That seems harsh. I haven't read any of the aftermath trilogy, but my understanding is that Wendig wasn't calling a lot of the shots there. He was given a set of plot points that the story had to hit to set up the new EU, and he did what he could to do that. But they weren't his ideas, and it's those elements, not his overall writing (which is....functional, at worst) that get flak.
That said, his personal behavior online is reprehensible, but that's not really something you can critize the books for.
I don't consider it overly harsh. My
phrasing is harsh, but that's where his own behaviour comes in. If a decent person writes utter dreck, I won't pretend it's great, but I'll be polite in my criticism. When a complete asshole writes dreck, I'll mince no words.
As far as the actual writing goes: it's terrible. Saying something is fuctional means nothing. The very worst fanfic, if it conveys information to the reader, is still "functional". It's not a high bar to clear. Wendig's writing is just really poor. I've criticised his writing before, on another site, and I think I've got a copy of my remarks available. Let me dig that up:
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The characters are weak and very poorly written. Inconsistent characterisation is an understatement: whatever Wendig was doing, I'm not even sure it really qualifies as "characterisation" at all. It's so bad that even the presence of Wedge -- a character I love -- isn't an improvement. What we get isn't Wedge at all, but something strongly resembling a cardboard prop of the character. One that was made by a mentally deficient pre-schooler. The plot is thin and muddled. There is no logic to it, and time after time, there are events that just seem to happen -- counter to all logic -- because the author couldn't think of anything better. What's worse, though, is that it's all so
boring.
The writing, however, is the true issue when it comes to these ghastly abortions that are falsely advertised as "books". Wendig simply cannot write. Even if he'd been brilliant at characterisation, and gifted with the talent to pen positively enchanting plots... his terrible writing would still render it all utterly unreadable. His books are steaming piles of sentence fragments. Even the basics of grammar consistently elude him. He clearly has an aversion to using verbs in a straight-forward manner, which causes such an over-reliance on passive verbs that it would cause brain damage in most editors. (This is presumably why the books appear to be devoid of any decent editing at all.) Also: squinting modifiers, good grief. Enough to kill a herd of fully-grown Nerfs!
Even beyond such errors, his ability to write engaging prose is... non-existent. He has no talent for vivid description, nor for setting a scene, nor even for the competent use of words in
any context. All of it literally reads like the sort of shoddy
Twilight fanfic where the tween author drafts some horrifyingly stilted dialogue, comes to the realisation that this causes talking heads syndrome, and attempts to solve this by enthousiastically adding some rather incompetent would-be descriptive sentences around the dialogue fragments. Beginning fanfic authors regularly try to make this kind of filler text sound more "interesting" by looking up adjectives that "sound good" and then using (or mis-using) them in the hope that the result comes across as sophisticated. It generally doesn't work out for them, and whatever the method behind Wendig's madness may be... it doesn't work out for him, either. (And he doesn't have the excuse that he's a thirteen-year-old girl writing her first story.)
Finally, there's the weird pet obsessions. For instance: Wendig seems to have added an otherwise redundant character with a beard-- apparently for the sole reason that it allows him to spend a lot of superfluous words on the topic of beards. Which he does,
repeatedly, for no discernible reason that could possibly make sense.
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It stands out that none of that is really about the plot. The overall ideas as far as world-building went were shit, but I blame the story group for that. This is all about what he does with what he's given. And what he does is nothing good. compare this to Claudia Gray, and her book
Lost Stars. That is set (in part) in the same period, deals with the same mandated world-building, and gives us good writing and believable characters. It's well-paced, too. It does what it can with the premise that the story group mandated.
And that's the difference, here. Wendig shouldn't be excused as someone who did the best with what he was given. Others were given the same, and did much better. He's just a total hack without a single iota of talent. All of which would be forgivable, by the way, if he wasn't
also a vengeful cry-bully who habitually slanders people online.
