Monkeybot

Who is listing romance authors here?

Alonzo Fyfe

David Hume

Sarpedon

Why thank you, monkeybot.

And by the way, to all semiliterates on the literature page. Romance didn't always mean a smutty pulp novel, it originally meant "a long story." The french word for novel is Roman, I believe.

thefugitivesaint

Tom Robbins woul dbe up there on my list simply do to his ability to describe things in a way i've not encountered in any other author i've read.

Anyone who can say that a headache feels like "a lobster and a porcupine having a fist-fight in front of a strob light" can woo me. And, as my ex-girlfriend use to say, his descriptions of sex actually feel like sex itself. yep.

Also:
neil gaiman
Haruki Murakami
Kurt Vonnegut
George R R Martin
H.P. Lovecraft (remnant of my childhood)
Philip K. Dick


and more than i care to list.
-theSaint

Eudaimonist

This is a difficult choice, but I'd have to say Ayn Rand. I'm not suggesting that her writing is "perfect" (I've yet to find a perfect author), but I like the following:

• She dramatizes philosophical ideas in the action of her characters; she doesn't simply present ideas to the audience as some other authors do
• Her writing is intelligent; there is usually some philosophical nugget to consider on each page, and her novels each contain a complete message
• Her visual descriptions are vivid, and often beautiful.
• Her stories can be a source of motivation in one's own life

On the negative side (mostly in Atlas Shrugged):

• Atlas Shrugged in particular suffers from the long, heavy-handed Russian Novel Syndrome. (She grew up in Russia, so she has an excuse.)
• She can be overly wordy
• Her characters often launch into long speeches, instead of having a more natural dialogue
• Minor characters often seem like mere placeholders for certain philosophical concepts

Other writers I like are:

J.R.R. Tolkien
H.P. Lovecraft
George Orwell
Anne Rice
Joe Haldeman
Isaac Asimov
Larry Niven

Entropic_Gnosis

Depending upon my mood:

Douglas Adams: "Arthur hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realised there was a contradiction there and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

Umberto Eco

Thomas Pynchon

J.R.R. Tolkien

Samuel Beckett: "Suddenly, no at last, long last, i couldn't go on. Someone said you can't stay here, i couldn't stay and i couldn't go on."

Tom Stoppard: "We're actors, we're the opposite of people"

Autonemesis

This is a difficult choice, but I'd have to say Gene Roddenberry. I'm not suggesting that his writing is "perfect" (I've yet to find a perfect author), but I like the following:

• He dramatized philosophical ideas in the action of his characters; he doesn't simply present ideas to the audience as some other authors do
• His writing is intelligent; there is usually some philosophical nugget to consider in each eposode, and his stories each contain a complete message
• His visualizations are vivid, and often beautiful.
• His stories can be a source of motivation in one's own life

On the negative side (mostly in TOS and TNG):

• TOS in particular suffers from the long, heavy-handed Pretentious Sci-Fi Syndrome. (He grew up in California, so he has an excuse.)
• He can be overly wordy
• His characters often launch into long speeches, instead of having a more natural dialogue
• Minor characters often seem like mere placeholders for certain philosophical concepts.

I also like J. Michael Straczynski.

KidFury

George R R Martin

N'uff said

gcameron

I know you smileyed this, but I'll bite. Tolstoy was an aristocrat; it's not surprising he had patriarchal and simplistic views of peasants (though this was tempered by periods of great idealism, however misplaced). This is not the honesty I am talking about. I'm talking about the first 2 pages of "The Death of Ivan Ilych." That's honesty -- the determination to describe human emotions and states of mind with total fidelity and no whitewashing. Neither however does he wade in angst as some lesser writers do. Not unlike Howard Cosell, he tells it like it is.

From Ivan Ilych, what is one of my favorite paragraphs in all of fiction:

"Each one thought or felt, 'Well, he's dead but I'm alive!' But the more intimate of Ivan Ilych's acquaintances, his so-called friends, could not help thinking also that they would now have to fulfill the very tiresome demands of propriety by attending the funeral service and paying a visit of condolence to the widow."

That paragraph knocked me out when I first read it, and it still does...

gcameron

I am skeptical of any novel that is supposed to be read for anything other than entertainment purposes. "Native Son" was a ripping yarn for a while, but if you are going to end with a 100 page lecture on Marxism, why not just write a 100 page lecture on Marxism and not call it a novel?