...and very little sci-fi comes anywhere near competitive by those standards. From my own bookshelves, LeGuin, maybe Samuel R. Delaney, maybe Octavia Butler... currently - China Mieville...? But even those we consider Giants of the Field - Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke - were good SCIENCE FICTION writers, but not great WRITERS... Kim Stanley Robinson is the perfect example of this. The Mars trilogy is great when judged against other sci-fi works but even he cannot really believe it bests the best of contemporary non-sci-fi fiction...
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...and very little sci-fi comes anywhere near competitive by those standards. From my own bookshelves, LeGuin, maybe Samuel R. Delaney, maybe Octavia Butler... currently - China Mieville...? But even those we consider Giants of the Field - Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke - were good SCIENCE FICTION writers, but not great WRITERS... Kim Stanley Robinson is the perfect example of this. The Mars trilogy is great when judged against other sci-fi works but even he cannot really believe it bests the best of contemporary non-sci-fi fiction...