Wow 2.8 stars. Good read ratings are pretty BS, but i'm not sure i've ever seen a book that low.

To borrow a phrase from Rick and Morty: "Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."

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.

Okay, but I've never seen a book with such poor public reviews. I'm dead serious about this: I've never seen anything comparable. And I spend a lot of time buying and reading science fiction books. The public disdain for this book is quite remarkable, really.

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.

I have not found either Amazon or Goodreads reviews to be a particularly good guide. Especially for scifi, actually. Tastes differ, a lot.

Be that as it may, a score of 3.1 (Amazon) and 2.8 (Goodreads) makes this book an extreme outlier, like -5 SD or something like that.

Check this out: https://emerginginvestigators.org/articles/25-198/pdf

That it's this extreme would honestly make me suspect that it's just pissed off some group of Very Online(tm) people.

because it's literary fiction. Moby Dick sits at a 3.5 on Goodreads. These sites are unusable for anything that isn't genre fiction. What happens with books like these is that a few hundred people bought it because it was tagged as 'sci-fi' and then got frustrated and gave it a bad review.

There are multiple versions of Moby Dick on Amazon, and virtually all of them are rated >4 stars. The current top-selling version is at 4.6, which is exceptional for a book with >100 reviews:

> 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.

Harrison is generally very challenging. A lot of people don't want challenging. That doesn't make it bad.

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.

This doesn't hold up -- there are lots of challenging books that were well-received by the public, and Harrison's Light and his Viriconium books were also quite well-received. Their review scores -- at around 4 stars -- are perfectly in line with what you'd expect of challenging work. For my part, I read Light and enjoyed it.

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.

To me, one of the biggest red flags, is a lot of the positive reviews seem to have trouble articulating what they like about the book and come across very generic. I think most of the positive reviews could be written about any challenging book if you just swap out the book title.

>or a book if you were looking for Sanderson.