In the book “The Omen Machine”, Terry Goodkind used the word “prophecy” over 250 times in 500 pages

It was distracting, irritating, and effective ruined any enjoyment I might have gotten because I was literally cringing and editing for the next one

I started reading “Light of Eidon” by Karen Hancock and the story seemed pretty generic fantasy, but something struck me as off about it. The main character was a devotee of her god, and she was really, really devoted. Like long passages of how empty her life would be without him, and the horror of not feeling his love in her heart.

This seemed a bit too on the nose, so I checked and found that I’d discovered an entirely new genre for me: “Christian Fantasy”. I dumped the book and moved on to something else.

a few months later, I started a new book that showed up in my Amazon suggestions, and within a few pages it was looking familiar…and I discovered I’d downloaded yet another book from Karen Hancock. THAT was the book I dropped faster than any previous one.

well, someone who writes a lot of books I guess.

I’ll go for Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, and Isaac Asimov

I honestly believe the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy is benefitting a great deal from “the emperor’s new clothes” phenomenon.

I found it interesting and entertaining to read a book written from a Chinese perspective…to say that was a change is an understatement. But the books as literature were pretty bad.

The first book was a disjointed mess. to say the plot lacked cohesion is an understatement. The second book introduced the idea of “the dark forest” by simply inserting it almost non-sequitur into the middle of the book, giving all the appearance of an idea that Cixin had after the book was done, and just jammed it into the middle at random.

There was an inconsistent attachment to science. it’s about half committed to hard science, but there’s a non trivial amount of inconsistencies regarding the limitations of the speed of light that I can only assume were mistakes as nothing else explained it.

there was just too much of the book that didn’t let consistency get in the way of the story being told.

Cixin’s earlier book “Ball Lightning” is a much more enjoyable read, with a story that’s concise and science heavy. However “Supernova Era” was hot garbage.

the thing is, at this point it doesn’t make any sense to spend time on Winds of Winter from his perspective

he’s got MANY other projects going that are generating FAR more income than Winds publication will, the only reason there is to finish ASOIAF is to give the readers closer…and he’s already said he doesn’t feel any obligation to his readers.

it’s never gonna happen, and i’m fine with that. I mean, I’m pissed at him for leaving a story unfinished, but he’s not gonna live in my head over it.

I just finished “A Shadow of All Night Falling” book 1 of “The Dread Empire”, so I discovered my new favorite trope

At the end of the book, within the space of a few pages, all the main characters are killed. Not at the same time, just in a series of increasingly unlikely events.

Then a character who hasn’t previously appeared in the story shows up suddenly and performs a resurrection spell and brings them all back to life for no particular reason.

So my favorite trope now is the massively unearned deus ex machina. Like the bigger the F-U to the reader, the better. If at the same time the heroes are saved, the ultimately powerful antagonists are also killed trivially, like in this book, Im satisfied

I’m calling it the “Deus ex Maxima”

No, they have zero value.

It’s not like they’re random, they are solicited by the publisher and always 100% positive

Around about 1979 I read a story story in “Isaac Adimov’s Science Fiction magazine”, set in the future about a women living in a highly automated home.

When she downloaded a book to read, is was printed out in hundreds of loose pages, which she messed up the order of and had to re sort

Two things to take away from this:

Almost 45 years ago an author was able to predict we’d be downloading books, but couldn’t imagine any way of reading it other than printed pages

Secondly, it’s weird the things you can remember just out of the blue

I had the same impression, wondering if the english translation was to blame for hte books issues, but eventually accepted that a translation won’t change the plot elements significantly, and that’s where the flaws are.

there’s just too much meandering plot that seems intended to make the book longer without being necessary or even enjoyable. The later books don’t improve either. The speed of light is a huge barrier to the plot, and sometimes it’s dealt with realistically and other times it’s just literally ignored. there are some really cool concepts, like “the dark forest” that was such a non-sequitur in the larger story that I honestly think the book was completed and then Liu Cixin got the idea and shoehorned it into the book by simply starting a new chapter.

the overarching problem of maintain a characters across a story that spans centuries was childishly hand waved away, and not even necessary.

I enjoyed Cixin previous book “Ball Lightning” much better because it had the hard science ideas without trying to hard to be bigger than the idea was. and I just finished his book “Supernova Era” and it’s a steaming pile of garbage.