For your fun and edification, I now present selected snippets of one-star reviews of my work on Amazon. Why? Oh, just because.
Old Man’s War:
Opening the book, I met a central character whose lame attempts at humor are acclaimed as hilarious. Gradually we find our man is gifted at everything but amazingly modest. This endears him to his fictional friends who are numerous and described in tedious detail… A physicist character in inserted to relieve the author from any explanation by insisting that our math is inadequate. Aliens are thrown at us in pathetic haste, as mere cartoon monsters. I wonder this book can be classed as SF.
a trite, weakly written novel that barely qualifies as science fiction… The science (I’m a hard core devote) is absent or implausible, and the action is a series of cliches.
Ultimately, it reads like John Wayne of the future with the main character saving the day in multiple, and very tired ways. All of the “surprises” were predictable and uninspiring and the hints of self-doubt are pushed aside like so many alien carcasses. I highly recommend avoiding this book.
I could not finish reading this book because it bored me to tears. There are dialogs after dialogs, but no action. If this is a movie, there will be only one scene in the whole movie, of people talking to each others.
‘infantile’ is the best description, not even rising to ‘adolescent’. save your money on this wretched crap.
The Android’s Dream
Very slow, very boring, really not very interesting.
The Sagan Diary
There is just nothing here. No insights, no plot, no real imagination. Just fluff and dreck.
The book is emotional tripe without clear context. You need a better memory than mine to match the emotional ramblings to the events in the Old Man’s War series.
My real problem is that these thoughts and feelings portray a sensitive, delicate young thing rather than the heavy duty Special Forces soldier who even in civilian life engendered some degree of fear even in the people who knew her best. It’s like hearing Mike Hammer cry about his boutonniere not matching his tux for the prom – Oh please!
How do I feel about these one star reviews? I feel fine about them. I am not under the impression that, alone among all writers who have ever existed, I will be the one whose work is universally acclaimed; nor am I under the impression that when readers who feel burned by work are offered an avenue to express their displeasure, that they will rather prefer to stew privately. Nor do I think an appropriate response to negative reviews is to flamebroil the reviewer and send my minions to harass them, thus revealing myself to be something of an insecure psychotic. Someone doesn’t like my work and wants to tell people so? Okay by me. I’ll live. As will any other author who has the sense not to get in a lather over the idea that somewhere someone might not like their work. And if you don’t have that sense, well. Just put on your big author panties and deal with it.
A challenge to other authors with blogs, LiveJournals and etc: Post your one-star (or otherwise negative) Amazon reviews, if you have them, and you probably do. Oh, go on. Own your one-star reviews, man. And then, you know. Get past them. If you’re lucky, some of them might actually be fun to read.
