What Do Your Favorite SFF Authors Do Best?

We also have to go no further than our own Victoria S. and Unc Jim for some very colorful world-building and sociology in the fantasy realm.

Tri

Titania said:

Ah yes -- agree! I love that about Neil Gaiman as well. He does it the other way round very well too, i.e. ordinary folks getting mixed up in extraordinary situations, like his book about the lawyer who bought the kingship to a fairytale kingdom, and the one about London Underground. Ahh can't remember their titles.

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You're thinking of Magic Kingdom for Sale by Terry Brooks and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

SoloArtist said:

What are some of the things that you think other specific authors do extremely well? Who are some of the best paragons of particular literary gifts?

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I just like their stories, isn't that good enough? I have no clue why I like them over other authors.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I just like their stories, isn't that good enough? I have no clue why I like them over other authors.

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As a reader, that's certainly enough. As a writer, it's good to be conscious of what's working and what isn't.

Anybody, for instance, who thinks that quality of prose is Dan Brown's claim to fame and who tries to imitate it, is in for a nasty surprise.

Kitty Pryde said:

Ian McDonald-put as many astounding sci-fi ideas on a single page as another author would have in their entire novel

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You're among the few who mention Ian McDonald around here. He's one of my favourtie current writers. Interestingly, his idea density can get in the way for me (doesn't usually, but sometimes can, as in - say - Necroville [Terminal Café - in America]). I love his writing, because he always seems to find the right point-of-view for each scene, and balances points-of-view so well against each other. That, and stylish to poetic prose (which makes his recent novella, "The Tear", for example).

Also, I love short stories, and he's a master of that form. I find his short fiction often stronger than his novels. (For example, I prefer the collection Cyberabad Days to his novel River of Gods, although they share the setting.)

Dawnstorm said:

You're among the few who mention Ian McDonald around here. He's one of my favourtie current writers. Interestingly, his idea density can get in the way for me (doesn't usually, but sometimes can, as in - say - Necroville [Terminal Café - in America]). I love his writing, because he always seems to find the right point-of-view for each scene, and balances points-of-view so well against each other. That, and stylish to poetic prose (which makes his recent novella, "The Tear", for example).

Also, I love short stories, and he's a master of that form. I find his short fiction often stronger than his novels. (For example, I prefer the collection Cyberabad Days to his novel River of Gods, although they share the setting.)

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I loooooove his stuff. I only discovered him last year, and I was shocked that he isn't more popular. I just got Cyberabad Days as a gift and I can't wait to read it.

ElaraSophia said:

I like Ian McDonald, too. The Djinn's Wife and The Little Goddess are excellent. Have you read Brasyl? I love how well he does setting in his novels. It's clear how deep and detailed his research has been.

My favourite SF author is Ted Chiang. I think his ideas are great, but what I like best is the way he links them to his characters. His short story "Story of Your Life" has an incredible idea behind it, but it is the emotion of the character that I always remember first. Pretty much every short story he's had published has won a major award - I highly recommend him to anyone who is looking for someone new to read.

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Brasyl is on my list to read. I've read Terminal Cafe, River of Gods, Desolation Road (OMG Sci-fi magical realism! Totally inspired me to want to write like him) Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (a mind-blowing little novella that has a stupid premise and yet is somehow still brilliant by the power of his writing), and I'm working on Evolution's Shore. It's got a lot of powerful metaphors about AIDS in the developing world and colonialism, and I needed to take a break from it because I was getting overwhelmed. I'm excited for the new one, "The Dervish House" which is about Islamic mysticism in the future.

maxmordon said:

Terry Pratchett, for the motives pointed out above.

Neil Gaiman, for his hability to mix up modernity with mythology, you could have Shiva working on a McDonald's some way on Route 66 and Neil Gaiman would be the only one pulling it masterfully.

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I know a really good short story about the angel of death in a coffee shop.

AuthorGuy said:

I know a really good short story about the angel of death in a coffee shop.

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Do want to know.

ElaraSophia said:

I like Ian McDonald, too. The Djinn's Wife and The Little Goddess are excellent. Have you read Brasyl? I love how well he does setting in his novels. It's clear how deep and detailed his research has been.

My favourite SF author is Ted Chiang. I think his ideas are great, but what I like best is the way he links them to his characters. His short story "Story of Your Life" has an incredible idea behind it, but it is the emotion of the character that I always remember first. Pretty much every short story he's had published has won a major award - I highly recommend him to anyone who is looking for someone new to read.

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Ian McDonald is one of the writers I really ought to read more of. I've read quite a bit of his short fiction (the novella Tendeléo's Story is a knockout - it's set in the same transformed Africa as Chaga (UK title)/Evolution's Shore (US title)) but the only novel I've read so far is King of Morning, Queen of Day. It's fantasy and it blew me away when I read it. There's an argument that you can't have dense SF ideas delivered in anything other than plain prose, but I think the richness of McDonald's prose style belies that. (There's a fair amount of literary pastiche in his work, including King of Morning...) I've sort-of met him as he's usually at Eastercon every year and I know people who know him. He seems a nice guy.

As for Ted Chiang, one thing that not many people comment about him is his versatility. Compared to say, Greg Egan (huge ideas but generally written in straightforward first- or third person), he uses quite a variety of forms and techniques in even the eight stories collected in Stories of Your Life and Others. They range from straight third person past (Tower of Babylon, Seventy-Two Letters) to first present (Understand) to a dual-perspective with non-fiction inserts (Division by Zero) to a fake article (The Evolution of Human Science) to a documentary-like narrative made up of interviews, transcripts etc (Liking What You See: A Documentary) to a fable-like narration with NO direct speech whatsoever in some 10,000 words (Hell is the Absence of God). Chiang is one of those writers who makes you want to give up as you can't possibly compete. And he's younger than I am. Bastard.

Kitty Pryde said:

Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (a mind-blowing little novella that has a stupid premise and yet is somehow still brilliant by the power of his writing),

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Hehe. That is so apt!

I've discovered Ian MacDonald in the early nineties with the short story "Floating Dogs" (in Dave Garnett's 90ies incarnation of New Worlds) [a raccoon, a tapir, a porcupine, a cat, a bird, and a robot go on a quest handed down by the "angels"]. Had me listen up. Then, in 1993, I read the novellette "The Undifferentiated Object of Desire" [Alien refugees in London hire human lawyer to prosecute a rape case, but investigations are difficult as it's mating season and humans are susceptible to the pheromones... (second person narration for alien PoV; third for lawyer; questionnaires, radio news flashes, etc. as connective tissue)]. Then I went out and bought Speaking in Tongues (a collection), and that was that.

I haven't read King of Morning... yet, an ommission I need to rectify.

But, yeah, I'm especially in love with his short fiction.

***

I've only read three stories by Ted Chiang (Division by Zero, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, Exhale [was that the title?]). They were all excellent, and they were all different. I agree the guy has an incredible range. He also has a low output, so I wonder whether he's only writing stuff when inspiration hits, thus minimising the effect of habit. I don't know anything about him, though.

Apart from the famous authors mentioned here, I also love the short stories of relative new comers to the field. Jason Sandford for his complex worlds and unique, touching stories, Tim Pratt for his great prose, humour, and great descriptions of human interaction, Simon Haynes for very funny light sci-fi. Although both him and Tim have a number of books to their names, so they're hardly newcomers - probably just not as well known to the general public... Yet.

Also, Robin Sloan - his mix of the mysterious with modern-day tech is something I can really connect to... Not to mention that he's a great story teller. I highly recommend everyone to check out at least a couple of his stories (both available online for free) - "Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store" (available, amongst other places, in audio over at EscapePod) and the fairy tale "The Writer & The Witch," which I liked so much that I've found myself re-telling his story in Russian to my wife.

Simon Haynes is here on AW.

Capital said:

Do want to know.

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It's called Frankie's Diner.

[FONT=tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif]In the New York underworld, people are not always who they seem to be, and places you go each day – the office, or even the diner on the corner of your street – can be anything but safe. And as Marcus finds out, even something as simple as a cup of coffee can be more than meets the eye. In a world where time isn’t measured in minutes, Marcus finds out that sometimes your time is just up.

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I've been thinking about how to respond to this thread in a general way. There are some writers who know how and when to dump descriptions so that I don't mind their presence. Then there are other writers who irritate the hell out of me with seemingly endless descriptive passages that postpone the action far too long. Some of this seems to be the ability to select those details that matter most. I don't need a complete picture of the setting in any given scene: my imagination works well enough, thank you.

I want to know what happens next, not "I'm taking a long pointless flyover of the city so I can bombard the reader with meandering walls of text".