Sci-Fi and Fantasy Literature Suggestions for Character-Oriented People?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Can anyone suggest sci-fi and fantasy literature for maximally character-oriented people?

I have zero interest in the fact that "Ten Forward" in Star Trek: TNG, is on the tenth level of the forward saucer section. I have no feelings whatsoever when I look at starship diagrams except boredom. I don't care much about the lore except how it pertains to the main characters.

It doesn't interest me whether is something in a scene is on the left or right. Up, down, left, right, north, east, south, west, width, height, length -- I don't care about any of it unless it's very relevant to the characters. I don't care that a doorway is 6 feet tall unless a character is 7 feet tall and forgot to duck and hit his head.

I seem to be very peculiar this way. I love the fantasy and sci-fi genre but have minimal interest in world-building except for the details most relevant to the characters.

The reason I love fantasy and sci-fi is that we can have fantastical characters who are far more idealized than real people. So we have to put them through fantastical situations as I see it to start seeing their vulnerabilities. It takes a whole lot to make a character as fantastical as Conan feel any sense of fear, e. g.

[IslaTheWitch]

Try hard SF like The Enceladus Mission / The Titan Probe / The Io Encounter / Return to Enceladus by Brandon Q. Morris. It's a whole series called Ice Moon book series written by an actual scientist

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Ooh! That's tricky for me. The idea of hard sci-fi turns me off despite my STEM background, funnily enough. Perhaps it lacks a certain degree of escapism for me given that I have to immerse myself in very tedious and technical things all the time. I'll need to try your suggestions though regardless!

I just want to distill settings to the mood of the setting. Just "dirty to the point where I immediately feel the need to shower" is fine for me. I got it. I don't need to know that there are rats here, dust there, mud here, brown spots on the corners of the wall. I don't need those types of details, especially the ones like "The wall to the immediate left was [...]" Why does it matter if that wall was to the left or right?

[IslaTheWitch]

different people read books. Some can easily imagine the environment some need hints from the author...

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I actually want to skip the environment except the mood of it like scary, dark, brooding, mysterious, bright, sterile, etc. I just don't find it interesting. I want to find out what's evocative. I'm a more emotional type of person.

It's not that I can't map all this in my brain. I'm a visual arts major. I just don't really find it interesting. Even in VisArts, I was a little bit different from most students in that I was more interested to drawing the impression that people and environments gave to me, not drawing how they were. After all, we photography if we want to capture things precisely as they are.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

[*] After all, we [have, sorry] photography if we want to capture things precisely as they are.

So I don't see myself beating the camera here if we're just trying to describe how things are. But I can beat it in how things feel to me.

[AmyHew1tt]

Skyward by Brendon Sanderson? Most of my fantasy favorites that are character-driven have heavy romantic subplots, so I don't know if you'd be interested in those.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I think I at least appreciate the simplistic prose of Sanderson! On romance-heavy subplots, I think I'd even enjoy those. It's all a matter of prose for me. I'm very picky about it so far (until I broaden my horizons, hopefully).

My personal favorite author is Nicholson Baker who actually replaces the need for an interesting plot in my book with just "beautiful" (as I see it) prose:

>> But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings — for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family — the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had — as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. [...]

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

>> [...] And such hybrids — of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too — might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms — and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.

That's probably reflecting a very nerdy, detail-obsessed, and sentimental side of me but I've never read anything which seemed to flow with my intuitions as much as Baker. He writes the way I would think if I were a smarter person. His prose disappears into the background when I read it and I just find his writing style the easiest thing to read that I've ever encountered, even more than books designed for children.

[AmyHew1tt]

Interesting. So you don't prefer prose?

Here are some fantasies I really liked: The Belgariad and Malorian by David Eddings. A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L Jenson (Viking fantasy, romantic, some sex scenes) and The Beyonders. If you don't mind reading YA, Small Favors by Erin Craig is an awesome horror fantasy, and The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater is light fantasy but literally one of the best books I've ever read.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I actually love certain types of prose, but seem very picky about it. My "literary orgasm" would come about if Nicholson Baker wrote a dark fantasy or sci-fi book. I have a great difficulty understanding poetry and the most flowery prose, and some might think Baker's prose is very flowery. Yet it doesn't seem flowery to me; I read it once and I never feel the need to backtrack. It's beautiful but not at all cryptic from my perspective, and I really dig that.

I will have to check out your suggestions starting with The Scorpio Races one!

[AmyHew1tt]

That makes sense, everyone has different tastes.

Yeah, I loved it! It's pretty character-oriented, and there is prose but I wouldn't call it complicated.

Oh, also, I've heard that lots of men really love Red Rising by Peirce Brown.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I come more from a visual arts background and a dual major in CompSci/VisArts. So my main medium of expressing my feelings is drawing and painting. Yet I never wanted to draw what I "see" so much as what I "felt". I love how certain authors can do this in their medium of words better than I can ever hope to do visually.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I might be a bit weird and uncharacteristic of most men. For example, I lack spatial awareness. The only way I can navigate 3D spaces is by landmarks, which I've heard is more common in women than men.

My wife sometimes says I think like a woman as I try to tell her a long-winded story and get swept away by tangents. It's about the journey, you know, not the destination! I'm pantser-ing all of this. Most guys are so concise. This happened, that happened, the end.

[AmyHew1tt]

Ah, that makes sense!

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I think I might be inclined towards the feely/emotional side more than usual. or example, when people ask me what it was like living in Tokyo, I don't respond in a conventional fashion in describing locations and visual details; I genuinely can't do this well at all.

Instead, I want to describe my overall feeling: neon jazz, the wailing of drunkards singing Karaoke in the middle of the night whose intoxication made them forget that they're tone deaf, the strangely lonely feeling we get when we're surrounded by a sea of people.

[I felt an intuitive desire to in favor the asyndeton here although I'm not practiced and studied enough to be sure what I'm doing; it just seemed cooler and more dramatic].

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I really need to quit drinking again. I'm very sorry about that. I'm making so many mistakes and probably barely coherent right now.

[AmyHew1tt]

Not at all, lol. I actually get it

[NamerOfStars]

You might want to give the Vorkosigan saga a look, then; it's far more character-driven space opera than flashy tech porn sci-fi.

[exitseven]

The Dune Trilogy had a rich cast of characters.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Is the setting description kept to a bare minimum? It's not so much the abundance of character-oriented writing that I'm seeking as a minimalism of setting description.

[exitseven]

@GuyAnswersGirls123 Truthfully the whole universe is richly painted so you can imagine the whole universe in tyour mind. It is one of the few books that I felt sucked into the whole thing.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I have a difficulty sometimes with those descriptions unless they're very evocative. I think I have a general disability to visualize things from text. But I can feel how they feel.

For example, describing the layout and visual details of a house doesn't make me feel very much as just describing that the abstract paintings on the walls of the house reflected the eccentricities of its owner.

[IslaTheWitch]

Dune has 6 books and has many extensive descriptions

[exitseven]

Thanks for the MHO😎

[FunkyMonkee]

I just found a Chris Miller interview. I don't know it's give you any ideas but, I can't post it here because it's 7 pages long.

[NathanDavis]

The Rabid Wookiee...

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

How's that?

[NathanDavis]

rabies? or wookiees?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I was hoping you were citing and I wanted to know how it was so character-oriented, but I think we're hopeless messed up now...

[NathanDavis]

I'm still working on it... not finished with, as of yet...

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Oh, in that case, I'm looking to reading it!