What’s something that you feel like you should like, but for some reason can’t get into, no matter how many chances you give it?
For me, it’s The Three Body Problem. It should be right up my alley from everything I’ve heard about it (especially the second book, which looks at the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter!), but for the life of me, I can’t get past the first chapter at all. I even tried reading it in another language to see if it was the translation that kept me from getting into it, and nope.
It’s so funny to me how polarizing KSR’s writing is. I cannot understand how people could be bored by my absolute favorite sci-fi series; I could read a whole other trilogy in the same setting! I’ve talked to so many people who just cannot stand his writing, but he’s my absolute favorite modern sci-fi author.
But I tried to read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and I just couldn’t be less interested. People talk about that series in the same ways as the Mars books, so I know I’m missing something good; I feel like some books capture our imaginations while others don’t.
It’s a bit frustrating that some books just aren’t for me, at least for right now.
I get that with The Stormlight Archive. Some people find it far too long, but I love watching someone develop, and then battle PTSD over 3,000 pages. Leaves me just wanting to give Kaladin a hug
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I believe Antarctica also shares a setting, but I’ve not read that one yet.
I feel like I should space them out; it’s hard to face not having another KSR book waiting for me.
Aurora is also one of my favorite books ever; I used it to inspire an RPG campaign that I ran.
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I still need to read The Years of Rice and Salt, I love his historical stuff like Galleleo’s Dream and Shaman too.
And the campaign was definitely not a hard sci-fi setting, I just took the concepts of generation ships, self-supporting biomes, and a war on such a ship and used those as my starting point (sprinkled with a bit of Battlestar Galactica and Rendezvous With Rama). I used the Apocalypse World system (my very favorite), and a big part of that game is having the players set up their own corner of the lore and setting; it came out as something quite unique and compelling. We started the story about a hundred years after a failed revolution blew out about half the ship with the survivors scrapping over the remaining resources. Apocalypse World is more narrative focused than simulation directed though (and tends to go PVP in the endgame), so it’s not for everyone.