I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
Weir gets a lot of praise because his writing is accessible. While I also demand a bit more from the sci-fi I enjoy in terms of their narratives providing thought-provoking moments and a certain depth of information that we tend to call "hard" sci-fi, I'm not about to take a dump on Weir's work. He knows what he can do and who his audience is, so he writes for them. That is, arguably, the smartest thing any author can do if they want to make a living at it.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
Not a fan of his other works but his short story The Egg (not sci-fi) is up there with Asimov's best shorts (I'm not a fan of Asimov's Foundation series either). I'm more of a fan of Frankenstein and Singin in the Rain sci-fi that explores the social/personal disruptions introduced by technology. Much like how Stand Alone Complex (not Ghost in the Shell) focused on the media ecology i.e. interfaces between human and machine interactions and some of their (social) network topologies (rhizome for example).
I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
Andy Weir does a tight well placed adventure better than most.
I can see that you wouldn't like him if you're more into characters than plot, but that's not what everyone wants.
Weir gets a lot of praise because his writing is accessible. While I also demand a bit more from the sci-fi I enjoy in terms of their narratives providing thought-provoking moments and a certain depth of information that we tend to call "hard" sci-fi, I'm not about to take a dump on Weir's work. He knows what he can do and who his audience is, so he writes for them. That is, arguably, the smartest thing any author can do if they want to make a living at it.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
Not a fan of his other works but his short story The Egg (not sci-fi) is up there with Asimov's best shorts (I'm not a fan of Asimov's Foundation series either). I'm more of a fan of Frankenstein and Singin in the Rain sci-fi that explores the social/personal disruptions introduced by technology. Much like how Stand Alone Complex (not Ghost in the Shell) focused on the media ecology i.e. interfaces between human and machine interactions and some of their (social) network topologies (rhizome for example).
He's the Dan Brown of sci-fi.
That's not entirely fair. The Martian is the most fantastical technical manual I've ever read.