Writers You'll Buy Sight Unseen

Normally I don't do memes but SFSignal started a quite nice one.

Which authors do I buy without hesitation and without bothering to check reviews?

           

Stephen Baxter - Not so much his YA stuff but I'll buy pretty much anything he puts out that's hard SF.  I've also got into the habit of requesting his historical fiction for review.  I also think that, were that possibility dry up, I'd still buy the final book in the series.  Baxter's original XeeLee sequence is what made me want to study the philosophy of science at grad school (I initially signed up to study Aristotle) and he's arguably one of the people responsible for how I see SF and how I see the world.

Charlie Stross - Probably the only author that I systematically pre-order from the US.  I adore the wide range of ideas that he's capable of engaging with and I absolutely love the way that he does technobabble.  There's a section in The Atrocity Archives when a philosopher explains what it is she's working on and while it's utter nonsense, it sounds exactly the way philosophers sound when they talk about their work.  I adore Stross's work and I think he's a very very clever man.

Neal Stephenson - Doesn't write that many books but that suits me fine as I'm still working my way through the Barroque Cycle.  I know that he can't do endings and I know he has a terrible tendency to shelve his plot and go off on some mad tangent exploring an idea but I adore those tangents.  I'm all about the tangents whether it's the bit in The Confusion where they spend a dozen pages talking about how early stock-markets worked or the bit in Cryptonomicon when the family come up with a weird system for equitably dividing up a dead relative's furniture.

Terry Pratchett - I still happily buy up every Discworld novel that comes out, in hardback.  Over the years I've become increasingly disillusioned with Pratchett as a person, in particular I thought Thud! was an absolutely shameless and horrid attempt to flog a book and a boardgame in time for Xmas.  I've also heard loads of stories about how much of a prick he can be but I still adore the irreverent intelligence of the Discworld novels and the way that Discworld society is shown to be subtly changing as the world essentially goes through the enlightenment.

Interestingly, these are all authors I tend to be quite harsh about, so if you read this site you might well think that I fucking hate Charlie Stross and Stephen Baxter but in truth I'm like the kid who pulls the cute girl's pigtails... I hold them up to impossibly high standards and then moan and bitch when they don't live up to them.  A touch passive aggressive perhaps but in both cases I know what the authors are capable of and I want them to produce books systematically at that level.  In a way, it's a tribute to them that I absolutely refuse to pull any of my punches when I review or think about them.

Comments

[Ian Sales]

I gave up on the Baroque Cycle after the second book. I always think of Stephenson as the Tim Burton of science fiction - i.e., wildly over-rated :-)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I adore the Baroque cycle but I can only read it in 30 or 40 page bouts as I then go off and think about the ideas. I gave up on it originally but returned to it when I started to get into history.

[Paul Kincaid]

My list would be Chris Priest, Mike Harrison, Karen Joy Fowler, John Crowley, Steve Erickson - and outside the genre William Boyd, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Ah yes... Harrison and Priest are good choices too. I've never read Karen Joy Fowler though... aside from di Filippo's story in the last F&SF, I tend to be wary of book clubs.

[Martin]

Hmm, let's see: Harrison, Rupert Thomson, Martin Amis (still), McEwan, Iain Banks, Richard Morgan, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker.

[Ian Sales]

For me, it'd be Paul Park, Al Reynolds, Gwyneth Jones, Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Outside the genre... well, I went off McEwan after Saturday (er, the novel) - in fact, I went off pretty much all of the current crop of literary writers. I much prefer the, um, dead ones: Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles...

[Super Fan of Pratchett]

I haven't read Thud! yet but I'm surprised at your comments ... I've heard that it's exceptional.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

It isn't. It's thin. There's a plot about fanatical dwarves which is decent but terribly terribly thin and undeveloped. The rest of the book is bulked out with attempts to sell that kids book and that boardgame. I've been a huge fan of recent Pratchett works but Thud! really was terrible.