The show is weird because the source material is kind of schlocky and the show improves it significantly. I think season 4 is so hard to watch because book 4 is a self-contained story so they couldn’t blend characters and scenarios like in the previous book. The book characters are all a little too one-dimensional and the show does an excellent job condensing them into well-rounded characters.
I had to stop reading halfway through book 5 because I couldn’t take the heavy use of cliched language and tropes. The books are a great story at the macro level, but the writing is pretty terrible, especially as the series goes on.
This. I’ve read them all but my god is the writing terrible, or at least half of it. It’s written by two guys one who is a big sci-fi fan/writer who writes all the good characters (Bobby, Avasarala to name two of my favorites.) But the other guy, Daniel Abrahams, is a horrible writer imo and his shit writing bleeds through. I’ll also add that they can’t really write women and it seems like it’s written by two male nerds who didn’t engage with many women before meeting their wives (which is why they write women best when there’s no relationships involved.)
Jesus, if the show significantly improves on the books in that regard then I can't imagine what the books are like. I'm mid-way through S2 of the show right now. I like the realistic portrayal of what space travel/interplanetary colonies might look like. All the political stuff. But some of the dialogue and characterization is still embarrassingly cliched.
I don't know. People keep complaining about Cibola Burn (book 4), but I liked it. I genuinely consider it one of the better ones.
That's perhaps because it's the first, and to date the most detailed, exploration of the aliens and their technology, which to me is the most interesting part (after Earth-Mars politics).
But then, I'm the weird guy who thinks character development is overrated, and reads sci-fi for the ideas.
The whole series is like a tease. I like book 4 a lot too because I started reading this series to read about alien monstrosities, etc. Then the next three books turn back into a political theatre and it only gets good again in book 8 when they start looking at different alien systems. The series should have been a lot less books, but it makes sense the writers themselves have said they have the whole story in mind, up to the last sentence, and they’re just adding in pacing. I think it’d be better to have a trilogy with the first two books, the second two and then the last trilogy (no need for books 4&5 since, as I said, I’m wanting to read about an ancient alien civilization.)
I had to stop reading halfway through book 5 because I couldn’t take the heavy use of cliched language and tropes. The books are a great story at the macro level, but the writing is pretty terrible, especially as the series goes on.