Samuel R Delany, Philip K Dick, Ursula K Le Guin, and (maybe) William Gibson.

[pmb]

What scifi/fantasy authors would you be willing to defend as writers of high quality literature and not just genre fiction? What authors both have something to say, and say it well?

NB: I'm primarily looking for people who are by default filed in the SciFi ghetto, not "real" authors who have occasionally been filed in SF/fantasy. Because Kurt Vonnegut is widely acknowledged to be a virtuoso writer and has written a bunch of SF, but I'm not sure that most people think of him as a science fiction writer.

Comments

[leech.livejournal.com]

I'd add Frank Herbert to that list. Orson Scott Card might make it if he'd published significantly fewer crappy books along with his few gems. I don't think Neil Gaiman makes it, because he's just too squarely a fantasy writer. Same issue with Neal Stephenson.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Frank Herbert - but only for Dune. All of its sequels sucked progressively more and more. Neil Gaiman tells a good story, but I'm not convinced there's anything more there, and I'm even more sure of that with Neal Stephenson. The same thing with Lois McMaster Bujold. I read their books and they make me smile, but not think beyond that. That's wonderful, but not quite what I'm looking for.

Orson Scott Card ... he's a tough one. I think Ender's Game will stand the test of time, but I'm not convinced that any of his other books (the Alvin Maker series, Speaker for the Dead, etc) will.

Theodore Sturgeon perhaps. I haven't read much by him, but I was very impressed with More Than Human.

[leech.livejournal.com]

Card also had some interesting early stuff: Wyrms, Hart's Hope and Treason. I haven't read any of them in quite a while, so I could have inaccurate memories. Maybe they sucked and I was too young to notice.

I wanted to say Dan Simmons for Hyperion, but it's just not quite there, you know? Astounding cultural depth, but still very much in a speculative fiction way.

[kirin]

I dunno, I'm tempted to argue for Gaiman on some sort of grounds of tapping into and exploring universal mythos (in addition to being a damn good storyteller). But I don't feel like I have enough background in Lit-Crit to have a clue how to defend myself.

[jes5199.livejournal.com]

On the phone and in his incoherent published reply, Card repeatedly shows ignorance of what he himself purportedly wrote. I simply cannot imagine how you could write such a stunningly well crafted piece of work (inasmuch as it is wildly popular and deeply affects people) without being aware of every fibre and splinter of its composition. About the third or fourth time I heard Card say something wasn't in his book that I knew was, I began to suspect that it was more of a committee effort. - "Orson Scott Card has Always Been an Asshat."

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

Orson Scott Card is an asshole, but he has written some fantastic books. I think the best of his work is actually in Maps in a mirror, his book of short stories. (There's just a paragraph in there to ignore, in one of his essays where he decides to let his asshole show.) Ender's Game is great, but I also like Speaker for the Dead (not as a sequel, and no love for it's sequels) and Ender's Shadow (again, hate the sequels).