The payoff is worth it, IMO.
I did really enjoy the first book, kinda want to go read it again.
The ending was just really shitty and stupid to me.
The characters aren't flat at all, there's a lot of nuance to all of them.
I guess this is one of those the beauty is in the eye of the beholder situations.
It will be interesting to see how much of today's scifi holds up half a century from now---not because the science is wrong, but because the moral qualities will be judged outlandish.
Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.
Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.
Almost did the same this year, but deliberately stopped after book 4 so I'll have something exceptionally fun for next year. Also thought it would be hot garbage, but gave it a chance based on sheer volume of high ratings. Easily the biggest introspective surprise of the year.
> Dishonorable mention: Service Model.
Ditto.
I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the overarching plot.)
Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" was pretty bad. So much early scifi is considered great because it's groundbreaking, writing about things nobody else has before. The concept of a generation ship was pretty new at the time Heinlein was writing it, and it has some very interesting concepts, but the book has some really bad problems. If you've read it, you know; if you haven't, and decide to, you'll see it for yourself.
I binged a few Brandon Sanderson books. The standalones are great; the Stormlight Archive is a huge slog through some beautiful writing, but I'm not sure I'm willing to spend so much time in beautiful books that move the plot forward so slowly.
Exordia, by Seth Dickinson, started off incredible, kept going, but the ending felt like both a fizzle as well as a cliff-hanger for the next book. I'm glad I read it, but I wish it had a clear conclusion it wanted to reach.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Memory" delivers more of the great philosophical questions & answers about the nature of consciousness and personhood that the previous books did, A+. No idea where he could possibly go from there, but if he does, I'm going along for the journey. (Honorable mention: Alien Clay. Dishonorable mention: Service Model.)
Eric Flint's "Fenrir" was a fun BDO near-future space adventure. (As was John Sanford's Saturn Run, but that wasn't a 2025 book I read.)