The beginnings of his books are pretty difficult too, since he just drops you into a world with its own vocabulary and weirdness that takes forever to understan

The beginnings of his books are pretty difficult too, since he just drops you into a world with its own vocabulary and weirdness that takes forever to understand or in the case of Seveneves does many hundreds of pages of infodump details on how they build their space stuff. I guess the middle parts and ideas of his books are usually a thrill enough to make it worth the other parts.