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angst_ridden • today at 7:25 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

bawolff • today at 8:15 PM

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.

A_D_E_P_T • today at 7:38 PM

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.