Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don't get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.

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[–] mr_satan@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Now that you mention it, yes. The characters are quite 2 dimensional and unlikeable (not all, but definitely important to mention).

That being said I thoroughly enjoyed the books and didn't stop too much on the characters. Under unlikeable, flat, awkward characters there was an interesting premise and good thinking to be had: living in a society that has no private thoughts; dark forest theory, life in a society after the end.
So what I did was take a big sip of suspension of disbelief and enjoyed the ride. The interest to see the conclusion of the story was enough to coast through all three of the books.

Also, I read those just before the hype. I first heard of the first book a few years before from an Adam Savage podcast and the premise stuck to me. So after reading the Witcher I wanted something sci-fi'ish and this hit the spot.

[–] UnrepentantAlgebra@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

I agree that the underlying ideas were interesting, but the books had so much padding. So much of the story was just "but wait, it gets worse" that I found it hard to get through at times. I feel like the books could have been half as long and still conveyed the same interesting concepts without losing much.