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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1840370" data-attributes="member: 99">...resumption of hijack.Well, Tacky, though I'm sorry that you were not so fond of Lucifer's Hammer, I didn't make the "or your money back" deal with you.  I was responding to John Q. Mayhem who said:If it were instead:then I would not have jumped in to recommend these other books.  But I was addressing somebody who was admittedly a fan of this duo and Lucifer's Hammer is widely regarded as one of their best books together.  I'll also say that Legacy of Heorot might be a bit more to your liking, if you've not read it, for reasons I'm about to explain.I'm a big fan of science fiction, particularly hard science fiction, more particularly that written by Larry Niven and his various collaborators.  I can agree with you that some of his books have characters that are not fully fleshed out but I think this is somewhat a necessary characteristic of the scope of the books rather than a poor performance by the author(s) in question (you may disagree about that).  After all, we're talking about a book that touches on dozens of characters in an epic tale about the impact (litterally) of a catastrophic event across the globe.  So the focus is on the event and, only to a lesser extent, the characters.I think the same charge can be leveled at lots of books about global catastrophe.  Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising is similar in scope and has many of the same issues regarding characterization.  When you are hopping from one character to another through the course of the book to illustrate how this event is making its effects felt throughout the world then you are going to have to let characterization take a bit of a back seat or your book is going to be several thousand pages long.  I might even enjoy that on occasion, but most publishers are not going to go for it.I'll also make it clear that I'm not a blind adherent of Niven's.  He has written some stinkers and even some of his work with Pournelle has been uninspiring (I thought The Burning City had some interesting moments but was not all that riveting to somebody who lives outside Los Angeles).  But he is perfectly able to portray a character who is multifaceted and deep.  I think Louis Wu is a great example.  He's almost what you'd call a "paripatetic iconoclast" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.  So I feel that "idea fiction" (and Ringworld and the sequel are very nearly the definition of "idea fiction) needn't be lacking in good characterization.And I fully agree that there ought to be a separate "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" section in the bookstore.  Not because I don't like either but because it would make it easier to find the one that I'm more in the mood for at the moment.</blockquote>

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