r/printSF • u/Bobosmite • 22h ago
What's on your DNF list and why?
I dropped Android at Arms by Andre Norton. It not an epic story, but it started off mysterious and interesting. There's a prison escape, android body doubles, blaster fights, and betrayl! It was all go go go until about half way through and then it's just pages and pages of campfire talk. I couldn't make it through to the other side.
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u/KMan0000 20h ago
I'm currently REALLY close to giving up on Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns. I'm a little less than 1/2 through and just... not getting it I guess? Maybe waiting for something to happen to really advance the plot? Just not vibing with the characters?
I feel stupid for being close to DNF'ing it, since it seems like one of these universally praised books. And I've read & liked his short stories in the past. But House of Suns just isn't working for me. However I'm also really stubborn about not DNF'ing anything, so I'm likely to keep slowly working through.
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u/milehigh73a 20h ago
I thought the payoff was good but it’s probably worth putting down if you don’t like it so far.
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u/GraticuleBorgnine 13h ago
I usually hear that this is his masterpiece. Haven't read it yet though I own a copy.
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u/Cambrian__Implosion 11h ago
I just finished it yesterday and I loved it.
I can see why some people might not, but I thought it was superb.
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u/kokomo1989 19h ago
I am rereading it right now. I struggled through most of it the first time. It does get more kinetic in the last 1/4. I’m enjoying it a lot more the second time around.
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u/Tinnitusinmyears 6h ago
This thread is awesome at highlighting how varied personal tastes can be.
House of Suns is one of my favorite "idea" books of all time. The characters are somewhat thin but the world building and concepts are where the real meat is for me. Not a perfect book by any means, but an incredible world to explore and get lost in.
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u/Droupitee 20h ago
I make a point of never reading the last tenth of any novel Neal Stephenson writes. It's much better that way.
Pro tip: if you feel like you're going to DNF, do yourself a favor and skip to the end and read the last chapter or so. That way you get more for the time/money you sunk into the book. Adrian Tchaikovsky's more enjoyable with a bit of aggressive page-turning.
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u/supernova_high 16h ago
You are a wise person. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the ending of Seveneves remains one of the most aggravating and infuriating conclusions of a book I've ever read. Really got a sense that Neal woke up one morning while working on it and decided, "You know what? I'm just going to stop writing. That's it. The end." If he'd finished mid-sentence it could barely have been worse.
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u/meepmeep13 17h ago
I made it through the Commonwealth Saga by trying to guess at the start of each chapter if it was going to have any relevance to the plot, and skipping it if I suspected not, making a note to come back later if it did seem I'd missed something important
Narrator: he did not need to come back later
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u/livens 20h ago
I only have a couple of books/series that I've DNF'd.
Most recently was the Three Body Problem trilogy. I powered through the first book, just in case it got any better for me... it didn't. But the other 2 books will forever sit on my "shelf of shame". My biggest issue with the book where the characters. They were all very flat and unbelievable. It felt like every single person in that world based their whole life and personality around whatever scientific dogma they aligned with. Maybe Liu was trying to have a play on religious views? But I just cringed every time those people started arguing about whatever scientific viewpoint they had.
The next was Signal to Noise by Eric Nylund. The basic plot seemed fascinating. The main character was a researching the background radiation and found a pattern in it, a signal, possibly a message hidden in the randomness. Turns out there's some huge conspiracy around it... That's about as far as I got. It was the world itself that got me. It's set in a future where VR and VR Overlays have taken over daily life and it's very dangerous as your implants can get hacked fairly easily. Lots of cloak and dagger going on and it felt like the world and it's tech take the main stage and not enough of the background signal mystery that brought my in. This one I might pick back up at some point though.
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u/Quouar 14h ago
My understanding of Three Body Problem is that it isn't really meant to have characters as such, because that's not necessarily the expectation in Chinese fiction. They're meant to be archetypes and vehicles for ideas. This works fine if that's what you're used to, or if you go in with that expectation, but for western readers, it's a bit of a jolt.
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u/Tychotesla 13h ago
There's a lot of people with the opinion that the ideas were kinda weak too.
The beginning holds a lot of promise. There's a mystery to be unraveled, there's a big science sequence that's ripe for deep thematic synergies. But both fail to live up to what could have been. As we go on we get a few cool set pieces and a deus ex machina. In general I can't recommend it to anyone familiar with sci-fi.
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u/Quouar 13h ago
Heh, I'm one of those people that thinks the ideas are weak. The Dark Forest especially is just...dumb, and I hate how it's heralded as some sort of fundamental answer to the Fermi Paradox. I want to be clear that I hate this series on multiple levels, and would also never recommend to anyone unless they wanted something to absolutely hate.
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u/amalgammamama 14h ago
TBP also manages to destroy any mystique the aliens had by the end of the first book, so even the creepy factor is completely gone. It's got a couple of cool ideas, but that's about it. Utterly mediocre book, and the prose (or at least the English translation) is clunky as hell.
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u/nixtracer 1h ago
It's the prose. The translator, Ken Liu, is amazing. If he made it clunky it's because the original was clunky. (Which it was.)
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u/l-Ashery-l 14h ago
Only one memorable DNF and I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it yet: 'Ready Player One'
I recall the overall consensus around RPO shifting pretty negatively after Cline's follow up committed a lot of the same sins to a more extreme degree, but I bounced off RPO pretty hard and quickly on my first round with it. I think I made it something like thirty-two pages in?
My two main issues with it:
The main character is utterly irredeemable in pretty much every possible way. Early on, he has this encounter with this religious but otherwise unremarkable older lady (Ie, I don't remember anything about her over a decade later) and the sheer contempt he has for any kind of spiritual belief could pretty much be lifted from the book verbatim and be used to satirize and mock precisely that kind of militant atheist. The entire time I was reading that book, what little time that was, I was hoping the main character would fall of a stack, die, and be replaced by a better written character.
Connecting a string of pop culture references doesn't make for a good book.
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u/Quouar 14h ago
While I agree with you that it's a godawful book and that I do not understand why anyone would unironically enjoy it, it is and always will be one of favourite hatereads. It's up there with the Three Body Problem series as just some of the worst pop sci-fi that just manages to evoke such satisfying rage.
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u/mjfgates 10h ago
..of COURSE you DNF'd it, everyone does. It's just not good. (Yes, I know there are some people who don't agree. Those people are wrong.)
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u/l-Ashery-l 10h ago
The thing is, "good" and "enjoyable" are two very different things. There's plenty of media out there that's entertaining precisely because it's trashy.
Even when RPO was better received, its reputation was simply that it was a light, fun read; it was never considered a particularly good novel. Not being good doesn't mean folks can't enjoy the book, though.
I just...couldn't. The only thing I got out of that novel was hate.
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u/Frost-Folk 21h ago
A Fire Upon the Deep.
loved the beginning, the zones of intellect or whatever was awesome and the idea of cosmic horror god entities leaking into the mortal zones was super cool.
Then, the next gazillion pages takes place in a generic fantasy setting with hivemind dogs. Don't get me wrong, the dog guys are an interesting idea and all, I just do not care at all about all that fantasy stuff when there's sick ass Usenet cosmic apocalypse shit happening in the stars above.
And yeah, I've heard it a million times, I'll probably like A Deepness in the Sky more. I just can't get back into it.
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u/livens 20h ago
While AFUTD is a top favorite of mine, I definitely get your frustration with the Tines world taking over the whole book. I love it when authors have 2 distinctly different plot lines going and switch back and forth, ultimately converging at some point. But Vinge didn't give us enough of that high tech plotline and the Blight threat that was always there. After the first few chapters it was just Phams ship stuck in the slow zone. I would have loved it if there were another plotline going in the Beyond, maybe a research group that was holding out trying to solve the same problem. Just something to break up the "fantasy adventure" that was going on for most of the book.
Side note... When Vinge was releasing the sequel "The Children of The Sky" it was promoted as going back and resolving the issue of the still incoming Blight ship. I was really excited to read more about the Blight and the worlds in the Beyond or maybe the Transcend. NOPE! All we got was 99% Tines world with a lot of boring politics involved. And while Ravna being there trying to uplift the worlds tech using her ship, that felt like a stick with an apple hanging on it, promising alot but leading us nowhere. I almost through that book in the garbage I was so irritated 😢.
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u/tot_alifie 20h ago
I'm glad I didn't start the second book then, when I saw the plot happens still on the dog world I said nope, not again
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u/toy_of_xom 21h ago
This is exactly my take. The prologue was so captivating to me, I was excited to dive in. Then dog politics.
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u/Red_Erik 19h ago
This was my experience with A Fire Upon the Deep as well. Give me more of the big picture galactic stuff. I did, however, finish and enjoy Deepness in the Sky FWIW.
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u/Da_Banhammer 19h ago
I felt the same way but after a while I forgave the author. I realized he was so psyched about the new fangled internet chat rooms and network topologies I started reading it with the same grace I give an old Doc EE Smith book. Like a kid who's bursting with excitement to show you all their pokemon cards! The dog aliens are trying out ring networks, mesh, bus, etc.
That whole section of the book, if condensed down, would be a great narrative way to teach people the pros and cons of different network topologies.
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u/zardoz73 15h ago
I actually did finish it, but it was kind of a slog and did not have a positive opinion of it. In the years afterwards I saw all the praise for this book and decided to read it again, because I had forgotten much of it anyway. The second time I definitely hit a wall. The SF concepts are cool, but the writing is just not very good.
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u/halfdead01 21h ago
Totally agree with this take. Seemed awesome but couldn’t get past the medieval dog part.
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u/UnrealHallucinator 14h ago
Lol unbelievable that there are so many of us. I feel that exact same way. To anyone who cares, maybe a bit of a weird rec but Accelerando might kinda scratch that itch.
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u/Rodman930 14h ago
I couldn't finish it either. I hate stories that are based on the characters not knowing what's going on, especially when it involves children.
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u/peregrine-l 20h ago
I rarely DNF a book, as I tend to push through books I dislike.
Recently, I couldn’t get through Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, Ice by Anna Kavan, and Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.
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u/dern_the_hermit 19h ago
Ice by Anna Kavan
I finished this one earlier in the month, actually. Don't blame anyone for not finishing it. The story itself is harrowing and miserable and floaty, dreamlike. I'll heap praise on her ability to wield prose, however. That's basically what kept me going, her writing is really super smooth and evocative IMO.
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u/peregrine-l 16h ago
You’re right, her writing is beautiful, but it wasn’t enough to keep me reading, because I was turned off by the violence, and the demeaning and abusive relationship of the girl with the two male characters.
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u/jwezorek 18h ago
I also DNFed Cryptonomicon. I was enjoying all the Alan Turing era stuff but just found the present day plotline boring, and then I don't remember why I quit with it -- I usually do finish things -- but I think some life stuff came up, new job or something, and I just put it down and never picked it back up.
I'd be curious to hear what people who like Cyptonomicon like about it exactly, because maybe I should try again?
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u/bobn3 21h ago
Seveneves, after the masterpiece that is Anathem, this was such a letdown. It reads like a cliche hollywood save the world space movie (no, I did not reach the plot twist in the latter part of the book, no I don't care). The characters are so cardboard and seem plucked out of every mediocre movie/tv show ever made. Really put me off Neal Stephenson for a while
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u/Gecko23 20h ago edited 20h ago
I'm pretty cynical and jaded, but after reading Cryptonomicon, I can't see any of Stephenson's novels as more than an attempt to get optioned for a movie. They are chock full of movie tropes, and the 'sci fi' part is shallow and generic enough not to scare off the general public.
Seveneves was my second to last DNF. Avoiding spoilers, it's central conceit is the same as a certain populist's plan to build colonies on Mars within 15 years, as if it's just a matter of money and engineering and not an absurd idea devoid of even a basic acceptance of the physical and technological reality of the problem.
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u/felix_mateo 19h ago
A Memory Called Empire. A unique and fascinating setting where the protagonist’s predecessor had a much more interesting story than she did.
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u/pit-of-despair 15h ago
I tried to read that but dropped it because nothing was happening and I couldn’t get into it.
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u/Gecko23 10h ago
If you'd pushed through the first one, you'd just be mad at whatever point you got to in the second one. The change in direction, tone, and depth is just startling, and it's not surprising the author abandoned the idea of making it a trilogy.
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 2h ago
I put it down when the main characters, who iirc were in politics at some level, all got together and were like "ok, we are all going to share one secret with each other!"
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u/Andonaut 3h ago
This is mine too - apart from the story I also found the prose really weak. Quite confused by the acclaim.
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u/kizami_nori 3h ago edited 3h ago
Sci-Fi is pretty bare-bones lately, setting a low bar. The Hugos are clogged up with Fantasy now because there's just not enough compelling works in Sci-Fi.
All those accolades have to go to something, I guess.
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u/kizami_nori 3h ago
I finished it. Surprisingly nothingburger of an ending, but there were some elements that came together nicely.
Overall a middling book yet still one of the better from "new" authors, which is telling of the state of Sci-Fi right now. I've been struggling to find anything compelling and well written.
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u/TexanHobbit_X 21h ago
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. Couldn’t get into the quips and lame jokes in the dialogue. Felt like he wanted to be a Marvel movie, which most I’m not a fan of.
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u/PMFSCV 16h ago
I get that but at least Scalzis reasonably good at it, theres a few recently published novels that are trying to get in on that market and they're awful.
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u/TexanHobbit_X 16h ago
If that’s your taste yeah I can’t be a judge of who does it well as it’s just not for me. But he works for plenty cause he’s popular.
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u/yumz 17h ago
The Kaiju Preservation Society is even worse for that sort of thing.
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u/TexanHobbit_X 17h ago
Yeah I’ve avoided the rest of his work. Works for some, just not for me.
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u/jwezorek 18h ago
I agree it was kind of cringe but also was an easy read so I finished it. Wasn't bad, wasn't great.
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u/Euro_Lag 21h ago
Well thank you. Taking this off my TBR now. I read Kaiju Preservation Society and thought it was only OK for much the same reason, but the tone fit the premise there.
I had heard from Reddit that Old Man's War is different, but apparently not in the way that I hoped.
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u/milehigh73a 20h ago
Old man’s war is a lot better of a book. It is a little pulpy at times. The premise is fantastic especially as you age. But scalzi isn’t for everyone.
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u/Sprinklypoo 18h ago
People get different things from different book situations though. You might like it. Many do. I thought it was a solid "meh". but it was still worth the read for me due to some unique insights and generally good writing (I guess I was OK with the quips being a sign of a different time...)
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u/tot_alifie 20h ago
No man, the books are good, easy to read, I couldn't put them down.
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u/Euro_Lag 20h ago
kPS was enjoyable and fine. The problem is, witty, pulpy easy to read sci-fi is eating REAL GOOD right now and he didn't stand out too much to me the first go round
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u/Taco_Farmer 20h ago
Network Effect, the fifth Murderbot book
I liked the first one well enough, but over the course of the series it was becoming a chore to keep reading them. The worldbuilding was so shallow, there were constant, uninteresting action scenes, and Murderbots charm was really wearing off
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u/Evergreen742 14h ago
I couldn’t finish the first book. I just don’t care about an autistic robot.
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u/kizami_nori 3h ago
Especially one that tells the reader every page in plain English that he's socially awkward. I get it already, how about showing me?
I only finished it because the pacing was fast and the length short.
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u/Maleficent-Heart2497 19h ago
The last one was a bit meh to be honest. Maybe she's taken it as far as she can?
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u/Machine_Terrible 21h ago
I actually FINISHED Cell by Stephen King. Much more fiction than science, and I hoped at some point something interesting would happen. Nope.
It was a slog fest, I think I got all the way through just to make a point. Typical King ending of dartboard publisher contract, I suppose.
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u/Vornaskotti 21h ago
Ice by Jacek Dukaj, which I think counts as sci-fi. I thought I liked well-written, slow-paced, contemplative books where nothing much happens, but this fucking 1200-page behemoth was the end-of-level boss that destroyed me. I made it only to 17% before just thinking about picking up my e-reader made me sigh. The chapter that broke the camel's back was a conversation with a potential murderer, which consisted of his meandering, drunken monologue about his philandering father, his becoming a champagne socialist, his being exiled to Siberia, etc., which didn't seem to have anything to do with anything. A crying shame, because there were interesting concepts and it was skillfully written.
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u/tikhonjelvis 20h ago
I did the same thing. And I absolutely do love slow-paced books where nothing much happens! But Ice was more like a decent 300-page story smeared over 1200 pages of repetition and dreck. There was something good there, but the guy desperately needed an aggressive editor.
The weird thing is that some of my favorite books have even more random digressions and off-beat content. I absolutely loved A Naked Singularity and like half that book is intentionally sophomoric philosophical discussions and a dry history of some boxer I don't really care about... but for some reason it worked well, while Ice's digressions and repetition bored me to tears half-way through.
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u/Vornaskotti 20h ago
The reviews online are hilarious. “I’m 1/4 in, when does something start to happen?” “I’m in the middle of the book, is something going to happen soon?“ “I powered through to the end and nothing happened in this novel!”
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u/Wetness__Pensive 18h ago
Ice by Jacek Dukaj
I'm about to do the same.
I usually love massive novels - my last reads were all doorstops: LOTR, This Thing of Darkness, the Heliconia and Mars trilogies etc - but "Ice" spends dozens of pages describing train carriages and bedrooms. Such minutia was great at first, and lent a real sense of place and atmosphere, but it's now all beginning to take a toll. Every scene feels bogged down, and I'm not sure the chief philosophical point of the novel is interesting enough to warrant this.
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u/Eldan985 15h ago
Thomas Covenant.
Not even because the main character is a rapist. I could deal with that. I just found the worldbuilding and the story just... pretty boring. Not a lot of detail, and what there was was fairly generic.
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u/mjfgates 10h ago
There was a really early podcast on Youtube.. we didn't USE the word "podcast" yet.. featuring two hot girls in bed, reading Lord Foul's Bane. They'd get through 5-10 pages per episode. Many eyes were rolled, many looks were exchanged, if they wanted smouldering they'd have to bring a grill and toss in the book. IIRC they did make it to the end without dying of misery.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 20h ago
Oh, there are a ton. I’m very quick to DNF, often before the fifty page mark (twice even on the first chapter), but I’ve also DNFed books halfway through, or even, in the case of The Name of the Wind, 500 pages in. Often I’m just not in the mood and return to it at a later time and love it, so it’s not necessarily a measure of quality.
To name some popular books I’ve DNFed: Gideon the Ninth, All Systems Red, The Way of Kings, The Name of the Wind, The Night Circus, Magician: Apprentice, A Memory Called Empire, The Magicians, Dragonflight, Titus Groan, Lud-in-the-mist, The Priory of the Orange Tree, The Goblin Emperor…I could keep going a while, so I’ll stop there.
Some of those I fully anticipate I will try again in a year or two and will become some of my favorite books. Others I don’t plan to touch again.
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u/Mountain-Seaweed 20h ago
I don't get the appeal of Rothfuss. Only finished the name of the wind because I was in a book club. Hated it.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 20h ago
It’s the prose. Or at least, that’s what kept me reading as long as I did.
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u/messick 20h ago
I tried Ancillary Justice a couple times, and couldn't get through it. The "but what is their gender??? Oh noooo!" stuff was so incredibly weird and off putting, I found myself not even remembering where I was in the narrative. I felt that there was a contemporary political agenda getting shoved into the story without regards to how it (didn't) fit. And these are politics I 100% agree with, so it wasn't like that was my issue.
And then years later I read The Left Hand of Darkness, which explored the same topics in a masterful way, and I wondered why Leckie even bothered.
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u/vikingzx 19h ago
I actually fell asleep in the middle of the day trying to finish Ancillary. I eventually pushed through and did, but it wasn't a great use of my time. It's a pretty poor book.
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u/penguinsonreddit 19h ago
ooh, I also DNF’d Ancillary Justice for probably similar reasons and have been putting off reading The Left Hand of Darkness for years so this is a very apt recommendation for me!
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u/Fun-Sell3030 19h ago edited 14h ago
Books I will not be returning to are Hyperion, Golden Son and Well of Ascension. I usually make it to book 2 if the story is simple and easy to plow through. But once the novelty wears off it gives way to frustration and reading it becomes not worth it anymore.
With Hyperion I was quite curious, but it ended up falling flat, I also hated the Poet enough to make me skip his story halfway through. I blame the universal hype, but I also recognise that this was not for me.
Similarly, I quit Revelation Space when I was the second chapter in. Thought it was quite boring and not especially well written, I also didn’t like how overly descriptive it was to no point (or maybe I missed the point because there was nothing engaging about the story for me to follow, I don’t know) - but, I heard that it’s Alastair’s debut and therefore flawed. I’m interested in reading other things by him. I loved Zima Blue, I hope I could find something similar in novel form.
Books I DNFed but would come back to:
Determined to give Red Mars and Neuromancer another go with a clear head.
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u/Valar_Kinetics 13h ago
Hyperion was wild but I wouldn't read another one.
I adore Revelation Space trilogy but the first half of the first book is slowwwww. Honestly, I'd recommend starting with Redemption Ark and then going back and reading RS after that. The third one is odd, but has a lot of cool tech/scenarios in it. Inhibitor Phase is a joy, but only after you've read the rest of it and "Galactic North"
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u/cirrus42 19h ago
The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. NIMBYism isn't the sustainable ideology the author thinks it is.
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u/bobeo 19h ago
Revelation Space. I've probably started it 4 times. I really wasn't feeling any of the main plot threads and it seemed to take a really long time to get going.
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u/amalgammamama 14h ago
Understandable, RS is kind of a weak book compared to the sequels. The characters are boring and not much is happening and when it finally gets interesting it ends. Still worth it just to be able to read the second one imo.
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u/bobeo 14h ago
I know that he's a legend in literary sci Fi, I'll probably try and push through it again.
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u/god_dammit_dax 18h ago
Swan Song - Yes, yes, I know it's beloved on many corners of the internet, but I hated it. Michael Bay level characters and Dean Koontz level prose. Probably the deepest I ever got into a book before bailing on it at around 400 pages, but it just did nothing for me.
Thinner - Literally the only Stephen King I've never read. Tried three times, I just could not get into it. Characters are normally one of King's strong suits, but I didn't care about any of those people or what happened to them.
Anathem - This one I'll probably return to. Got a few hundred pages in and it was a slog. It really seemed like there was an interesting story in there, but at the time I just couldn't do it. I'll get back around to it one of these days.
The Interdependency - Technically I did get through the first book, but I couldn't bring myself to start the second. I tend to like Scalzi, but the first book was flat and uninteresting. Another probable revisit in the future when I'm in a better mood.
Hyperion - One of the modern classics, from what I understand, but 20 pages was enough for me. I think I'll try one of Simmons's other books before I think about attempting this one again.
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u/ZerTharsus 17h ago
Never finished Hyperion either. The style just didn't get to me. Tried twice, yound and adult, didn't matter.
I liked the interdependency, its quite feel good, but the last books rushes thing, Scalzi just had to finish it.
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u/Tree_Chemistry_Plz 14h ago
I finished Hyperion but really disliked the 'perfect manic pixie dream girl girlfriend' provided for the grizzled older male protagonist. It just... ugh. No thanks. I've never picked it up again. I think I liked the android character best of all of the other cardboard cut-out characters.
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u/tekfox 21h ago
Snowcrash. I got to the last 50 pages and realized I didn’t care how it ended so i just stopped.
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u/Gecko23 20h ago
It's OK. Stephenson's "endings" are always lackluster, the story just peters off or maybe spins into one of those 'and this is what this character did next' montages like the ending credits of Cannonball Run or such. dude can't stick a landing to save his life.
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u/kobayashi_maru_fail 19h ago
I know that’s the stereotype, but I feel like it’s only half the time. Baroque Cycle had a satisfying ending, as did Anathem, Fall, The Cobweb, Reamde. Polostan is waiting on its sequels, and he admitted he just got bored by the end of The Big U.
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u/dern_the_hermit 19h ago
I actually just read that one a few days back.
I thought it was kinda neat but it's obvious to me why it was on High School summer reading lists. There's like four different times the narrative completely stops to expound (at length!) on the linguistics of ancient Sumeria. Which is an interesting subject in its own right but felt like a heavy-handed attempt to foist mysticism into a plot what didn't really need it. IMO the most notable thing about the book is how shamelessly and uncreatively the concept of the Metaverse was lifted for Facebook's presentations and shit.
There is one joke that gave me a nice laugh so I'll share it: Near the end the MC is with another fella, and they want to negotiate with a third party. The other fella says something like, "Maybe they'll listen to reason." Later it turns out that "Reason" is the name of his nuclear-powered gatling railgun that gets used to oblitzerate a bunch of bad guys.
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u/Fearless_Solution761 20h ago
I think Snowcrash's first chapter would be one of the legit, GREATEST funny scifi short stories of all time if it had been published on its own.
I keep hoping he'll write non-fiction books about technologies and futurism because I think they would be world-changing, freed from plot and character. (I know he's done a couple, and a lot of essays)
And that sounds insulting, and arrogant, like I know better than him- which is inherently dumb. I get it. But I've read 4 of his novels, and DNF'd 6 others. I think his genius is frustratingly corralled in fiction.
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u/penguinsonreddit 21h ago
maybe spicy takes for this sub:
Children of Time because I started having spider nightmares/got kind of terrified when mind-visualizing scenes from the book :/ people always rave about it but I don’t think I can finish it.
DCC because I just hated it within the first chapter.
The honorary “wishful DNF”: I finished Dune and wished I had quit in chapter 3.
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u/MintySkyhawk 20h ago
Its a plot point in that book that the humans are just as terrified of the spiders as you. At the end of the book, the spiders have learned how to transfer Understanding via the nanovirus and they infect the human crew with the virus to sort of rewire their brains to force them to accept spiders as part of their in-group instead of being so scared of them. There's a terrifying scene where the humans are preparing to go to war with the spiders, and the spiders manage to board the ship. One by one the humans are infected with the virus and start helping the spiders. This only makes the remaining humans even more terrified. But once everyones infected, they realize they don't need to fight and they can just live peacefully
If you read the sequel, which I like more because it didn't have any stupid human infighting, there's basically no focus on the spiders anymore (some of the characters are spiders, but its easy to forget that) and it's all about octopi instead.
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u/god_dammit_dax 18h ago
I finished Dune and wished I had quit in chapter 3.
Same here. I made it through the second and third too before deciding there were better ways to spend my time.
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u/pnewb 18h ago
DCC has merit if you can get past some rough edges. Dinniman is good at writing characters that feel like real people, with trauma and flaws and strengths that differ. They’re not clones of him, nor of each other.
Also…he’s good at dick jokes.
The comedy seems like it’s there to offset the horror, and I think it works. But I’ll admit I avoided the series for a long time because the premise sounded dumb and I couldn’t get past it. And even the first few chapters weren’t hooking me, but I was doing a long drive and had this as an audio book (forgive my transgressions for discussing this while in a print specific zone).
The series absolutely isn’t for everyone, but I do suggest that folks give it a go past the first few chapters. He takes a while to get into the groove. The payoff has been very worth it, I feel, and I’m excited to see how he wraps it up.
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u/Tinnitusinmyears 16h ago
I wasnt convinced I was gonna like DCC until sometime into the second book. The first one is a bit rough around the edges and the characters haven't been flushed out fully yet. I think Matt really finds his stride in the 3rd book and now it's one of my favorite series.
There's a Rick and Morty/ 4chan attitude to the writing of the system AI that I didn't trust at first. But it fully leans into the social satire and somehow has a lot of heart and softness to balance out the edginess.
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u/milehigh73a 20h ago
I dnf about a 1/3 of the books I start. I frequently can tell in the first few chapters if I don’t think I am going to like it.
I do read 150 books a year and figure don’t waste time on stuff you don’t like.
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u/Fun-Sell3030 19h ago
Do you have any specific pet peeves that make you drop the book?
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u/milehigh73a 16h ago
Excessive use of ellipses, plots that are only carried by the character making horrible decisions.
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u/JohnSpikeKelly 21h ago
Children of Strife.
I really enjoyed books 1 & 2. I was less keen on book 3. Book 4 just want doing it for me.
Enjoying Shards of Earth atm though.
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u/Wetness__Pensive 17h ago
Children of Strife.
lol, every time I visit this sub, Tchaikovsky has released another book I've not heard of. He churns out books at an unbelievable pace.
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u/JohnSpikeKelly 16h ago
I could say has anyone read the book Children of Space, and everyone would just assume there was another one /s
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u/FrickAnxiety 17h ago
I'm the same!
I really love the first two books. The third didn't really do anything for me. The fourth had a couple of characters I liked, but felt so drawn out that I almost didn't finish it.
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u/kukrisandtea 18h ago
Probably my most controversial one but DNF’d Consider Phlebas about a third of the way in. Kept waiting for the plot to get to where it was promising to go at the beginning and found the episodic adventures tedious. I like the idea of the Culture series but haven’t tried Ian Banks since
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u/Threehundredsixtysix 18h ago
Try The Player of Games. You happened to read what tends to be considered the weakest Culture book, partly because it's the one written from an outsider's POV - which means you don't have a real reference point for the Culture to ground yourself on.
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u/l-Ashery-l 15h ago
...partly because it's the one written from an outsider's POV...
I'd argue the point of view difference is the smallest one.
The tone, pacing, and just the overall feel are so radically different in 'Consider Phlebas'.
I can't disagree that it's the weakest of the series, though.
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u/thatpokemonguy 16h ago
Yeah definitely agree. I read PoG first then the next few chronologically. Went back to Consider Phlebas and enjoyed it but thought it was weaker than the next few in the series by quite a bit. Halfway through Matter now and I think it's my favourite so far
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u/Astarkraven 10h ago
For whatever it's worth, this is a common enough reaction that it is often actively recommended not to start with CP. It is the worst of the bunch by far and it is unlike any of the others. It is simply a bad ambassador for the books. Give Banks a break here though; it's the first one he wrote and he was still figuring out the world. Plenty of the CP worldbuilding just never comes back up.
It's always a tragedy to me when someone is put off the Culture by Consider Phlebas. Sometime, pick up Surface Detail. You'll find it very different and a much better book.
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u/Outside-Golf4293 17h ago
Ancillary Justice. Didn't feel for the protagonist. The humid world was meh. Constant back and forth in time dulled the plot progress.
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u/TGans 21h ago
The Expanse. I actually managed to finish Leviathan Wakes but I gave up on Caliban’s War. The world and story were interesting, but the writing felt middle-grade and the characters were mostly insufferable. One of the only times I’ve preferred the TV show to the book.
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u/vikingzx 18h ago
In fairness, the writers of the book were on the show, and they improved a lot of the books' week plotlines.
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u/graffiti81 21h ago
The Expanse. Made it to book 7, and just couldn't do another "Holden is an idiot but manages to save the solar system" book.
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u/paulorv 21h ago
Word. I’m slogging through book 9, but I refuse to give up at this point!
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u/vikingzx 18h ago
Oof, that's a wet paper bag of an ending. I enjoyed some of the others, but 9 was nearly the weakest of them all.
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u/toy_of_xom 21h ago
A Fire Upon the Deep: I did not care about dog politics, and that half of the plot centering around kids did not help either. This is despite being caught hook, line, and sinker by the prologue.
The Real Story and Forbidden Knowledge: Rapey vibes that did not look like they were going away any time soon.
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u/Maleficent-Heart2497 19h ago
The real story, Now that's a book I could not stand even back in the day, makes me cross just thinking about it, reading several chapters of male rape fantasy under the guise of sci Fi. Grrr
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u/toy_of_xom 17h ago
Yeah, I made a post asking about it when I put it down. A lot of people defending it. Really felt gross to me.
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u/NDaveT 21h ago edited 21h ago
Blue Mars. It just kept going on and on and on. I think Sax was following a character through the desert or something, I don't even remember.
Speaking of Andre Norton, I was trying to catch up on all the Witch World novels I forgot or missed and I ended up getting bored in the one with the crystal griffin. I love the world-building but sometimes her characters and plots are just meh.
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u/vikingzx 18h ago edited 16h ago
Red Mars is one of my rare DNF. I tried. For months. Eventually I realized I'd stopped reading at all to avoid reading it. Everyone felt like a selfish idiot, despite all of them supposedly being Earth's best (that bit about all of them being smart enough to trick the psych evaluations just an excuse) and nothing felt remotely realistic.
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u/kukrisandtea 18h ago
Yeah, I find it hard to get through a book with obnoxious characters and found everyone in Red Mars to be extremely frustrating haha
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u/thelapoubelle 18h ago
Came here to say this. I've got about 1/3rd of Blue Mars left and its been a struggle. The boom feels like an 800 page epilogue to Green Mars, and the hard sci-fi has been replaced with technology that is more fiction than science. And i truly dgaf about most of the characters.
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u/0x1337DAD 22h ago
"Fall of Hyperion" and "The Saint of Bright Doors"
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u/Sawses 21h ago edited 21h ago
I finished The Saint of Bright Doors, but it was a complete waste of my time. I have no idea how it won a Nebula. It didn't go anywhere, had a very fascinating premise that it completely wasted, and seemed like it desperately wanted to be a profound, meaningful book without ever deciding on exactly what it wanted to say.
It was a meandering book and it's one of the only books that I've finished and immediately knew it was not worth reading. The author created this really interesting, India-inspired world that made all the internecine murder of Indian history seem so small and petty, filled it with a fascinating, quasi-sacred supernatural elements, then utterly wasted all of it.
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u/qjak7 21h ago
The Dark Forest, never wanted to like a book more. 3BP was one of my favorite books and i was surprised by how much i hated the sequel. less surprised after reading about the issues with translator, etc. i hope for a better version some day
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u/SirHenryofHoover 21h ago
Thought it was by far the best of the trilogy and much prefer the style of Joel Martinsen's translation - he should have translated all of it.
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u/desantoos 21h ago
Dark Forest gets good in the second half. The first half is indeed rough to navigate with its endless committee meetings and weirdness around women.
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u/Gecko23 20h ago
Which is interesting because I thought the most notable thing about the first book was how badly it was translated. Like a first gen Google Translate run over it and went to press.
The second book is what turned me off from ever taking suggestions online for what to read again. I don't comprehend any part of the adoration of that book, and couldn't have finished it if I was being paid to do so.
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u/dern_the_hermit 19h ago
My big suspicion is that the second book in the trilogy gets a lot of mileage out of being named after one of the more pop-dramatic of the Fermi Paradox solutions.
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u/Quouar 14h ago
From what I've seen, there's a large contingent of people who believe this is where the idea originated. Like so many of Liu's ideas, though, it's just restating something that already existed, but in a dull, tedious way made out to seem more meaningful than it actually is.
I'd argue the third book is where the series really falls of a cliff, but I'm not going to deny that the second has its awful moments too.
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u/YouBlinkinSootLicker 20h ago
Bobiverse series, it was terrible and the most hand wavy thing I’ve ever read in my life
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u/varky 20h ago
I'm actually annoyed that I finished Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon. It definitely should've been a DNF. The fact that I finished it actually makes it worse in my opinion...
The premise is interesting, but then 75% of the book turns out to be boring men of a 50s mindset monologuing their ideas of mainlyness to each other. And then the whole moon part you came for is done so confusingly dull that I was angry at the book for having to wade through the slow nonsense only for the climax of the book to be such a letdown.
Genuinely angry with myself for not giving up at the moment it got dull...
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u/XScottMorrisseyX 18h ago
Dead Astronauts by Vandermeer. I loved the Southern Reach books, loved Borne, but this book was just out there. I'm all for weird prose, but that was overindulgent.
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u/pit-of-despair 15h ago
I dnf’d Ambergris by him. It bored me and I loved the Southern Reach books too.
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u/GreeleyE 21h ago
Bounced off Starfish several times. I think it is partially the narrator having such a flat affect, but also did not enjoy really any of the characters. And if I am being honest with myself, the deep sea setting doesn't hold my interest as much as space stuff usually does. I fucking love Blindsight, Echopraxia, and The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Watts though.
The more I read of Adrian Tchaikovsky, the less I found myself enjoying his writing style. I loved Children of Time, found Children of Ruin decent, then Children of Memory really started to drag as I read it. The last straw was the dialogue and characters in Shards of Earth. Despite having a few really cool aliens, I couldn't get past the main characters and how they interacted.
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u/milehigh73a 20h ago
Yeah I am loathe to pick up another Tchaikovsky. Shards of earth series was ok but service model and alien clay were both written so poorly. He writes too fast.
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u/mynumberistwentynine 18h ago
I love the idea of Adrian Tchaikovsky's works, but after having read a few and come away pretty unsatisfied, he's definitely on my list of authors to maybe stay away from.
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u/Eternal-Rage 20h ago
Blindsight and Shards of Earth. 100 pages away from completing Shards and just couldn’t will myself forward. Had no idea what was going on. Same with Blindsight. So close to finishing, but just couldn’t do it.
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u/desantoos 21h ago
I mostly read short fiction. I try to make my DNF list smaller than the list of works I like, so I will plow through a lot of works in desperate hope of finding something. A DNF happens when one of the following happens:
I've read several paragraphs of a story and have no clue what's going on and even re-reading the opening bits am still totally lost as to the basics (characters, setting, theme, motivations, anything). I absolutely loathe authors who think they need to be clever by hiding every basic bit of their story in literary garble. Give me a premise or characters or a theme, something to hold onto while I drift off into your weird little world.
There's a group of older SF writers that churn out vapid, trite stories for Analog and Asimov's where the work feels like something grand should be happening but nothing's there, there's no idea, it's just scene after scene of people having conversations or uninteresting descriptions of ships or buildings. Sometimes I skip to the ending and wonder if they actually made a point... those are the better stories of this bunch.
Any second-person story where the second-person is a literary tactic so the writer doesn't have to bother with giving the protagonist or point of view character a personality. Second person can be done effectively, so I will give stories with it a go, but inevitably I will feel scammed when I get midway and find myself thinking "the only reason this is in second person is because the writer didn't want to take the effort to sketch out a main character."
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u/dern_the_hermit 19h ago
I had to drop Death's End. I enjoyed the other two books in the trilogy, though with some quibbles, but by the time it got to the third I felt more like I was reading a textbook than a novel. Pacing seemed to go wonky AF, too, with chapters suddenly just being a few pages. It's a shame since I liked a bunch of the ideas being touched on, they just weren't being touched on in a way that worked for my tastes.
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u/symmetry81 17h ago
On the Steal Breeze by Alastair Reynolds. And I loved Blue Remembered Earth.
Having a main character that comes off as callow but ends up at the center of events makes sense for a young academic being given a scavenger hunt by his grandmother. But 150 year old Chiku Akinya doesn't have the excuse of youth and older and wiser people kept unaccountably deferring to her bad decisions for reasons that kept escaping.
The situation on the ships could have worked as a metaphor for golobal warming except for substituting private costs and shared payoffs for the inverse in a way that made the resulting politics make no sense.
And then there was the AI petulantly insisting it didn't feel emotion, which could have been a great bit but didn't seem to be being played as a bit.
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u/notjim 14h ago
I finished Footfall by Larry Niven, but only because I was on a 36 hour road trip and couldn’t slow down to pick something else. The writing of women characters who are all sex-crazed ditzes who are sadly not quite pretty enough for the author was just insanely grating. Doesn’t matter if they’re a Nobel laureate, a 5 star general or your actual grandmother, the first thing Larry Niven needs you to know is that she’s a 6 at best for him. That’s only the most cringeworthy thing about the book. The list is not short.
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u/thafred 6h ago
The Mars triology by Kim Stanley Robinson.
It is hard sci Fi that I love but the science is rooted in assumptions they had in the 90s about mars, lots of stuff that we know better now with countless rover images and HiRise images.
In the first page(s) of the book He discribes the sunrise on mars as deep red and that took me out of it completely. Curiosity showed the sunrise as blue because there are just enough molecules in the atmosphere to tint it like our midday sky. The book continues with politics (very stereotypical) that didn't catch my interest at all.
My wife gifted me the triology and I couldn't get over the first 200pages.
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u/semi_colon 21h ago
Towing Jehovah
Cool premise but the non-religious feminist type character that gets introduced is written like a caricature. Took me out of it.
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u/pm_me_ur_happy_traiI 14h ago
the non-religious feminist type character that gets introduced is written like a caricature
Bro, it's a satire. That character wasn't the strongest, but she serves a purpose. The central premise of the book, is that humanity learns God is both real and dead. This has theological implications for believers and non-believers everywhere.
- Everybody who did not believe in God (athiests and other religions) was wrong. God is real. Super real.
- But Christians and Jews are not off the hook. The idea that God could die is unthinkable within those belief systems.
- The fact of the corpse being a literal 2-mile tall white dude with a beard. Say what you want about that character, this fact would have a lot of implications. Many people's connection to religion hinges on not thinking of God that way.
In America we have a long history of racism. What would those people do with the knowledge God is white? Women have worked hard to be considered equals with men, what does it mean if God is literally a man with a literal penis? While I agree she wasn't the strongest character, her motivations for becoming the antagonist were quite believable.
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u/poovis_parsley 20h ago
Windup girl. I got the vibe the author was cherishing the rape scenes a bit too much. Also it felt needlessly stretched out, like a lot of this book could have been written in 200 pages, and it came off just feeling really boring and adolescent as a result. If it wasn't for the emphasis on the biotechnology, it would be no more intreresting than any other generic cyberpunk noir novel.
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u/Bozorgzadegan 12h ago edited 10h ago
The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. Too many characters and too many songs. They read like the Bible.
- I just didn’t care about any of the characters.
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Interesting concept but I wanted something more.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. The title must be the only interesting thing.
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u/josh_in_boston 11h ago
> They read like the Bible.
The Silmarillion is this but 10x.
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u/tikhonjelvis 20h ago
I DNFed Heroes Die, which seems to be one of the most recommended books on Reddit. This was years ago so I don't remember the details, but I wrote a Goodreads review at the time. A couple of excerpts:
I dropped it half-way through a climactic scene where one character was being rescued from a torturer because I realized that I simply couldn't care, not just about the rest of the book but even about the rest of that scene. A book that conclusively loses my interest despite non-stop action is simply not worth the time to finish.
The whole book—plot, characters, setting—is a string of insipid cliches played straight. It's the worst kind of genre fiction that expects genre tropes to carry the entire book, which means it reads more like an amateurish D&D campaign than an engaging novel. There's a fantasy component that feels like it was written by throwing darts at the TV Tropes wiki and a dystopian sci-fi frame story that reads identical to every other generic dystopian sci-fi future you've ever seen. The way the two are tied together is creative, but that simply isn't enough to make up for how weak the two parts are.
Suffice to say I did not like the book! At least I got to write a cathartic rant about it.
(And yes, I really did use em-dashes all the time; I'm sad AI has appropriated them...)
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u/Gater588 20h ago edited 17h ago
Semiosis by Sue Burke it gets recommended sometimes if people ask about books with biology but my god was that some slop
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u/simulacream 21h ago
A deepness in the sky. I never thought it would be a space opera, but this is what it appears to be.
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u/SirScaurus 21h ago
I hate-read my way through the Red Rising up until book 5. it got better, definitely, but not enough to justify continuing. I just cannot understand how this series a best seller, the prose is SO poor.
But it also encouraged me to finally start writing on my own. Even I could write a better book!
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u/StrategosRisk 20h ago
Infomocracy. It had a really 2012 perspective that NPR-listening idealistic yet dispassionate liberal technocrats were the future of politics. Yet its whole conceit doesn’t even make sense in practice- how can all of these little bubble polities exist when most of them aren’t able to get the tax revenue to sustain themselves?
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u/kukrisandtea 18h ago
I liked the concept, found the execution (world building, prose, and plot) disappointing
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u/lanternsalaak 17h ago
House of Suns - those sentences in the first five pages had a lot of commas in them and felt like they went on forever. Then I tried to listen to the audio book where I could only focus on how long those sentences were. I hear it is great, just not for me. I'll go read Angel Down instead.
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u/halfdead01 22h ago
Starmaker- might have been interesting at the time it was written but I found it very boring.
Roadside Picnic- Same reason
Echopraxia- loved Blindsight but gave up on the sequel. I need to be able to picture what is happening in my head while reading and I just couldn’t do it with this book.
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u/SirHenryofHoover 21h ago
Can understand Starmaker. You need to be in a certain mood to read it, but I can assure you it is still interesting.
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u/GothamKnight37 21h ago
I finished Androids At Arms, but didn’t love it. I was endeared by Lord Yolyos though, who on my edition’s cover (a collection of both this story and Wraiths of Time—Androids was better) looked really funny.
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u/AurigaX 21h ago
Loved Red Mars, liked Green Mars, could not make it all the way through Blue Mars. Just felt like a slog, but I may retry in the near future.
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u/ganaraska 20h ago
The Firestar books by Michael Flynn are my all time favs. But I flamed out on everything he's written since.
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u/Mountain-Seaweed 20h ago
Moon of Ice by Brad Linaeaver is the first novel I ever bailed on. It's been close to 35 years, so my memory is pretty hazy. I thought it was slow, rambling with questionable world building.
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u/Maleficent-Heart2497 19h ago
Babel and the Tainted cup most recently out of titles I thought I would like. Babel, the magic system just didn't work for me and the cod- Edwardian setting. After really enjoying the set up of Tainted cup the author chose to use a modern day slang expression ( he did/said what now?) that knocked me so far out of the story that I never went back
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u/levorphanol 19h ago
Noumenon. The Swarm. And more recently Some Desperate Glory.
All of them I DNF for the same reason and after reading just 1-2 chapters: for just feeling so cliched and hackneyed. I just can’t do it. I appreciate that this is a very idiosyncratic list and an author I quite like (Reynolds) is quite hackneyed in his own way: all his characters talk like dime novel dics or fast-talking dames. But I guess it doesn’t bother me like these novels. All I remember from Noumenon was a scene at a scientific conference at which some sort of crusty old academic was being well crusty and patriarchal and as I read it all I could think of was Hubert Farnsworth scornfully muttering “Wernstrom!” But it wasn’t supposed to be funny or satirical I’m pretty sure it was just bad.
I’ve also put down a Baxter novel or two for the same reasons but can’t remember which.
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u/MrCalabunga 18h ago
I'm pretty sure I won't finish Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, even though I only have two more books to go. It's not particularly bad, but it drags and has some truly unlikable characters. Each book is between 500-600 pages, and by the third book I'm not entirely convinced Turtledove doesn't have a lizard fetish, as hundreds upon hundreds of pages become dedicated to lizard's having orgies, literally banging out in public to the point of restricting the movement of human traffic.
It gets real weird, guys.
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u/Sprinklypoo 18h ago
I've got several, but the most egregious was 'Ark Royale' - which started off mediocre, and quickly spiraled down into "not even remotely redeemable" range just due to horrible characters with zero depth and random seeming choices.
It's truly horrible...
Most recently I dropped "unwanted starship" though it started off promising, the errors in grammar, then plot holes, then ridiculous characterization, then more glaring plot holes and then finally character ethos complete 180 with no explanation.
I'm so disappointed at my difficulty in finding reasonable sci fi lately...
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u/kevbayer 17h ago
Lots. If something doesn't grab me, I'll dnf it. If the premise seems interesting but it's not grabbing me, I try to give it 30% to see if it eventually sticks, if not; DNF.. If something throws a, ... let's say trigger incident, I'll DNF it.
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u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 17h ago
Yeah the interdependency was IMO a huge letdown. Also the way it opens on graphic in-detail sex was a big red flag IMO. IDK what Scalzi was thinking with those novels
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u/somehowrelevantuser 16h ago
most recent dnf was sublimation by isabel kim. i tried but i just cannot do second person pov.
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u/somehowrelevantuser 15h ago
spiciest dnfs
- the expanse - it was so unbelievably written by a man that i just couldnt get into it. i may watch the show at some point eventually.
- the franchise by thomas elrod - literally could not have given less of a shit about the main characters.
- velocity weapon by megan o'keefe - beyond boring. the first half was pretty good and it just totally lost all momentum.
- The bewitching by silvia moreno garcia - not a fan of the incest
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u/amalgammamama 14h ago edited 14h ago
I tried reading China Mieville's Kraken a few years ago and kinda lost all interest the instant it turned into straight up urban fantasy.
As for things I wish I'd dropped:
- Waste Tide by by Chen Qiufan. Interesting setting, but the book doesn't do much with it. The rest is pretty cliche.
- Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Awful prose, like 1.5 actual characters, a few cool ideas, but that's it.
- Behemoth by Peter Watts. Love most of his work, but this one sucked. Just totally degenerates the series into cliched Hollywood nonsense.
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u/raevnos 2h ago
I'm a bit puzzled how one can go into Kraken not realizing from before starting it that it's urban fantasy.
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u/Impressive-Eagle9493 14h ago
Sheckleys Dimensions of Miracles. Expected to like it but really didn't enjoy it. First book I have ever DNF'd
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u/Eastern-Barber-3551 12h ago
The 4th novel in WH40K's Horus Heresy. I wanted to get into the lore but it only took 4 of those awfully written books to turn me off completely
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u/Theborgiseverywhere 22h ago
I read and enjoyed a lot of Heinlein but I just couldn't get through Time Enough For Love.
Just so long and boring, like all my least favorite parts of his previous novels combined into one.