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A comment on M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize. Parent comment

Re:M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to w... by A_D_E_P_T on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:05AM (#50442274)
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

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Re:M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to w... by rsynnott on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:34AM (#50442684)
That it's this extreme would honestly make me suspect that it's just pissed off some group of Very Online(tm) people.
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Re:M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to w... by Barrin92 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @08:35PM (#50448783)
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.
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Re:M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to w... by A_D_E_P_T on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @09:41AM (#50454020)
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.

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