Sci Fi That Didn’t Satisfy
20 books I gave up on because I’m: too dumb, too smart, impatient or a squeamish wuss.
I have an untreated fiction addiction and get high on the ‘what if’ questions and brilliant writing in most of sci fi. Here are the 10% I gave up on before finishing in the past two years because they were:
Too Grim
(If grim is your thing, consider 1–6 as recommendations)
1
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie — This is one of the more high concept and lauded I abandoned. I even tried twice. Characters and settings were simply too dismal, and trudging through a frozen wasteland was better when Ursula Le Guin did it.
I kept hoping for more from the character who used to be a ship. If the author had foreshadowed any hope that anyone might triumph over the evil empire or their own anger and depression, it might have kept me going past the halfway mark. I know a lot of people enjoy bleak. If I could afford a therapist to work through my aversion to bleak maybe I could have got through it.
I prefer to be immersed in the snark of Murderbot, the warmth of the Wayfarer Series or the ludicrous hijinks of Scalzi’s latest. For adventures with a self aware spaceship, I’ll clone another rocket into the Bobiverse.
