Medium core scifi???

Question:

Medium core scifi???

I just finished reading "Light" by M. John Harrison and I really liked it because it seemed intelligent, literary, and introduced concepts that really made you think.---I really can't handle scifi that is too "genre-y", adolescent and predictable, and yet a lot of what people recommend to me as "hard scifi" seems most apt as masturbatory material for engineers and physicists---Not into it. Anyone else feel this way and/or have recommendations?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I feel pretty much the same way, although I like some of the better "genre-y" stuff (like Poul Anderson and H. Beam Piper for older writers, or Neal Asher and Mike Resnick more recently) and some hard sf writers.

You probably would like Ken MacLeod and Iain M. Banks, although MacLeod's latest ("The Execution Channel") may be a little (computer) geeky for your taste. I enjoy everything by them, but "The Sky Road" or "Newton's Wake" would probably be good starting places for MacLeod, and "The Algebraist" is Banks' most recent and a good read.

I don't like Kim Stanley Robinson myself, but it's an issue of taste rather than quality, and you might like him. Try "Forty Signs of Rain" or "Red Mars."

John Brunner was a really good writer, most famous for dystopian novels like "The Sheep Look Up," "Stand on Zanzibar," and "The Shockwave Rider." You might also like other writers from the 60's and 70's "New Wave" like Brian Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany or Philip K. Dick.

Dan Simmons is pretty good. Try "Hyperion" or "Ilium." Both start out series (four books and two books respectively).

Greg Egan writes hard sf, and isn't really good enough to sustain novel-length works, but I suspect that you would really like his short stories (collected in "Axiomatic" and "Luminous"). Robert Charles Wilson is another nominally hard sf writer that you might find worth it if you gave him a chance. Try "Spin," "Blind Lake," or "The Harvest."

Hope that gives you a start.