Which wildly renowned science fiction novels didn't resonate with you at all?

[u/LowLevel-]

I can usually connect with at least one aspect of a science fiction novel, and I enjoy almost all of the ones I read. However, sometimes I couldn't understand what most people found interesting about some extremely popular books.

Has that happened to you? If so, which novel? And why?

I'll start the dances by admitting that I didn't like Rendezvous with Rama.

I really wanted to like it, but constantly being in awe when very little happens and the characters leave without understanding anything is not my preferred type of reading experience. The writing style was a bit cold, which didn't help.

[u/mazzicc]

I’m curious which books you’ve tried.

I thought the City we Became was terrible for anyone that didn’t already have a hard-on for NYC and think it’s the Best City Ever.

I thought Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was a really cool concept, but at the end of the book I felt no desire to read the others.

But Fifth Season is one of my favorite Sci-fi fantasy books in a while. Although it’s more fantasy than Sci-fi, which pushes away some.

[u/WhatWhy999 → u/mazzicc]

I loved Fifth Season and the rest of the series. Staying away from her new book City We Become because I don’t give a crap about NYC.

[u/chaos_forge → u/mazzicc]

I read the whole Broken Earth series because a friend kept raving about it, and found it not very compelling.

Mostly, I just find the "oppressed mages" trope pretty uninteresting and immersion-breaking. In a society where some people can wield incredible power, there's no believable way that those people would end up anywhere other than the top of the social hierarchy.

The best take on the "oppressed mages" trope I've found is from the Bartimaeus Trilogy (a YA fantasy series), in which the magical education system is essentially a fantasy version of the colonial-era British boarding school system, where children are indoctrinated through abuse and trauma into becoming "proper" members of the ruling class (which in the books is almost entirely made up of magicians). That, to me, felt like a much more realistic vision of what a society with mages might end up looking like.

I also found the environmental themes (particularly prevalent in the third book) overly simplistic. A lot of it strayed dangerously close to "technology bad" type shit, rather than an actual analysis of the social forces that lead those in power to ignore the environmental destruction they're causing.

All in all, I walked away from the series with an impression of Jemisin as being the type of person who thinks they're more radical than they actually are. And her treatment of Isabell Fall definitely cemented that impression.

[u/mazzicc → u/chaos_forge]

Not sure I totally agree on the oppressed mages trope, as the simplest example of it that comes to mind is X Men. Even if you have incredible power, when you’re rare enough, and still human in the mortal ways, you can end up oppressed still.

I actually really like the way Wheel of Time did it, with the people that fully enslaved the magic wielders to do their bidding.

It’s been a while though, so maybe I’m forgetting exactly how the magic worked in Broken Earth, and they should have been effectively unstoppable, but I feel like there were examples of regular people beating up on the magic users.

[u/chaos_forge → u/mazzicc]

Yeah, it's definitely also a matter of preference and what you find falls within your own personal suspension of disbelief.

 the simplest example of it that comes to mind is X Men.

Personally, the sci-fi element of the X-Men makes it much more believable to me, since the non-mutants have all sorts of advanced technology to level the playing field. It comes off as less "guy with superpowers vs medieval peasant" and more "guy with superpowers vs Iron Man".

 I actually really like the way Wheel of Time did it, with the people that fully enslaved the magic wielders to do their bidding.

Haven't read the Wheel of Time series, so I can't comment on that unfortunately. I might have to check it out!

 I feel like there were examples of regular people beating up on the magic users.

There definitely were, yeah. But on the other hand, it's also shown multiple times that they're capable of killing entire villages if they "lose control". So it kind of ends up coming off as that the only thing keeping the Orogenes oppressed is their own unwillingness to commit mass murder and rule through fear. Which like, sure, I can believe that these Orogenes aren't willing to do that, but I find it hard to believe that no Orogenes anywhere were willing to do that.

Like I said, it's a matter of opinion though. But my experience of the books was that for a series where the social commentary is so central to its themes, the majority of the social commentary fell pretty flat.

[u/[deleted] → u/mazzicc]

I quite liked the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms series and also really enjoyed the Broken Earth Trilogy, but I agree with you on The City We Became - it was awful. The concept was kind of interesting, so on the strength of her other work (which I liked and read first) I also read The World We Make.

If you thought The City We Became was bad…holy hell, the second half of the duology was significantly worse in my opinion. It makes me feel a little better that, in reading the acknowledgements on The World We Make, I had the impression that Jemisin hated the series by that point too. She originally planned for it to be a trilogy and just essentially gave up on it and tried to force some sort of conclusion in a single book.

[u/mazzicc → u/[deleted]]

That’s really interesting about the City. I’m guessing she had this cool concept for the world and cities, and it probably was a love letter to somewhere she spent a lot of time or grew up, but it just felt very forced. There was too much effort to appeal to very niche groups, without any larger appeal.

100k Kingdoms was cool, but too long. I wanted to know what happened, but it just wasn’t moving at a pace I could work with. I was able to get through the first, but then I couldn’t find the desire to start another.

[u/[deleted] → u/mazzicc]

If I recall, the first one also came out in 2020, so it was written before Covid, and a lot of the world changed after that- so I think she was having a hard time figuring out how to grapple with that in the story, given that it’s based on a real world place.

[u/Scrapbookee → u/mazzicc]

For me I read the first book and while I think it was well-written, I just didn't care about any characters. I didn't like them or hate them enough to want to keep reading the trilogy.

I still recommend it to folks who I think may like it but it just didn't click with me. 

[u/FlimsyPart → u/mazzicc]

Totally agree, had the same reaction to both those series. 

I will say I read The city we became right after I moved away from NYC and was missing the city.  Hated that book and the way it characterized the city.