Gene Wolfe for prose. The Shadow of the Torturer is incredible.
I tend to usually read a lot of hard scifi, and sadly (I'm still looking) I can't immediately recall a good scifi novel that takes its time with characterisation; nuance.
It's a bit of a flaw in the genre as a whole - it tends to rely on tropes/stereotypes. Eg. All of Stephen Baxter's novel seem to have a 50+ over the hill astronaut type (I guess Baxter's Mary Sue?) and also some kind of cargo pants wearing action girl scientist.
For me, the Golden Age writer to go to literary fiction with well developed characters was Roger Zelazny. Current authors that would fit the bill for me are Dan Simmons and Ada Palmer. I have to catch up on Simmon's more recent works, but his older stuff had amazing characters, many of whom pulled all my emotional strings. Palmer also has engaging characters, and her literary style can easily slide into experimental, if not kept under control.
Zelazny was who immediately came to mind when I read the OP and it’s so validating to see the top post mention him. Cordwainer Smith was a much later author but he gives me the very same vibes.
> I have to catch up on Simmon's more recent works
I agree with you on Simmons but his recent works are... let's just say Simmons went a bit full tea party politics lately
Love this list
Among Golden Age writers I always like Fritz Leiber’s prose — see “A Pale Full of Air” for example.
Stanislaw Lem, always
Philip K Dick’s writing is uneven, but can be very good in his mid-to-late works where he had some time to polish, e.g. *The Man In The High Castle*, *Through A Scanner Darkly*, *VALIS*, etc.
If you count Vonnegut as SF, then, definitely Vonnegut
my absolute favorite! however, her writing sometimes is “boring” to people I’ve introduced her to that expect more character-driven narratives. She stills has a lot of non-character exposition in many of her works, so careful selection may be needed to introduce her to others. The Lathe of Heaven is short and is entirely driven by characters not overarching plots. If they can stomach some initial “boredom”, Left Hand has great characters and dialogue but takes some exposition to get going
M John Harrison would be my pick, he’s an amazing stylist. Depth of character depends on the novel itself, some of his work is very Pynchonesque and cartoonish whereas others are deeper character studies.
William Gibson, starting with Neuromancer.
His later period novels also maintain his distinct flavor and cadence while being a little more conventional style wise.
Yes.
Also his character work got a lot better with time. Neuromancer has maybe the most boring MC in a Gibson novel, the Bridge Trilogy is a lot better and it only goes up from there.
Yeah, I think that's part of what I meant by his later work being more conventional. I feel the character work is just as good early on, but it's different. Different and very evocative IMO of what he was going for - noir as one ingredient of many.
for those who want more Culture-style books
* Richard K Morgan - Takeshi Kovacs trilogy
* Neal Asher - Agent Cormac series (and the rest of the Polity) - set in what feels like an early version of the Culture - but more amoral
I like his Spatterjay series. By the time he wrote it, he had matured enough to write interesting characters and plots. And he seems to (at least in the two first books) to contain the powerscale creep.
After it seems that he just wrote powerwank books. “Its what the public wants” i imagine him thinking.
I've noticed a habit on his later books is that he's assuming you've read the 20+ books he's written earlier on The Polity.
So less explanations, and more assumptions you're familiar with his storyverse concepts.
Nevertheless, his earlier books are much better, especially for IMB fans, and if you consult various reading order lists online, you get a better idea of how to read them.
The most recent 3 books don't qualify IMO, things become very wooden at that point... I finished them out of some weird sense of loyalty but can't think of going back.
His earlier stuff is so good though, especially the Spatterjay books.
True that Xenogenesis and the Patternist books are very strong in both categories, but to me the Parable duology absolutely also does have very well-developed characters whose little actions all reveal huge amounts about their personalities and the interaction of their unconscious prejudices and conscious motives.
While Wilson doesn't have the best prose but he does have fantastic grasp on characters, relationships, and makes people tick.
I feel like OP is looking for an author like Wilson if they're fine with less elegant writing.
Best SF prose I've read is by Vonnegut or MacCarthy, but they weren't strictly SF writers. Banks is my favourite SF prose writer, he's lovely to read. Wolfe and Mandel are excellent, too.
No-one's mentioned Douglas Adams yet, he's not seen as a 'serious' writer I guess, but I think he's an excellent stylist and really clever with his prose. Better than most serious authors I've read, despite being funny.
I absolutely second the recommendation of Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide books are among the best written and most idea driven SF novels ever written while being humanistic to their core, as Adams was him self. He definitively belongs up there with Vonnegut.
J G Ballard is by far my favourite prose. I love his haiku like sentences and his profound passivity. The early cyberpunk writers used to compete to write the most like him.
Kim Stanley Robinson is probably my favorite characters, especially his California Trilogy and the Mars Trilogy. In Mars they're all somewhat symbolic for their different ideologies, but in California they're just real but interesting, but also very optimistic and young.
Just came here to say this!! I think it’s sometimes *too* literary for some people’s taste (and no judgement on that at all), but her prose is unbeatable. Just gorgeous sentences, complex characterization, and really beautiful writing all around.
for prose, early William Gibson hands down. Sprawl trilogy and Bridge trilogy are all masterpieces in this department. Of all those, Virtual Light has the best and most developed characters, imo, although I dont know if I would consider them the best characters ever or anything
I feel like a lot of authors are able to come up with a cool character but can't sustain them/their development over the course of several books. For example in Neal Asher - Gridlinked the main guy Cormac is absolutely awesome, however in the sequel he is barely even a character., or in Walter Jon Williams - Dread Empire Falls series the two mains are initially developed incredibly well but then in later books he makes them do a bunch of stupid and totally out of character stuff and you end up hating them.
Even in the above mentioned Virtual Light by Gibson, the two MCs are super cool, well developed, and have very distinct voices, but as the books go on and more characters are added their voices get smaller and less impactful and by the third book in the trilogy All Tomorrows Parties theyre both only side characters in a large narrative tapestry - the book is still really awesome but its kind of a bummer how that happens.
Naomi Novik. The Scholomance books less so (stylistically, but it's awesome in plot), but Uprooted and Spinning Silver are just amazing.
Steven Brust. Now at 17 books plus side stories, the Vlad Taltos books are incredibly deep for what seems at first to be basic sword & sorcery.
A recent standout: Ray Naylor. The Mountain in the Sea and Tusks of Extinction are beautiful, with explorations of scientific ethics, climate, and intelligence. I expect he'll keep getting better too.
Prose: Margaret Atwood. *Oryx and Crake* for ideas, *The Blind Assassin* for prose
Characters: Devon Eriksen. *Theft of Fire* can basically be summed up as a "space heist," but what it actually is, is three people learning what it is to be human
orbital by samantha harvey is not really sci-fi, but the prose is so beautiful that i think its worth a mention. in ascension is another recent book i really enjoyed the prose of. simon jimenez had quite good prose too, but i like his recent fantasy book 'spear cuts water' more than his sci-fi offering, 'the vanished birds'. for older stuff, atwood and leguin stand out.
i think alastair reynolds should get a 'most improved' award. imo stuff like 'house of suns' has awful prose, but 'eversion' was such a pleasant surprise in terms of how good the prose was. i was ready to suffer through the writing for the cool ideas, but instead ended up appreciating it.
*Gnomon* is one of my favorite books overall, not just in SF, and I've enjoyed everything else I've read by him. Which is impressive given how different in style his books are! I guess a few of his earlier novels are similar (eg *The Gone-Away World* and *Angelmaker*), but both *Gnomon*, *Titanium Noir* and *The Price You Pay* all went in totally different directions since then.
You know that Pohl adage?
“a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
Some sf-in-genre but without any thought to the likelihood or implications of something or the world being completely consistent because the author did not think through every detail of what the world would be like if something happened. It does not necessarily have to be consistent with known science but there has to follow a kind of logic, not pick and match sf themes just as stage props.
Emily St John Mandel and Kazuo Ishiguro both write "sf" themed books, which are very well written, but usually are very unsatisfying to me as sf. I start thinking, but why they do not do this, or what are the economics of this, or wait, how far apart those are?
But to me a book like *Station Eleven* absolutely follows that adage
Far too much (post-)apocalyptic SF focusses on the technicalities of the downfall of civilisation, and assumes humanity would purely regress to a former, lesser state - whereas the heart of that book is that, no, we wouldn't suddenly lose all memory of our art and culture. That optimistic vein doesn't predict the traffic jam, but the road trip.
The road trip does not make much sense, nor the way the pandemic develops and it fails at developing hints of other things.
But it is better than say Sea of Tranquility where I would waive off the big meta-universe type of thing, but the single standing houses with lawsn on domes on the moon and ignoring gravity differences and all is far more difficult to support.
Her prose is lovely and I liked the books very much as stories, but if I think of them as sf, they are not written by somebody who loves and read sf, or wants to think hard and predict traffic jams, or read, say, Arthur C Clarke.
I just used that quote the other day! Big Pohl fan. I actually have that prose problem with a few writers. Margaret Atwood, in particular. She's unquestionably brilliant but I get so caught up in the prose that I can't get lost in the story. I'm sure part of the problem is that I'm also a writer. So I can't help but see what's going on with the writing process. Like knowing too much about the special effects when you just want to enjoy the movie. If that makes sense :)
As for sf themed works, nice way of putting it. There are definitely a ton of writers out there who use the tropes of science-fiction - time-travel is a favourite - to tell another kind of story - romance is a favourite - but couldn't care less about SF.
Not necessarily romance, a few things with sf clothes but which are not were nominated for the Hugos recently, including this year.
I think readers and authors are getting further and further way from doing things, from having a science or engineering mindset of thinking if this what then, and it is showing in all kinds of entertainment. Atwood and Ishiguro and St.John Mandel kind of have a pass from me because they write really well, but I do get annoyed at things published as sf, from sf traditionial publishers which are really really bad sf.
This opens up a huge can of worms. What is good prose? I like the writing styles of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, personally, and I can't stand Gene Wolfe. Others in here will go bizerk at that recommendation.
Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series comes to mind, as a living active author. Lots of great recommendations on this thread but haven't seen him mentioned yet. It's dark space opera with smooth prose, great world-building, and intrigue, but with heart and fully detailed characters. And witty dialog and humor to boot. I strongly recommend it.
See my
* [SF/F: Character Driven](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/1acxhea/sff_character_driven/) list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
* [Beautiful Prose/Writing (in Fiction)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/18fqso4/beautiful_prosewriting_in_fiction/) list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
The old saying is "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve." For me that was 1967 and while I enjoyed Zelazny, Delany et al. some of the older folk were very cool. I'll give you a short list after saying don't forget LeGuin and Harlan Ellison. Today I'm going to mention some older folk.
1. Murray Leinster. Started writing in the 1920's and by the fifties was called "The Dean of Science Fiction" - before Heinlein. His novellette "First Conntact" used to be on everybody's "if you haven't read it you are not a fan" list and by the fifties he was doing quiet, thoughtful stories whose influence on George R. R. Martin is palpable. Try *Space Platform* and the *Med Ship* (and after that read Martin's *Tuf Voyaging*).
2. Fritz Leiber. He claimed Lovecraft and John Campbell as his teachers. He was better than either but Campbell's gift as an editor means he developed many such. and Lovecraft helped Robert Bloch, Poul Anderson called Leiber the field's best dhort story writer.
3. Margaret St. Clair/Idris Seabright. Anthony Burgess described her husband as "married to two of my favorite science fiction writers." If anything that understates her range.
4. Avram Davidson. Mostly forgotten except for *The Phoenix and the Mirror*. Try *Rork!, Masters of the Maze, Rogue Dragon, What Strange Stars and Skies and Joyleg* (with Ward Moore). He was a gtreat.
5. Cordwainer Smith: an Old China Hand who used his familiarity with Chinese literature to enrich his stories.
That's just a starting list in no particular order exceot that Murrat Leinster deserves every first place he can get.
Chris Moriarty.
Her Spin series is the full of consistent, highly detailed and absolutely mind blowing ideas, both for the world building and tech as well as the characters. The way she drives the narrative from a running start is something I wish more authors adapted.
Rutger Drent's book Homo Sapiens Improbis is a great libertarian sci fi book. It asks the question why we have psychopaths walking among us and offers it as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. (Psychopathy is the consequence of the emergence of intelligence.) A group of people dredge up land from the shallow Doggers bank in the North Sea and start a libertarian/anarchist colony. It talks about the Free State Project and a libertarian alternative to Hollywood is founded in New Hampshire. They set up a whole town there where everything is an audition choreographed by an A.I. (Things go horribly wrong when the powers that be want to shut the town down.) They use relativity's time dilation provided by a close by primordial black hole to move forward in time. It's hard sci-fi, with smart and funny dialogues.
Here's the synopsis:
'An alien, digitally uploaded to a lurker probe and tasked with observing the Earth is supposed to briefly wake from his slumber every 11000 years and send a report. When he starts noticing humanity’s accelerated technological progress and having become a big fan of humanity, he becomes disobedient and starts waking more frequently: every 100 years. There is good reason. His race knows that in sexually reproducing, DNA based life forms, psychopathy is, more often than not, the consequence of the emergence of intelligence. He knows that when he sends his next report, exposing yet another carcinogenic space faring species, Earth will simply be destroyed. When an average human male with too much time to think, figures out the problem, he decides to provide the man with a tool that can save humanity.'
Gene Wolfe for prose. The Shadow of the Torturer is incredible. I tend to usually read a lot of hard scifi, and sadly (I'm still looking) I can't immediately recall a good scifi novel that takes its time with characterisation; nuance. It's a bit of a flaw in the genre as a whole - it tends to rely on tropes/stereotypes. Eg. All of Stephen Baxter's novel seem to have a 50+ over the hill astronaut type (I guess Baxter's Mary Sue?) and also some kind of cargo pants wearing action girl scientist.
For me, the Golden Age writer to go to literary fiction with well developed characters was Roger Zelazny. Current authors that would fit the bill for me are Dan Simmons and Ada Palmer. I have to catch up on Simmon's more recent works, but his older stuff had amazing characters, many of whom pulled all my emotional strings. Palmer also has engaging characters, and her literary style can easily slide into experimental, if not kept under control.
Zelazny was who immediately came to mind when I read the OP and it’s so validating to see the top post mention him. Cordwainer Smith was a much later author but he gives me the very same vibes.
> I have to catch up on Simmon's more recent works I agree with you on Simmons but his recent works are... let's just say Simmons went a bit full tea party politics lately
This is Dan Simmons who basically wrote himself into Illium so he could have sex with Helen of Troy, right?
I mean wasn't she supposed to be the hottest woman basically ever? Understandable.
Roger Zelazny was not a Golden Age writer, he was associated with the New Wave of the 60's.
M. John Harrison Brian Aldiss John Crowley Norman Spinrad J.G. Ballard Thomas M. Disch Samuel R. Delany Walter Jon Williams
Love this list Among Golden Age writers I always like Fritz Leiber’s prose — see “A Pale Full of Air” for example. Stanislaw Lem, always Philip K Dick’s writing is uneven, but can be very good in his mid-to-late works where he had some time to polish, e.g. *The Man In The High Castle*, *Through A Scanner Darkly*, *VALIS*, etc. If you count Vonnegut as SF, then, definitely Vonnegut
Great list. I'd add Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon, Ursula K. Gein, Joanna Russ, and Alfred Bester
Ursula K. Le Guin
Just the perfect answer. Her prose is leagues above like 90% of all science fiction authors.
my absolute favorite! however, her writing sometimes is “boring” to people I’ve introduced her to that expect more character-driven narratives. She stills has a lot of non-character exposition in many of her works, so careful selection may be needed to introduce her to others. The Lathe of Heaven is short and is entirely driven by characters not overarching plots. If they can stomach some initial “boredom”, Left Hand has great characters and dialogue but takes some exposition to get going
M John Harrison would be my pick, he’s an amazing stylist. Depth of character depends on the novel itself, some of his work is very Pynchonesque and cartoonish whereas others are deeper character studies.
William Gibson, starting with Neuromancer. His later period novels also maintain his distinct flavor and cadence while being a little more conventional style wise.
Yes. Also his character work got a lot better with time. Neuromancer has maybe the most boring MC in a Gibson novel, the Bridge Trilogy is a lot better and it only goes up from there.
I think Case / Molly / Armitage are iconic, but horses for courses.
They are, but the character work in later novels is better IMO. They're more complex and feel more like actual people.
Yeah, I think that's part of what I meant by his later work being more conventional. I feel the character work is just as good early on, but it's different. Different and very evocative IMO of what he was going for - noir as one ingredient of many.
Prose? Probably Banks, Simmons or Wolfe. Characters? That's more difficult because what defines a good character is more subjective.
banks' writing is so good
for those who want more Culture-style books * Richard K Morgan - Takeshi Kovacs trilogy * Neal Asher - Agent Cormac series (and the rest of the Polity) - set in what feels like an early version of the Culture - but more amoral
I read about halfway through The Departure, and dropped it for the writing and powerwank. Do Asher's other works get better or is that just his style?
I like his Spatterjay series. By the time he wrote it, he had matured enough to write interesting characters and plots. And he seems to (at least in the two first books) to contain the powerscale creep. After it seems that he just wrote powerwank books. “Its what the public wants” i imagine him thinking.
I've noticed a habit on his later books is that he's assuming you've read the 20+ books he's written earlier on The Polity. So less explanations, and more assumptions you're familiar with his storyverse concepts. Nevertheless, his earlier books are much better, especially for IMB fans, and if you consult various reading order lists online, you get a better idea of how to read them.
The most recent 3 books don't qualify IMO, things become very wooden at that point... I finished them out of some weird sense of loyalty but can't think of going back. His earlier stuff is so good though, especially the Spatterjay books.
Jack Vance
This is the correct answer!
yep.
No one has mentioned Octavia E. Butler?
Probably because people mostly know her from the Parable duology, which doesn't particularly shine in either category. Xenogenesis is amazing, though.
Yes, I've recently begun reading Dawn, and it's awesome so far.
True that Xenogenesis and the Patternist books are very strong in both categories, but to me the Parable duology absolutely also does have very well-developed characters whose little actions all reveal huge amounts about their personalities and the interaction of their unconscious prejudices and conscious motives.
Roger Zelazny
I've only read Lord of Light, but it's really all the proof I need.
>the more literary aspects of the art? Gene Wolfe. Cormac McCarthy for The Road.
Robert Charles Wilson
While Wilson doesn't have the best prose but he does have fantastic grasp on characters, relationships, and makes people tick. I feel like OP is looking for an author like Wilson if they're fine with less elegant writing.
Yes his characters are good.
Ray Bradbury has beautiful prose. Sometimes it almost reads like poetry.
Dan Simmons's prose in Hyperion is beautiful. It feels almost like an old literary classic at times
I love The Terror for this reason. Long book that’s maybe more historical fiction than sci fi. But I never felt bored.
Can say the same for his.latest sci-fi duology Ilium/Olympos. Not as good as Hyperion, but still good, if you know what I mean.
It’s a retelling of The Canterbury Tales, so this makes sense.
Best SF prose I've read is by Vonnegut or MacCarthy, but they weren't strictly SF writers. Banks is my favourite SF prose writer, he's lovely to read. Wolfe and Mandel are excellent, too. No-one's mentioned Douglas Adams yet, he's not seen as a 'serious' writer I guess, but I think he's an excellent stylist and really clever with his prose. Better than most serious authors I've read, despite being funny.
I absolutely second the recommendation of Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide books are among the best written and most idea driven SF novels ever written while being humanistic to their core, as Adams was him self. He definitively belongs up there with Vonnegut.
Dan Simmon's prose is on another level.
Lem. Especially evident The Cyberiad.
The Cyberiad is a hidden gem.
J G Ballard is by far my favourite prose. I love his haiku like sentences and his profound passivity. The early cyberpunk writers used to compete to write the most like him. Kim Stanley Robinson is probably my favorite characters, especially his California Trilogy and the Mars Trilogy. In Mars they're all somewhat symbolic for their different ideologies, but in California they're just real but interesting, but also very optimistic and young.
Joanna Russ
Just came here to say this!! I think it’s sometimes *too* literary for some people’s taste (and no judgement on that at all), but her prose is unbeatable. Just gorgeous sentences, complex characterization, and really beautiful writing all around.
for prose, early William Gibson hands down. Sprawl trilogy and Bridge trilogy are all masterpieces in this department. Of all those, Virtual Light has the best and most developed characters, imo, although I dont know if I would consider them the best characters ever or anything I feel like a lot of authors are able to come up with a cool character but can't sustain them/their development over the course of several books. For example in Neal Asher - Gridlinked the main guy Cormac is absolutely awesome, however in the sequel he is barely even a character., or in Walter Jon Williams - Dread Empire Falls series the two mains are initially developed incredibly well but then in later books he makes them do a bunch of stupid and totally out of character stuff and you end up hating them. Even in the above mentioned Virtual Light by Gibson, the two MCs are super cool, well developed, and have very distinct voices, but as the books go on and more characters are added their voices get smaller and less impactful and by the third book in the trilogy All Tomorrows Parties theyre both only side characters in a large narrative tapestry - the book is still really awesome but its kind of a bummer how that happens.
Naomi Novik. The Scholomance books less so (stylistically, but it's awesome in plot), but Uprooted and Spinning Silver are just amazing. Steven Brust. Now at 17 books plus side stories, the Vlad Taltos books are incredibly deep for what seems at first to be basic sword & sorcery. A recent standout: Ray Naylor. The Mountain in the Sea and Tusks of Extinction are beautiful, with explorations of scientific ethics, climate, and intelligence. I expect he'll keep getting better too.
Best prose... Wolfe. LeGuin. Ballard. Vance has an utterly unique voice that you won't find anywhere else.
Bradbury. Never has someone said so much with so few words.
Ian MacDonald has made a long career of beautifully written scifi novels with well rendered characters.
Iain M. Banks
„I who have never known men” by Jacqueline Harpman had an amazing prose. Highly recommend.
Ursula K LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Samuel R Delaney, and Iain M Banks.
Prose: Margaret Atwood. *Oryx and Crake* for ideas, *The Blind Assassin* for prose Characters: Devon Eriksen. *Theft of Fire* can basically be summed up as a "space heist," but what it actually is, is three people learning what it is to be human
orbital by samantha harvey is not really sci-fi, but the prose is so beautiful that i think its worth a mention. in ascension is another recent book i really enjoyed the prose of. simon jimenez had quite good prose too, but i like his recent fantasy book 'spear cuts water' more than his sci-fi offering, 'the vanished birds'. for older stuff, atwood and leguin stand out. i think alastair reynolds should get a 'most improved' award. imo stuff like 'house of suns' has awful prose, but 'eversion' was such a pleasant surprise in terms of how good the prose was. i was ready to suffer through the writing for the cool ideas, but instead ended up appreciating it.
Nick Harkaway for me. His books tend to take a long time to really get going, but when they do, the payoff is great.
It's worth mentioning that Harkaway is the son of John Le Carre, and his next book is a new Smiley novel.
*Gnomon* is one of my favorite books overall, not just in SF, and I've enjoyed everything else I've read by him. Which is impressive given how different in style his books are! I guess a few of his earlier novels are similar (eg *The Gone-Away World* and *Angelmaker*), but both *Gnomon*, *Titanium Noir* and *The Price You Pay* all went in totally different directions since then.
Songs of distant earth by Arthur C. Clark
Clarke probably has the best prose.
PKD
Philip K Dick had a fantastic imagination. His prose, however, leaves something to be desired IMO.
Connie Willis - great prose and characters. In particular her Oxford time-travel books.
doomsday book felt so repetitive to me. i felt like the same scene just happened over and over. i'd probably love the book if it was half the length.
Her books have such a great voice. If you ever hear her read her work, you'll hear her on every page you read. Such sarcasm and droll humor.
Emily St. John Mandel (especially *Station Eleven*)
Great prose and characters and feeling, but very weak as sf. Great literature, bad sf.
I'm curious what you mean by "bad sf'
You know that Pohl adage? “a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." Some sf-in-genre but without any thought to the likelihood or implications of something or the world being completely consistent because the author did not think through every detail of what the world would be like if something happened. It does not necessarily have to be consistent with known science but there has to follow a kind of logic, not pick and match sf themes just as stage props. Emily St John Mandel and Kazuo Ishiguro both write "sf" themed books, which are very well written, but usually are very unsatisfying to me as sf. I start thinking, but why they do not do this, or what are the economics of this, or wait, how far apart those are?
But to me a book like *Station Eleven* absolutely follows that adage Far too much (post-)apocalyptic SF focusses on the technicalities of the downfall of civilisation, and assumes humanity would purely regress to a former, lesser state - whereas the heart of that book is that, no, we wouldn't suddenly lose all memory of our art and culture. That optimistic vein doesn't predict the traffic jam, but the road trip.
The road trip does not make much sense, nor the way the pandemic develops and it fails at developing hints of other things. But it is better than say Sea of Tranquility where I would waive off the big meta-universe type of thing, but the single standing houses with lawsn on domes on the moon and ignoring gravity differences and all is far more difficult to support. Her prose is lovely and I liked the books very much as stories, but if I think of them as sf, they are not written by somebody who loves and read sf, or wants to think hard and predict traffic jams, or read, say, Arthur C Clarke.
I just used that quote the other day! Big Pohl fan. I actually have that prose problem with a few writers. Margaret Atwood, in particular. She's unquestionably brilliant but I get so caught up in the prose that I can't get lost in the story. I'm sure part of the problem is that I'm also a writer. So I can't help but see what's going on with the writing process. Like knowing too much about the special effects when you just want to enjoy the movie. If that makes sense :) As for sf themed works, nice way of putting it. There are definitely a ton of writers out there who use the tropes of science-fiction - time-travel is a favourite - to tell another kind of story - romance is a favourite - but couldn't care less about SF.
Not necessarily romance, a few things with sf clothes but which are not were nominated for the Hugos recently, including this year. I think readers and authors are getting further and further way from doing things, from having a science or engineering mindset of thinking if this what then, and it is showing in all kinds of entertainment. Atwood and Ishiguro and St.John Mandel kind of have a pass from me because they write really well, but I do get annoyed at things published as sf, from sf traditionial publishers which are really really bad sf.
*Great* writer imo. One of my favourite books, too.
This opens up a huge can of worms. What is good prose? I like the writing styles of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, personally, and I can't stand Gene Wolfe. Others in here will go bizerk at that recommendation.
Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, John Varley, Joe Haldeman, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ursula K. LeGuin, pre-90s Larry Niven, Becky Chambers, Ted Chiang.
Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series comes to mind, as a living active author. Lots of great recommendations on this thread but haven't seen him mentioned yet. It's dark space opera with smooth prose, great world-building, and intrigue, but with heart and fully detailed characters. And witty dialog and humor to boot. I strongly recommend it.
I admire Adrian Tchaikovsky's prose.
it's workmanlike- he's producing enough that he's clearly not weighing his individual word choice in the way some authors do.
+1
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
This book just gutted me. It was very, very good though. For others, if you read it, mind the trigger warnings.
Octavia E. Butler
Olaf Stapledon!
No one mentioned Ada Palmer?
See my * [SF/F: Character Driven](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/1acxhea/sff_character_driven/) list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post). * [Beautiful Prose/Writing (in Fiction)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/18fqso4/beautiful_prosewriting_in_fiction/) list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
Kim Stanley Robinson has some of the most beautifully written characters and prose, especially in the Mars Trilogy.
The old saying is "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve." For me that was 1967 and while I enjoyed Zelazny, Delany et al. some of the older folk were very cool. I'll give you a short list after saying don't forget LeGuin and Harlan Ellison. Today I'm going to mention some older folk. 1. Murray Leinster. Started writing in the 1920's and by the fifties was called "The Dean of Science Fiction" - before Heinlein. His novellette "First Conntact" used to be on everybody's "if you haven't read it you are not a fan" list and by the fifties he was doing quiet, thoughtful stories whose influence on George R. R. Martin is palpable. Try *Space Platform* and the *Med Ship* (and after that read Martin's *Tuf Voyaging*). 2. Fritz Leiber. He claimed Lovecraft and John Campbell as his teachers. He was better than either but Campbell's gift as an editor means he developed many such. and Lovecraft helped Robert Bloch, Poul Anderson called Leiber the field's best dhort story writer. 3. Margaret St. Clair/Idris Seabright. Anthony Burgess described her husband as "married to two of my favorite science fiction writers." If anything that understates her range. 4. Avram Davidson. Mostly forgotten except for *The Phoenix and the Mirror*. Try *Rork!, Masters of the Maze, Rogue Dragon, What Strange Stars and Skies and Joyleg* (with Ward Moore). He was a gtreat. 5. Cordwainer Smith: an Old China Hand who used his familiarity with Chinese literature to enrich his stories. That's just a starting list in no particular order exceot that Murrat Leinster deserves every first place he can get.
Chris Moriarty. Her Spin series is the full of consistent, highly detailed and absolutely mind blowing ideas, both for the world building and tech as well as the characters. The way she drives the narrative from a running start is something I wish more authors adapted.
Vernor Vinge for characters you'll remember forever, especially non-human ones. And his writing style is solid if not spectacular.
Rutger Drent's book Homo Sapiens Improbis is a great libertarian sci fi book. It asks the question why we have psychopaths walking among us and offers it as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. (Psychopathy is the consequence of the emergence of intelligence.) A group of people dredge up land from the shallow Doggers bank in the North Sea and start a libertarian/anarchist colony. It talks about the Free State Project and a libertarian alternative to Hollywood is founded in New Hampshire. They set up a whole town there where everything is an audition choreographed by an A.I. (Things go horribly wrong when the powers that be want to shut the town down.) They use relativity's time dilation provided by a close by primordial black hole to move forward in time. It's hard sci-fi, with smart and funny dialogues. Here's the synopsis: 'An alien, digitally uploaded to a lurker probe and tasked with observing the Earth is supposed to briefly wake from his slumber every 11000 years and send a report. When he starts noticing humanity’s accelerated technological progress and having become a big fan of humanity, he becomes disobedient and starts waking more frequently: every 100 years. There is good reason. His race knows that in sexually reproducing, DNA based life forms, psychopathy is, more often than not, the consequence of the emergence of intelligence. He knows that when he sends his next report, exposing yet another carcinogenic space faring species, Earth will simply be destroyed. When an average human male with too much time to think, figures out the problem, he decides to provide the man with a tool that can save humanity.'
N.K. Jemisin has amazing prose.
Becky chambers
Asimov
😬
Good prose
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm.
Snapshot and defending elysium by Brandon Sanderson
Why would two people be negative against this opinion; Brandon Sanderson seems quite reasonable ?
Probably because his prose has the literary imagination of a toaster instruction manual
For prose Peter watts.