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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9381485" data-attributes="member: 18">Becky Chambers has pretty good characters, but I cannot handle her mangling of some of the SF elements, particularly the harder science elements. It's too much for me (the failing is mine, to be clear). She's the perfect example of a writer who'd be better if they wrote less, not more. I've brought this up before, but she totally unnecessarily devoted pages to describing how the power source of a robot character was definitely not a perpetual motion machine, and in doing so, made it completely clear that it was absolutely undeniably 100% a perpetual motion machine, and she didn't understand basic physics well enough to get that (she was using physics-by-analogy - i.e. "X is like Y" instead of like, understanding thermodynamics*). Whereas if she'd just said the robot had like an unobtainium core and thus infinite power, or just never explained the power source, it would have been fine! And if that was the only time she'd done that I'd shrug it off, but there were multiple other instances in that book alone, of like basic science fail (in most cases which could have been avoided by less description not more). She's like the inverse of Mary Robinette Kowal, who writes excessively dry characters (imho) - not unrealistic ones or cut-outs, just ones it's hard to care much about (the 1950s setting and somewhat uptight nature of most of the characters really does not help), but my god, the hard science of it! The only times I even questioned something, I looked it up, and was like "Oh it is I who was wrong!", with her books - there was particular one thing I hoped she was wrong about but nope, that's real depressing!Murderbot is great but I kind of want to get it all as a big collection when it's done (which it may be, I forget). I have her epic fantasy novel so I need to read that at some point.* = As my wife often teases me about, screwing up thermodynamics is my greatest bugbear in any SF novel or really just any situation!EDIT - You are definitely right to laugh lol, I don't consider myself like a "mansplain-y" kind of awful nerd and actively avoid that behaviour if I sense myself doing it, but anything about thermodynamics and it's like I'm a Manchurian Candidate sleeper agent and I just heard my activation phrase</blockquote>

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