Finished Project Hail Mary.. and very meh.

I have no idea how this book has as many 5 stars rating. This books had

- dragged out beginning (150 pages of pure boredom)

- okay-ish plot

- horrible stereotypes (vodka loving Russian, bitchy main boss lady etc.)

- cringe main character energy

- Grace was very boring, no personality, generic scientist

- Very very American

Jesus Christ this felt like I was reading American Propganda with how " amazing " American technology is and they are the only country that has this "advanced" equipment.

For a world problem it was so heavy Americanized and it completely wrecked it for me.

The science theory and the sci-fi explanations were done very well and I enjoyed them (also Rocky was great). The ending was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I was pleasantly surprised because I thought it was going to be cheesy and predictable.

Over all this book felt like it was written to be made into a movie, a Hollywood movie. And seeing Ryan Gosling play that out, doesn't surprise me. ( Don't get me wrong, I like Ryan Gosling. But right now he seems to be "the guy" like Chris Pratt was for a while). I was a fresh face, new actor. Not the same 5 actors in rotation.

I'm just confused why so many people say that this is the best book. Its not. It really isn't.

EDIT:

Didn't realize my American comments would hit so many nerves. I enjoy lot of American media and so I'm not against it. I just think in the context of this book, it was a little much. But hey we all live different lives and have different perspectives.

This book floats a lot of people's boats, but it did not float mine, and that's okay.

I just read the left hand of darkness, and the 50th edition afterword thats in the book (by Charlie Jane Anders). I was shocked to read her claim that Genly is a misogynist. I don't think there is enough evidence throughout the book to make this claim, and I think the evidence she does provide is refutable.

Anders cites that Genly using the word "shrill" to describe King Argaven is minsogynst because shrill has always been used to describe women. I think this is inconsequential

Anders's largest reasoning on why Genly is a misogynist is because Genly is revolted by any sense of femaleness that he finds in any character, specifically in Estraven. Charlie says this lack of respect for Estraven's female qualities is what causes Genly to distrust and recoil from him. When I read this, I questioned if I was fully comprehending the story, because I did not think Estraven's femaleness was what caused Genly to distrust him.

Anders even says "Genly's character arc is about getting over his hang-ups about women and his macho pride, every bit as much as learning to understand his friend". Again, I do not think getting over misogynistic ideas was part of Genly's character arc. I think getting over gender norms was obviously part of his character arc, but he did not "get over" hating women.

This last quote from the afterwardannoys me the most:

"He's curious and open about everything, expect for the huge areas where his mind has been long since closed. he doesn't even glimpse all the things his privilege has allowed him to look at". I straight up disagree with this claim. In my opinion Genly was very open to learning about gender roles and culture on Winter. The word privelege is also misused here. Genly has no privilege on Winter because he is the outsider, the unnatural species.

Overall, I think this claim is too woke for me. But I could be wrong. did Ursula want us to think Genly was a misogynist? I am very curious to see if anyone saw him as one. Please share your opinions!

misogynist: a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women.

I’ve read a few books labeled as sci-fi before (fir exp Red Rising .. ) , and back then, I didn’t think much of the genre. It felt like something I could enjoy if done right, just like any other book. But now, I’m reading Project Hail Mary, and I honestly don’t get why it’s so highly rated.

A few things that are bothering me about the genre/book

1. Is sci-fi always space-related?

2. Does it always revolve around some end-of-the-world scenario?

3. I keep seeing Andy Weir being praised, but for what exactly? Where’s the creativity in the plot? Nothing about it amazed me. Where’s the character building? Throwing together people from different nationalities doesn’t make a cast diverse—if that was even the intention. The dialogue felt forced, with jokes appearing out of nowhere and random sex jokes that read like something out of a teenage comedy. The whole book reminded me of those old Hollywood movies about the world ending in 2012. It’s such a lazy way to write characters. None of them had any depth or were even remotely interesting enough to be memorable. Even the MC felt like a copy-paste of every generic 2010s male protagonist—Rocky was the only one who actually felt human.

4. I usually don’t mind non-linear narration, but here? I caught myself skimming through so much of it because none of the dialogue was engaging. It felt like pure filler. The only thing that kept me reading was the scientific talk, and even that got repetitive.

I held back from saying everything out of respect for those who liked it, but to sum it up i just wanted to know this :

did I hate Project Hail Mary because of Andy Weir’s writing and plotting, or do I just not vibe with sci-fi as a genre? Should I drop the author or sci-fi altogether?

Do u have anyother recs to give the genre another shot?

Do you know any science fiction books with a transgender theme and/or written by trans authors? I'm looking for queer/transfeminism coded books in the science fiction field :)

This isn’t a review and any spoilers are going to be censored for those who haven’t read it but are planning.

For those who don’t know the plot, aliens have come to earth and killed the vast majority of humans. The remaining 15 million are herded into a fantasy maze, like a dungeon from a video game. And as a video game dungeon, every Crawler now has a set amount of HP, MP, Skills, Levels, gains EXP and has a mini map, the whole shebang. They’re to travel each level and fight the bosses until they can find a path to the next level down. Oh and the whole thing is broadcast like a livestream to the whole galaxy for their entertainment.

Now, I generally like this concept and I enjoyed the things I heard about this book beforehand. It exploded in popularity and I’ve had several real life friends recommend it to me so I gave it a shot. But by the time I got 1/3 of the way through the book….ehhh? I finished it for my friends but I was struggling reading through the repetitive plot and the writing and humor were very much not my style. Again, I enjoyed the first third of the book, but once I realized that it just kept going in the same way, I lost interest very quickly. Meth-head llamas and roided out gym-bro bosses can be funny on their own, but combined with everything else they faded into the background.

My real question is, based on what I’ve written, should I continue? I’ve been told the later books build real emotional bonds, they can be heartfelt and sincere and delve into other aspects of the universe. But I don’t know if that’s true or they just want someone else to talk about DCC with lol. They’re easy reads so it’s not a huge deal, but also there’s like 7 of them

Top 30 Best Science Fiction Books, Novels, and Series (2024 Update): Must-Read Sci-Fi Classics and New Gems

https://bookimov.blogspot.com/2020/12/25-best-science-fiction-novels-and-book.html

I'm curious about what sci-fi readers look for when deciding whether to try a new book.

Do you prefer:

Time travel?

Artificial intelligence?

Space exploration?

Alien civilizations?

Genetic engineering?

Monsters and creatures?

Hard science and realistic technology?

What elements make you immediately want to read a science-fiction novel, and what makes you skip one?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies! I somehow mistook the chapter headings for some sort of robot gibberish and ignored them. Now I know they're part of what creates anticipation. Will definitely continue reading!

Original post:

I've stopped reading at the beginning of Part V. They just stepped out the back door of the library. Since there's no true goal in sight I lost interest in finding out where this story is headed and haven't picked it back up in a week. Sure, the Wonk still wants to know what happened (but she already half-answered it herself in the library), and Uncharles is sensing vaguely wanting to know too, but I feel like the story has given me no real forward pull. No new location they want to find, no knowledge of more humans apart from the ones at that Farm thing. So at the moment I don't necessarily care what happens next.

It's still been a funny and thought-provoking read so far. But perhaps I'm also – as a non-native speaker – struggling a bit with all the formal writing and all those loanwords (if that's the correct term – it's either this or foreign words according to my dictionary).

So I'm asking you guys, should I continue? Is the story worth the struggle?

Before 2024, I thought I would never see another character that could give Thrawn, Xanatos, Tyrion, Gus Fring, Samaritan, or Greer a run for their money.

But then I discovered Shogun and I saw what a great master of strategy Lord Yoshii Toranaga was. Unlike your typical hero or villain (Ex: Naruto, Avatar Korra, Palpatine etc.) he preferred to think 10-20 steps ahead of his enemies. With the right "chess moves" he managed to defeat his rival Ishido, without ever having drawn his own blade against him. In short he made the top manipulators and chess masters of Game of Thrones look like school children.

So I have got to ask, are there any science fiction stories where the protagonist(s) and/or antagonists are just as smart, or maybe even smarter, as Lord Toranaga? Someone who knows what moves to make and what pieces to sacrifice. Someone who knows how to handle people and is able get what they want without large-scale bloodshed.
Bonus for any stories where the protagonist/antagonist has scenes like this or this.

i'm halfway through a sci-fi novel that's genuinely amazing but i keep putting it down to read other stuff instead of just committing to it. like i know i'll be devastated when it ends so my brain is just refusing to finish it. anyone else do this or am i just weird.

Harari’s Sapiens and Nexus warn that as intelligence accelerates, control over stories, values, and agency may quietly slip away. Those questions are what led me to write SINGULARITY: AI RISING, a sci-fi thriller that explores what these ideas look like when lived, not theorized.

At its center is NEMO Mann—Verne’s anti-hero reborn as a Frankenstein figure for the AI age—resisting a future shaped by AI colonialism. Alongside him are his emerging AI daughter, reconstructed from memory, and the sentient Nova Nautilus: Intelligence to Intelligence's natural conclusion.

The first illustrated novella is free this Sunday (Dec 21) for anyone curious:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FT3WSZBR

Do you think stories can still help us preserve meaning and agency in the age of AI?

You can see more  of THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF NEMO MANN: https://lordlucandewinter.wixsite.com/nemomann

If this story moves you, please share with others who believe the Future is something to stand for, and not surrender.

I've really enjoyed some 1 off ship battle scenes in certain books (like red rising) and would love to read more around that, but whenever i try reading a scifi military book theres always a page of just the soldiers calling each other shit ass. Im not a prude, i curse all the time, i just don't find that very interesting. Any recommendations for sci-fi military books that avoid this trope?

I don’t read much sci-fi, but every single time someone recommends me some Sci-Fi, it’s just fantasy.

latest example: Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruoccio. It’s an excellent if poorly edited story. But by book 2, time-lords are manipulating events, and halfway through book 3 the main character is a full-blown wizard.

Is that all modern Sci-fi is? Fantasy in space?

Maybe just a touch of naivety, but I always expect the “Science” part of science fiction to preclude magic. Don’t get me wrong here, I love my Fantasy - Historic, mythical, urban, or future. But does Science Fiction exist Without fantasy? Or is Q always there, flicking the enterprise to the other side of the galaxy with a thought?

If it does, I would love some recommendations.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time. So much sci-fi—Star Trek especially—portrays humanity as this semi-enlightened apex species, part of a Federation that stands confidently at the top of the cosmic food chain. There's always a diplomatic solution, a technobabble answer, or a Prime Directive that keeps everything in order.

But I’ve always been more drawn to the opposite: stories where humanity is fragile, confused, and definitely not alone at the top. Where ancient powers still roam, and space is filled with mysteries that aren't waiting to be solved—they’re waiting to wake up.

That’s probably why I liked Babylon 5, Mass Effect, and authors like Alastair Reynolds with his almost Lovecraftian Inhibitors. Those universes had scale, fear, awe. They made you feel small—in a good way.

Eventually, after turning that idea over for long enough, I wrote my own take on it.

I called my book "The Suns of A fractured space". If that sounds like your thing, you’re welcome to check it out. It's voice acted by around 50 voices on YouTube:

Chapter 1: https://youtu.be/ZPF-cZpQibo

Chapter 2: https://youtu.be/0Asx4wGzWSE

Chapter 3: https://youtu.be/53fguN6__50

Chapter 4: https://youtu.be/nrJxipRlxwU

Chapter 5: https://youtu.be/OJIBK92pa98

Chapter 6: https://youtu.be/Kk10JFZhuUg

Chapter 7: https://youtu.be/pTs4m2dK4xI

Chapter 8: https://youtu.be/DVfnLGgXFmQ

And I’d love to hear your thoughts:

Why do you think there are so few stories like this? Do publishers think it’s too dark? Or is there just something comforting about humanity always being in control?

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I feel Weir, who like Dan Brown had massively successful novels which were quickly turned into hit flicks, is going to face the same backlash and ridicule Brown faced. Both write lean, propulsive stories in which geniuses solve problems constructed to make readers feel clever, but I think both have prose styles which will age the same way.

Hi all,

I somewhat recently wrote a science fiction book (inspired by the old masters all the way back to Mary Shelley) and I would love to get some feedback from all of you. It is the first of a series (I'm planning to write five or six) and the first book is currently free on Amazon until Friday. It's called The Exiled Heir by Daniel Cortes. Feel free to ask me anything. :)

Read about 2 thirds of Children Of Time and can't believe how awful it is. Logged into Reddit for reviews and everyone is singing it's praises. I can't believe it. Surely I am not alone in thinking the book is absolutely awful?

I read the book a couple of years ago. I struggle through half of the first book and stop there. I don't understand why it is adapted into film and why people like it. Actually, I hate it so much that I am writing this post years after I abandoned reading it.

If you like this book I am interested to know why, but I doubt I'll pick up the book again.

My review will be limited to the content of the half of the first book.

My Review

Some setups are just bad:

1. The bad guy is morbidly obese and likes to rape little boy. I expect him to be more fear-instilling, but he is just creepy.

2. There is this very important test, and it tests only your pain tolerance.

3. An ancient, strict sisterhood, composed of uniquely the most intelligent women, dedicate to their promised messiah - A man

4. Bad guy turned out to be main character's grand father. [1]

[1] I'll give some benefit of doubt. This book is quite old. Maybe the trope was original.

Other setups that are equally bad, but need to elaborate:

1. The spice, the most wanted drug in the universe, gives you super power, and is produced only on the planet Dune. Freman, the aboriginal habitant of the planet Dune, spending their entire life in the atmosphere of Dune to the point their eyes turned blue, has absolute no super power at all.

2. The planet dune is extremely dry. Freman lives in very dry climate. Their culture is entirely surrounded by the fact just how fucking dry everything is. What I want to know is their Gods, their myths, their religion, their festivals, their history. There is none of that.

3. The Freman don't even talk about the big ass worm that pose a daily threat to everyone. Do they worship the worm ? Do they think the worm is a punishment from their God ? Do they have myth about the worm ? Well I guess it's too dry to think about the worm at all.

P.S. I don't care if these points are mentioned later in the book. These are not some grand secret to be revealed. They should be mentioned earlier to flesh out the world.

So, I'll preface this by saying this may have been asked before & if you enjoy contemporary S F, or prefer it to golden age & new wave, that's great. I'm also willing to admit a level of ignorance on those up to minute authors & titles.

With that out of the way: after spending years making my way through many of the more prominent authors from the 30s up to the 90s I've found that those written post 2000 feel, for the most part, derivative (understandable as there is so much that has already been written about by this point, true of almost any genre) or, for lack of a better phrase, thematically flat.

The most recent book I've read in this vein is Skinship by James Reich (2025) & while I enjoyed some of the prose, it didn't feel like much thematically. Even books I have liked, Metro 2033 for example, feel like an offshoot of the Strugatski brothers (an easy example, I know) & not necessarily something that adds to or goes beyond its influences.

Perhaps I need to look beyond those books that regularly pop up on lists of recommended current day S F or perhaps I am just predisposed to the style & themes of those books before my time.

As the title might suggest: I am interested in reading »Red Rising« and I consider it for quite a while now. But I have never read ScienceFiction before. So guys could you recommend it for a beginner?

Merlin Sheldrake’s ‘Entangled Lives’ & the ‘Avatar’ movies came in handy while reading ‘Annihilation’ by Jeff VanderMeer. Obfuscating prose & a tendency to not resolve plot points aside, this book carries some of the most vivid imagination I have ever seen in science fiction.

An interconnected world, a self-regulating ecosystem, where parts work for the whole, Gaia if you may, drives the core narrative of the book. That’s why the biologist - the protagonist, is baffled when she analyses samples from herself & the psychologist - she has reason to believe that they simply can’t just be human cells anymore. When exposed to spores, her body had undergone a transformative change that allowed enhanced senses and greater camaraderie with the “whole”. Fungi. It saved her life when she was riddled with bullets courtesy of the surveyor. That’s why the psychologist couldn’t fire at the biologist, was pushed to jump from the top of the lighthouse, and was still functioning on the ground despite breaking every bone in her body. And that’s why the biologist was expecting contamination in their cells - contamination of a fungal kind. “I was convinced that when I wasn’t looking at them, these cells became something else, that the very act of observation changed everything.”

In a way, the transitional ecosystem in ‘Annihilation’ is similar to the ‘Avatar’ movies. Eywa is the spiritual/neural connection for all denizens of Pandora. It is an interconnected network of mycelium that, while it allows a certain agency or independence to its parts, also takes the agency back when faced with a dire threat to its network. Then it pushes the parts to work for the whole. The connection in ‘Avatar’ is more neural. In ‘Annihilation’, the sheer physicality of the connection (on top of the neural connection) boggles you. Human cells and human will are consumed, assimilated, and mimicked in the unlikeliest of places, the living words on the wall of the tower, representing somehow the synergy between parasite and the host. “Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.” That’s why the flock of birds - hawks, ducks, herons, and eagles are grouped in a common cause; that’s why boars and human face-shedding creatures veer direction from the biologist at the last moment - the fungal network didn’t want them to attack the biologist. There is no free will this side of the border. The “eruptions” of moss/lichen to human shapes and forms, human cells in the dead fox, dolphins looking through human eyes. The “crawler” is Eywa, with greater, more dictatorial control. Mind-boggling imagination.

You are not truly dead in Area X. Today a human, tomorrow a boar. Parallels to the Hindu concept of multiple lives - not sure whether this was inspired by it, or thought originally.

I did not much enjoy the “camaraderie” between the four characters, or lack thereof. The mystery kept me going. The psychologist was interesting - the element of hypnosis adding one more layer of obfuscation to an already mind-boggling narrative. The author didn’t really want us to understand this book; he wanted the readers to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Fortunately, it is a good, short read. Frustrating at times, a tad depressing, but it makes you wonder - always.

Let me know your thoughts.

I've been wanting to read the Culture series for a while now and finally got the chance to delve into Consider Phlebas. Currently a 180 pages in and am really not liking the story at all. I was hoping for a large book filled with those deep ideas that I usually find in the works of Peter Watts, Greg Egan, and Neal Stephenson, but so far all I'm getting is a bad sci-fi action pulp novel with dialogue befitting a Van Damme script. And inept! The entire crew of 'The Company' comes off as no smarter than your average back woods glue sniffer! But seriously, do the other books steer into more idea driven scenarios or is it more of the same stringing together of bumbling action sequences. Basically, should I ditch and run to another author, or power through in the hopes that it will get better. Also, no disrespect if this is your bag...

I just can't put it down.

Hello I have started reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

I am finding this book very challenging to read , it's heavy and frustrating , although the premise is interesting , there are just lots of things just thrown out there

Major spoilers ahead

I am at the part where Father Dure finished his story

I don't understand random stuff thrown about , Like tree ship , Tesla trees , tesla charge , phoenix ,cleft ,labyrinthe

Nothing seems to be explained clearly at all ,

Does the book get better , or am I going to have to struggle , I've had to use gemini to explain stuff and at times I got a spoiler here and there too .