However, I suspect I will be one of the one star or DNF reviewers - I haven't enjoyed any of the other M John Harrison books I tried. The ideas are usually interesting but the execution tends towards weirdness and not much plot. Great at creating atmosphere but not so good at holding my attention. Maybe I will give it a go...
100% this.
I like the man and he's a great public speaker. I do not get on with his novels at all, from In Viriconium to a few decades later when everyone loved Light so I gave his "SF" another try.
I also began to suspect it was more magical realism than science fiction. Perhaps an incorrect diagnosis, but made me lose interest.
Also anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The one that stood out from him was the Void series and Alien Clay. Of course I'd you haven't read him do start with his main series as it was excellent too, but I'm pretty sure before 2020
Assuming you're talking Children of Whatever, eh, I'm not sure I agree. IMO some of his other novels are _far_ better (Children of Whatever are _good_, but some of the other stuff is _great_.)
Also, "There is no anti-memetics division" is interesting but I'm divided about it. The first 60-70% is great, but after that it's kinda "meh" and by the time I finished the book I was glad it was over lol. The initial 2/3rds of the book are really good and almost makes up for the lackluster ending (imo).
Martha Wells - Murderbot series (the AppleTV series is entertaining - but understandably drops some of the inner monologue. As usual read books first).
AnnaLinden Weller aka Arkady Martine "A Memory Called Empire" (first in series).
William Gibson - Jackpot trilogy: The Peripheral (2014), Agency (2020)
TV series is great (and cancelled) - books better...
Maybe too old:
"Lady Astronaut" series by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Kim Stanley Robinson "New York 2140".
On a side note I enjoyed Richard Morgan's "No Man's Land" - but it's alternative history fantasy - not sci-fi.
Might want to check science fiction awards+ database https://www.sfadb.com/
If you want a shorter taster, the novella The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also brilliant (and it has a handful of short stories that expand the universe, something Watts has done with several of his novels). Very, very dark stuff.
Watts is somewhat divisive, it should be said. Personally, I love his knife-edge prose and punk aesthetic, and I find his rather unvarnished perspective of humankind's place in universe refreshing.
Also, if you like short sci fi stories, hard to beat anything by Ted Chiang.
Also, the stuff that has won awards inside the genre these past ~10 years has been generally quite poor.
By Mary's Beard !!
More correctly, by Mary's vote: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/22/i-read-163-nov...
Might explain how she landed a role as Professor of classics at Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
So, a little less than one a day? That seems eminently doable -- I read more than that in my teens, considerably more sometimes, for years at a time. (Of course I had no internet to distract me: my teens were from about 1977 to 1986.)
I have read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 5 times, Kim Stnaley Robinson's Mars trilogy 6 times, and the entire Frank Herbert _Dune_ series twice. In my early teens, if under time pressure, several times I read about half a dozen novels in an afternoon.
For a retired professional? Sure. I'd be surprised if she couldn't.
Around 1997-1998, I was freelance, not working a lot, and lived with a judge of the Arthur C Clarke award. I read pretty much all the new SF published in the UK both years. A couple of hundred books a year, while working.
So at best you skimmed six books in an afternoon, which IS a time-honoured tradition by school kids who have reports due.
If you think that is "generous" then you underestimate the levels of focus a teenager (with a young, elastic bladder) can have. Do you know any teenagers?
:-D
> Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel
I just turned 59 this weekend. When I was a kit, books were shorter. Often much shorter. A typical paperback SF novel in the 1970s was under 200pp and typically somewhere around 150-175.
There was a reason for those binge sessions: my family was preparing to leave Nigeria forever, and it took nearly 2 months to do all the paperwork. We lived in the Mainland Hotel in Lagos (it's still there) and my dad had a friend who was a member of the Lagos Yacht Club. Its private library had a very good SF section, but only members could borrow books... So I had to read as much as I could while we were there as guests on Sunday afternoons.
Cue manic hyper-fixated focus.
One of the ones I read in those visits was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. Still a favourite, nearly half a century later.
> it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight.
No problem.
I tore through them as fast as possible, then went back through them in my memory over the following week. Favourites, ones I really enjoyed, like the Clement, some Jack Vance books, some Silverberg, some Sturgeon, I went back and reread.
My greatest "feat" was probably totally forgetting my summer holiday reading a few years later, at school in the Isle of Man. We were reminded on the first day of term. I read all of Joseph Conrad's Victory that night, starting as soon as I got home from school at about 6PM, finishing about 9:30PM, writing a report in the next hour, and then sleeping.
I got a B+.
No, not skimming.
Is it some meta appreciation of the art in doing that? I have found all of M John Harrison's works quite tedious; maybe I am holding them wrong...
I think the key for me is sci fi being recoqnised as an important category in media creation. It's a genre that doesn't often get the big awards despite in my view often having some of the best character development and emotional and moral plot lines. Obviously TNG with the late great Patrick Stewart being a huge cultural influence for those reasons.
Sci-fi was nerdy and a little juvenile and the identifiable tropes made it an easy target for those wanting to yuck someone else's yum. YA's distillation of the hero's journey into a freebase form has made pieces of genre fiction aren't as formulaic more obviously not juvenile, as the YA genre is pretty much where most juvenile literature is at.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Everything-M-John-Harrison-ebook/...
Ever since Amazon.com allowed blank feedback alongside proper reviews, there's been inflation in every book's rating, with most books clustering around 4.2 - 4.6 Stars.
These days, a 4.0 on Amazon means that a book is questionable, divisive, or has editorial errors. A 3.8 has serious issues.
I believe this is because Amazon prompts you for a review/rating after you've finished the book -- if you read on a Kindle, you only get the prompt when the book is at 100% complete -- so those who do not finish a book seem not to rate.
I don't think I've ever seen anything with a 3.1-star rating across >100 reviews. This suggests that the book is exceptionally bad -- that people were motivated to leave poor reviews.
By all accounts it's a very vague story...
That is, I've seen plenty of very high ratings on Goodreads/Amazon for things that (in my opinion) range from mediocre to slop.
That tells me there are lots of raters who use some criteria that, while I'm sure it's reasonable to them, doesn't correlate well with anything I'd recognize as "quality".
Glancing at the actual text of the Goodreads reviews, it seems like most of the bad ones are outright saying that they didn't understand the book, and therefore decided that it's meaningless.
So there are a lot of boos. And even the book's supporters seem to strain to find meaning in it. The most parsimonious explanation is that it's genuinely incoherent.
Check this out: https://emerginginvestigators.org/articles/25-198/pdf
> https://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Original-Unabridged-Melvill...
Literary fiction is, in general, fairly reviewed on Amazon. And yet 3.1 star rating is something I don't think I've ever seen before... It certainly denotes mass dissatisfaction.
Just don't read Harrison if you're looking for Heinlein, just as you wouldn't read Delany if you were looking for Asimov, or Le Guin if you were looking for Sanderson.
The End of Everything has ratings that place it in the bottom 0.1% of all published books with >100 reviews. This very strongly suggests that an absolute majority of readers found it frustrating or incomprehensible, and that among those readers are some who had enjoyed his other works.
So Harrison aside, if you find yourself without reading material at some point, I’d really encourage giving it another try. It’s certainly abstract, but there is incredible depth and coherence throughout.
I've only read a little bit of M. John Harrison, so I may be off the mark, but I wonder if the divisiveness could be because it's marketed as SF, but it doesn't fit into the genre, similarly to Michel Faber, Gene Wolfe, or Vladimir Sorokin.
But I get the impression that the genres that sell well overall does so in large part because of binge readers that reads broadly. A client of mine runs a small press - I help them with tech stuff; small enough that they can "see" in the stats how often people buy an entire 20+ volume set of everything a given author has published at the same time. That doesn't happen in literary fiction, not least because few writers in literary fiction write enough significant books for it to happen.
Overall I don't really subscribe to this binary between literary and genre fiction -- I think there's a fair bit of speculative fiction that is serious character-driven art, such as the works of Ursula Le Guin. I'd also recommend Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (made into a movie by the Wachowski sisters) as a lovely work of form-bending fiction that's hard to classify as one to the exclusion of the other.
In literary fiction, the order of importance is reversed. Prose quality is paramount, closely followed by characterization, with setting existing only to serve the characters, and plot hardly relevant at all.
This on the surface makes for boring works, but prose quality actually has the highest skill ceiling of all, both for writers and readers. "Quality" in this sense means "skillfully using words in the manner of literary fiction", which is difficult to detect if you don't read it, but it's a real thing. As appealing as it to assume it's all a big scam, the best literary fiction writers really are better, and the readers can tell, just like you can detect AI slop at the other end of the scale. I imagine if you put enough effort in it's even possible to enjoy reading Finnegans Wake (the final boss of literary fiction).
Plot/setting/character have real life as a reference, making them easier to master.
Do you mean some people find litfic boring? Otherwise, I’m not sure what you mean. E.g. there’s plenty of litfic with exciting, fascinating, and/or gripping plots. M. John Harrison, Doris Lessing, E.L. Doctorow are a few of my favorites in that vein.
Of course someone who finds the nature of the prose itself boring might consider the works as a whole boring. But that’s like saying someone who only sees in black and white finds artworks to be monochrome - it’s a tautology.
Best recent reads were American Hagwon and Partita.
Wow, pretty divisive, reviews are all over the place. I haven't read it yet, but the reviews seem to tend towards people annoyed at abstract and flowery plot / writing?
I will have to try, but I've also struggled through (possibly) similar books like Gnomon by the British sci-fi author Nick Harkaway which had plots too abstract to properly hold my attention but were well liked by others. Similar but opposite, How to Win the Time War, which was so abstract the whole book was a metaphor, stayed together enough that I followed the plot and enjoyed it (though it was quite short).
Curious how other people here found this book?