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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9109893" data-attributes="member: 18">I'd say that this is broadly true. It's notable that with the third and fourth Rama books, written together with Gentry Lee, suddenly try to be much more interested in the characters as people, with foibles, peculiarities, life-goals and so on, that aren't necessarily aligned with their profession, and where some of them aren't even particularly skilled individuals/professionals.And it's an absolute disaster and drains a huge amount of energy from those two books, and honestly those characters are so poorly written (and even insulting in a couple of cases, as I recall) that they're nothing but a detriment and frustration.I think there's an entire SF/technothriller subgenre of sort of "scientific mystery slowly unveiled" books, by Crichton, Clarke, and countless imitators, where genuinely, it is questionable as to whether we - the audience - care about the characterisations beyond the superficial, and indeed whether there's any real benefit to it. In some cases, sure (especially where there's a significant metaphysical element), but in a lot of others, especially where there's no metaphysical element, trying to give people unveiling the mystery too much in the way of personality and peculiarities often feels like it's a misunderstanding of the genre and actively a detriment. And a lot of authors sort of fall into this trap of trying to give us complex characters when honestly, no, that doesn't help, this story isn't really about that.It's funny to say that because in most SF I value strong and deep characterisation, just not that subgenre. It's also pretty rare in SF, which makes this entire discussion kind of wild. Honestly there's no way one can claim Clarke, Asimov, Niven and others were particularly deep or convincing character writers - Alfred Bester or Philip K. Dick maybe - but that doesn't make them bad SF writers. The Mote in God's Eye was mentioned earlier - it's extremely interesting, memorable and important SF book, despite having wildly and hilariously retrograde views and a subtext verging on the eugenic, and despite have paper-thin human characters.</blockquote>

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