I apparently picked up Alex S. Weber‘s first Manaforged Robtics novel without actually comprehending the description, as the whole fantasy world thing took me completely by surprise. And not in a good way. The integration between the sci-fi and fantasy elements is fairly nonexistent, the result being something utterly lacking in believability.
While there’s nothing in particular I can point to about the first of Mark Stanley‘s Vellhor Saga novels as being wrong, something about the tone or atmosphere put me off. It feels as though it’s trying too hard to be ‘epic’ and comes across a bit like a theater production. Less ambiguous is the rather large number of notably varied points of view, which will probably be a negative for some readers.