The books are also not meant to be deep or life changing, they are just fun.
I mean, there's definitely a critique of society, morality, and spirituality happening in these books. You can't just ignore the number of parallels between the books and modern social movements.
A bunch of the Twist Endings in the series
spoiler
involve subversion of tropes in American conservative/reactionary movements. Just off the top of my head, you've got an archeologist that's lionized the past, only to be confronted with irrefutable evidence that her people's predecessors were deeply primitive and backwards.
You've got a deeply religious man stumbling on a Spiritualist pre-recorded message that drills into his brain "God Is Dead and You Assholes Killed Him" on a damned loop.
You've got people grappling with colonialism, with wars over natural resources, with religious schisms, with bigotries, with philosophical struggles over the nature of power...
This goes a bit above some pulpy Flash Gordon tier action/adventure.
I mean, there's definitely a critique of society, morality, and spirituality happening in these books. You can't just ignore the number of parallels between the books and modern social movements.
A bunch of the Twist Endings in the series
spoiler
involve subversion of tropes in American conservative/reactionary movements. Just off the top of my head, you've got an archeologist that's lionized the past, only to be confronted with irrefutable evidence that her people's predecessors were deeply primitive and backwards.
You've got a deeply religious man stumbling on a Spiritualist pre-recorded message that drills into his brain "God Is Dead and You Assholes Killed Him" on a damned loop.
You've got people grappling with colonialism, with wars over natural resources, with religious schisms, with bigotries, with philosophical struggles over the nature of power...
This goes a bit above some pulpy Flash Gordon tier action/adventure.