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

[quizro.livejournal.com]

Terry Bisson
Howard Waldrop
Joe Lansdale
James Blaylock
Michael Swanwick

[pmb.livejournal.com]

They have been checked out. Reading will commence soon. I wasn't that into Terry Bisson the first time I read one of his works, but that was some time ago, and I may have chosen poorly. The others are new!

[quizro.livejournal.com]

I love Bisson's collection Bears Discover Fire.

Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide consistently creeps into my top informal list of 10 SF novels.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I sampled these guys. They ended up being a bunch of alternate history people. Which is generally not my cup of tea.

But oh-your-god was Stations of the Tide good. Michael Swanwick can't pull it off all the time - The Iron Dragon's Daughter didn't lack for ambition, but was ultimately a letdown - but SotT was fantastic.

I also just read Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling and it tickled many of the same nerve endings as SotT. I wasn't impressed by the Schismatrix books, but Holy Fire was quite good, so I'm putting Sterling and Swanwick in the same (very good) category.