Holy shit. How do you go from one of the great hardish sci-fi books in the last few years to this piece of shit...

Holy shit. How do you go from one of the great hardish sci-fi books in the last few years to this piece of shit. Goddamn. It reads as if written by someone who took a single semester of creative writing but kind of barely made it through. Good I pirated it. Shit, now that I've started it I've got to finish it.

Anyone read this? It's a gem of shitty writing.

>Randy was as blond as a Hitler wet dream.

the answer is stop reading this garbage and read something with merit
if you're an absolute manchild who can't read anything but sci-fi and fantasy start with Gene Wolfe and if you can't understand him just give up and play video games, a better use of your time

I read a bit of everything. I just loved The Martian and now I'm reading this. I can't leave a book half read.

>I just loved The Martian
I'm sorry, it's terminal. I need you to get out

No : ^ )

Reading fun stuff beats reading your boring shit everyday. I praise the day people drop reading all together.

That's not me btw. But I can and do read whatever the shit I want to read.

>one of the great hardish sci-fi books in the last few years
>now that I've started it I've got to finish it
what you gotta do is go back

>reddit makes him famous
>he wants to appeal to reddit

not surprising tbqh

The Martian was interesting. It sort of came out of nowhere by a nobody and somehow captivated a large number of people. So many and so quickly in fact that it was snagged up by a movie studio as soon as it got big. This is in spite of what is very clearly some BAD writing. I read it because it was getting popular and I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and I read it all the way through quite quickly. There was something about it that kept me reading, something captivating. I think that Weir fluked and made it so that people who read it genuinely want Watney to survive and make it home.

Unfortunately that's where my praise of it ends. There's literally nothing redeemable about any other aspect of the book. The prose is clunky, mismatching and becomes very sterile the more he delves into the concepts behind Watney's actions - a major problem when it suddenly decides to jump back into a relatively light-hearted adventure story. The characters are utterly one-dimensional, the dialogue is awful and littered with "hilarious" jokes that, at the risk of sounding cliche, could be straight up lifted from the comments of a reddit thread. He was not a writer before this and it shows. He didn't have an editor and it also shows.

I was surprised to learn about Artemis because I had absolutely no idea it had been published. It seems like the hype behind The Martian has died down and Artemis has failed to capture people's attention in the same way, yet more evidence that The Martian was a complete fluke, an idiosyncrasy of the viral media effect and nothing more. I read the summary of Artemis and wasn't hopeful, and reading the first twenty or so pages I put it down because it was just terrible.

Weir won't be remembered for writing good books; I went back to The Martian to see if I could stomach it again and had to give up after a dozen pages, it's just too bad and will very obviously not be rated well at all by any literature critic worth his salt. I think his career is only downhill from this point, which is sad because he seems like a nice guy, he just can't write for shit.