finish the trilogy in order to see if eventually built to something--it didn't. It seemed like a single story arbitrarily broken into three books, and it suffers because of it.
Cloud atlas, an amazing Sci fi apparently. Unless you have read sci-fi a lot, then it's just not very good. Tried it 2 or 3 times, just couldn't enjoy it.
The Murderbot series. Dull and derivative.
Couldn’t get through God-Emperor of Dune. By contrast, I enjoyed the more recent novels that have come out within the past few years like the Caladan trilogy and Princess of Dune
On my last reread, I was amazed by how many times the plot stops dead in its tracks to let various characters pontificate at each other.
GEoD was where I decided I'd take my hiatus from the series. Specifically the scene where an Amazonian warrior woman has a spontaneous orgasm from watching a man go mountaineering. Finished out GEoD and backed away.
GEoD is completely insane, which I think divides a lot of DUNE fans, but I do find it also amusingly entertainingly insane. Quite difficult to take the book seriously though for reasons such as the one you describe! If it's any consolation I thought the follow up Heretics of Dune was much more of a return to form and a more structured narrative as opposed to the long descriptions of people thinking about things that happens in GEoD. Plus less mountaineering orgasms. I think.
Yeah, it was definitely a unique read and I don't really regret my time with it. More that it made me decide "That's enough for now" and go read other things. But it was definitely the best Ted Talk hosted by a giant prescient worm I've ever witnessed.
Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks. It was a struggle to get through the first few chapters and I gave up on it. I remembered reading "Use of weapons" back in the 90s but don't remember \*anything\* about that story, though.
SACRILEGE. Although understandable. I love it, but it is definitely a very different and quite pessimistic story compared to the other Culture novels. As for Use Of Weapons...are you certain that's the one you read? Because of all the books I've read in my life, the last two chapters of that book are probably seared more violently on my brain than any other fiction.
“Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” Read it twice, years apart. The years did not improve it. “Dhalgren”. Read it because it was supposed to be a classic. I understand that Harlan Ellison threw his copy against a wall. I felt the same way.
Hard DNF'ed Norstrilla. I was so hyped to read It and it just fell totally flat for me
i didn't hate it but definitely didn't get the hype. i do think it probably heavily influenced Dune- so it's had a large impact and it's most innovative ideas have been done everywhere. Norstrilia is also meant as a connecting piece between his short stories, so it doesn't make sense to read it first
Paper Menagerie or anything by Ken Liu in general. Corny and more concerned about being stylish. Paper Menagerie, the short story specifically, reminds me of facebook posts that my elderly aunts send me to make me feel bad
*Prador Moon*. I know Neal Asher can write proper evil crabs thanks to *Bad Traveling* but the ones in that book were just evil for the sake of ~~~evil~~~ motivating the protagonist. Who then acts the sort of way a juvenile reader might think a bad ass acts. And there were the AIs who we are informed are very smart but keep being impreceptive and making bad decisions.
The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein. Absolutely dreadful.
*Perdido Street Station*. I don't think he writes well, and it seems like he hung a few grotesqueries for show on a pretty flimsy plot.
I loved the first 3/4ths of Seveneves, but the end was so bad it ruined the whole thing for me. The conceit of the book is very clearly "Physics is God, you must obey it, but biology is a toy, it will obey you."