(Ignore this comment; sometimes you have to add one when posting from kbin to make the post properly federate.)

Star Wars.

It’s got everything I enjoy: big ass spaceships brawling it out and a long history of lore. But for some reason, I’ve never been able get into it. I should be a huge fan, but I’m just not, I cannot bring myself to care less about it.

Rick & Morty.

Watched the first season but I just can't get past how awful Rick is. All the constant burping and how much of an asshole he his really puts me off the whole thing.

Foundation stopped me from finishing for 20 years until I could get it on audiobook, and even then it was a slog. All the politics in that book are simply not what I'm after when it comes to sci-fi, even if I can acknowledge that it's a fantastic piece of work.

I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson earlier this year. It took me around 5 months because I was determined to finish it but HATED reading it. There's some good world building and ideas going on, but it was just a slog. I'm normally a kind of slow reader, but it doesn't take me half a year to finish a book.

And so the direct answer to the question would be: Neal Stephenson. Just doesn't seem to be for me.

Wheel of time…maybe fantasy but still.

Im sorry but Star Wars. Some stuff is freaking cool, like the whole smuggler side, but it's something about mixing magic and scifi that rubs me the wrong way. Also, lightsabers are so.. toylike.

Dune. And outside the realm of SF... wheel of time and game of thrones.

Mostly it's just the pacing and the epic nature. Bugs the crap out of me.

Levianthan Wakes was a slog. mostly because of all the preachiness about how starships were supposed to work.

Star Trek - I'm 40 and never gave it a proper chance and now I don't even know where to start now

The beginning of 3BP is very, very dry and slow. There's a lot of exposition, and a massive amount of footnotes (which I personally found very helpful as like many westerners, I have extremely limited knowledge of Chinese history).

I highly recommend persevering and soldiering on, there's a reason why it's very highly rated. One of my favourite series and totally made me do a 180 on my opinion of SETI.

I know this thread is about science fiction, but dark fantasy is kinda like sci-fi if you squint really hard. And close your eyes.

Anyway, I really wanna be into the Soulsborne game franchise (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, etc.) but every time I try playing one, it simply doesn't spark my interest like I feel like it should, as I love fantasy and darkly themed stories. So now I wanna read the Berserk series, which is widely regarded as the greatest manga of all time. But then I hear the Soulsborne franchise is directly inspired by Berserk, so now I'm worried that it won't spark my interest once I start reading it. I really wanna like these franchises, both are regarded as some of the greatest of their medium and I'd love to enjoy them as much as other people do.

I am on my second year trying to get through the three body problem. It has drained me, but I refuse to give up.

I never got into Battlestar Galactica when it was airing, I don't remember why. Perhaps young me thought it was a Star Wars knock-off or something?

Anyway, after reading some discussions on Lemmy, I started watching it yesterday (began with the miniseries) and it's very promising!

I never got into StarGate either. I liked the movie, but was annoyed that in the show Kurt Russel was recast by MacGyver. StarGate is now the next on my watchlist.

The Expanse did it for me. I couldn't read the books. I couldn't watch the show past two episodes.

The oft-praised Honor Harrington books also fall into this camp. It seems I'm completely allergic to David Weber's writing, because I can't read any of his other series either.

Anything billed as "Young Adult". I just find them off-putting in their formulaic structures and find the way they talk down to their readers a bit insulting. I read a lot of adult books as a child (pre-teen, not even "young adult"), though, so perhaps I'm not the target market.

edited to add

Neal Stephenson. I hate hate hate his writing. I think if he wrote essays I might find them readable, but his fiction is atrociously bad. (It doesn't help that he spouts gibberish on topics he knows little to nothing about—e.g. Chinese culture—with dogmatic authority.)

P.S. I can understand completely why you didn't like The Three Body Problem. It is, especially at the beginning, very Chinese and incorporates outlooks and ideas that are utterly alien to the western mindset.

I've read a few different people sound off on Neal Stephenson in this thread, complaining specifically about how he goes on and on. I friggin LOVE reading him, and it's because of how he plays with language. His sentences are so wild, and so fun for me to read. They're not driving the plot--they're just cool thoughts written in interesting ways that reliably catch me off guard. Maybe it's because English isn't my first language, but for whatever reason I just love reading the ridiculous ways he has of saying sometimes very mundane things.

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks.

Not sure what it was. Maybe expectations were too high. Tried the first two books and they were fine, just didn't really trigger anything in me that made me want to keep going.

Red Rising. I tried to like it. Couldn't get through more than 20%. Seemed very YA and characters seemed very flat.