4 ms·

What should I make of the basically terrible reviews of "Light"? I am curious to read it to see what you are talking about, but 3.2/5 on Amazon usually amounts

• akanet 12y ago
  I think a lot of great work is very polarizing - in this case I think a lot of people who are used to a very different sort of hard sci-fi went into "Light" expecting it to be something that it's not. It is not a novel about a world with rigorously defined and cataloged physical law, and it's certainly not about a protagonist's moral crusade against evil. It's a novel (in my personal estimation) about the breathtaking and magical pace of the advance of technology, and how it amplifies all the great and awful things that make us human.
• _delirium 12y ago
  > 3.2/5 on Amazon usually amounts to "really quite terrible" Eh, I've found the correlation pretty hit-or-miss. William Gibson's The Difference Engine is currently sitting at 3.0/5 on Amazon, to pick one example...
• obstinate 12y ago
  Same thing you should make of the extremely high ratings that Cassandra Clare novels get (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/150038.Cassandra_Clare https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/150038.Cassandra_Clare). For those who aren't aware, this author is a serial plagiarist whose novels are basically ripoffs of already not-that-great books like Twilight (http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/fandom-guide-cassandra-clare-mortal-instruments/ http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/fandom-guide-cassandra-clare-...).
• elwin 12y ago
  On Amazon, I usually ignore the average rating. Read some 1 and 2 star reviews, and see whether they make serious critiques or are one-sentence complaints that the writing style was too difficult.