Blindsight

After such an amazing book description, it was a mega disappointment to sit down and read this novel.

All I could think while reading this book was that it was tiresome to read, disjointed, filled with flashbacks that you realize are pointless and not something the author put in to give you clues about anything, the characters are flat, and the story just didn't make sense. It was a meandering mess, and tries too hard to be both hard SF and literary — a combination that only wins if you're out to bore the shit out of people with stuffy, pretentious writing and wandering scenes. In addition, the author is so in love with throwing whatever technical or psychological factoid/know-how/whatever he had into the mix. This is my main complaint about a number of hard SF books — it's like hard SF writers write something just to get off on vomiting as much jargon as they possibly could, story or plot or characters be damned. I would be far more interested in learning or reading about whatever the heck technical crap is in your book if I actually gave a shit about anything you've written, but the way you write it means I don't, and then I get bored.