So it goes, I guess.
moopet
joined 10 months ago
That's a legitimate complaint, but it's also why other people like it.
tbh a bunch of Heinlein is like this. Number of the Beast is ok in parts, but mostly awful. Glory Road is terrible, too. He did write some good things, mostly the YA stuff, but even that had a lot of problems with the author lecturing about irrelevant stuff.
I read this when I was in my mid 20s, so I wasn't the target audience. It might have been nostalgia, but I compared it against similar things I'd read as a child and it came out poorly. Derivative and twee. I understand that as the series went on it got less twee but I didn't bother reading any more.
I will say that at the time when it got really popular I thought it was great that so many kids were getting into reading books, so for that it deserves some credit, I guess.
I didn't finish it either, but to be fair him being an awful person is kind of the point.
I read it and then the other three that were out at the time (Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons I think and something else I can't remember) because I was morbidly curious. Four physical books. Apart from the general awfulness Brown tried to cover up with frenetic pacing, the biggest thing I noticed was that even though there were four books, there were effectively only two stories, just repeated with different character names.
The Bridge, by someone I don't care to remember. Recommended by a hackaday post. I can't believe I was dumb enough to get a copy based on what was essentially an advert disguised as a tech post.
Anyway, it's a rip off of Aldis' Non-Stop / Starship only written really badly and with utter nonsense plot holes. I'm saying this fully aware that Non-Stop had telepathic rats for one of its chapters.