> 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 g

> 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.