alt Hacker NewsPublic reviews are not all over the place -- they are remarkably bad.
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...
Replies
I have not found either Amazon or Goodreads reviews to be a particularly good guide. Especially for scifi, actually. Tastes differ, a lot.
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 negative ones are outright saying that they didn't understand the book, and therefore decided that it's meaningless. I'm not saying this because I'm trying to sneer at those reviewers, it's just quite literally what they're saying about the book.
Wow 2.8 stars. Goodread ratings are pretty BS generally speaking, but i'm not sure i've ever seen a book that low.
Not to mention, if you click on show 5 star reviews, it shows the first 10, 3 of which have disclosures about receiving compensation, which seems like a pretty high ratio to me, but i dont know what is normal.
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.