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If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the pro

If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the prose and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.

jerf 3y ago
I think it was Larry Niven who pointed out that if you think of conventional writing as consisting of something like some combination of plot, prose, and characters, that the science fiction author labors under the additional constraint of also having to establish setting. (IIRC he broke it into five categories, but the total number and exactly what they are isn't important.) And given how few authors ever reach the level of firing on all cylinders in a non-science-fiction setting on those metrics, a science fiction fan must extend the science fiction authors some grace on the other fronts of good writing if they're going to enjoy it at all. I don't think I've ever seen a science fiction story that establishes a truly different setting that also gets a 5 out of 5 across the board on all the other metrics, and it's debatable whether such a thing is even possible. If such a story hypothetically existed it would probably be too verbose to count as good writing. You can get all sorts of combinations of various attributes, but you just can't get them all. Certainly Egan is in the Silver Age Asimov/Clarke tradition of sacrificing characters to fit the rest in, but what he does is so good I can't complain. For all the crazy science fiction I've read, Egan has, just to name one example, the only story set in a serious attempt at an alternative space-time geometry in which there are two space and two time dimensions, and not in some vague what-if "parallel dimension" sense, but by actually working out the consequences of what two spatial and two temporal dimensions looks like when you feed that into the equations of general relativity: https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html (I find this one particularly interesting because many of us have imagined "what if there were two time dimensions"; Egan shows that what came to most of our imaginations was so laughably wrong as to not even be in the ballpark, and that in fact you can perfectly sensible discuss the topic grounded in real physics.) Even in the field of science fiction writers there's only a certain percentage of writers who could even properly follow that page, let alone generate it themselves.
atombender 3y ago
Depends on what you mean by "the great SF writers." If you mean Clarke and Heinlein and such, then I would agree; their prose tends to be utilitarian. But as counter-examples I submit J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney, Ursula LeGuin, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon — and there are surely others I'm forgetting. All great prose stylists, all masters of characterization, and arguably among the greats of the genre.
lproven 3y ago
Iain M Banks. 'Nuff said.
justin66 3y ago
> If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. Joe Haldeman's non-SF novels were all very good in their way. I wonder if he would have been happy to make the switch to full time non-genre writing if 1968 (his Vietnam novel - although he'd joke that all his novels are Vietnam novels) hadn't fizzled. I'm not the right person to criticize his poetry, but I enjoyed some of it. As some others mentioned, Iain Banks, Ursula LeGuin, and William Gibson wrote some great non-genre stuff. In a different world William Gibson could have been a great essayist in the vein of John McPhee.

jerf 3y ago

I think it was Larry Niven who pointed out that if you think of conventional writing as consisting of something like some combination of plot, prose, and characters, that the science fiction author labors under the additional constraint of also having to establish setting. (IIRC he broke it into five categories, but the total number and exactly what they are isn't important.) And given how few authors ever reach the level of firing on all cylinders in a non-science-fiction setting on those metrics, a science fiction fan must extend the science fiction authors some grace on the other fronts of good writing if they're going to enjoy it at all. I don't think I've ever seen a science fiction story that establishes a truly different setting that also gets a 5 out of 5 across the board on all the other metrics, and it's debatable whether such a thing is even possible. If such a story hypothetically existed it would probably be too verbose to count as good writing. You can get all sorts of combinations of various attributes, but you just can't get them all. Certainly Egan is in the Silver Age Asimov/Clarke tradition of sacrificing characters to fit the rest in, but what he does is so good I can't complain. For all the crazy science fiction I've read, Egan has, just to name one example, the only story set in a serious attempt at an alternative space-time geometry in which there are two space and two time dimensions, and not in some vague what-if "parallel dimension" sense, but by actually working out the consequences of what two spatial and two temporal dimensions looks like when you feed that into the equations of general relativity: https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html (I find this one particularly interesting because many of us have imagined "what if there were two time dimensions"; Egan shows that what came to most of our imaginations was so laughably wrong as to not even be in the ballpark, and that in fact you can perfectly sensible discuss the topic grounded in real physics.) Even in the field of science fiction writers there's only a certain percentage of writers who could even properly follow that page, let alone generate it themselves.

atombender 3y ago

Depends on what you mean by "the great SF writers." If you mean Clarke and Heinlein and such, then I would agree; their prose tends to be utilitarian. But as counter-examples I submit J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney, Ursula LeGuin, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon — and there are surely others I'm forgetting. All great prose stylists, all masters of characterization, and arguably among the greats of the genre.

lproven 3y ago

Iain M Banks. 'Nuff said.

justin66 3y ago

> If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. Joe Haldeman's non-SF novels were all very good in their way. I wonder if he would have been happy to make the switch to full time non-genre writing if 1968 (his Vietnam novel - although he'd joke that all his novels are Vietnam novels) hadn't fizzled. I'm not the right person to criticize his poetry, but I enjoyed some of it. As some others mentioned, Iain Banks, Ursula LeGuin, and William Gibson wrote some great non-genre stuff. In a different world William Gibson could have been a great essayist in the vein of John McPhee.