Spec Fic with Beautiful Prose?

[Sci-2]

better passages, but this one's good:

"the windy light at the poles, the auroras, is a gateway of heaven;

yet, for the gods, this windy light is but earth underfoot. they live

in the enormous tree of electromagnetic energy that sprouts from the

iron core of the planet and spreads its broad branches over the entire

world...far above those rootlands, in the topmost branches of the

World Tree where solar wind buffers against the earth's magentosphere,

the terrain shifts like desert runes, a barren wasteland in the eyes

of the gods where images shimmer and swim on warped, quaking horizons.

Just below that ruinous frontier is the paradise where the gods dwell.

protected from the sun's wind and the gusts of the stars by

overarching branches of the Great Tree, the middle region shines with

a special blue-green beauty for the electric entities who live there.

the ionosphere at this level spreads over the globe in majestic hills

and terraces. to the radiant gods, these ionized plains thrive with

life. rainbow forests flourish among silver veins of rivering

currents. and in those forests and streams, animals of ionized gas

fulfill their bestial life cycles: griffins, manticores, basilisks,

rocs, fire serpents, chimera, and an occaisonal sun-stallion alighting

from its frolicking journeys among the solar herd.

Composed of plasma - electrically charged gas too tenuous for human

eyes to perceive -- the gods, their terrain, and the creatures exist

replete in their own world. for these dwellers of light, all that is

below their magnetic kingdom is steamy dark."

--attanasio, dragon and unicorn

[dreamcatcher]

Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana (haven't read his other works)

Breath-taking.

[kcf]

also, how the heck could I forget Attanasio?

I've only read one Attansio book and I thought it was terrible.

[Sci-2]

Heh, I know a few people find him to be a chore to read. Strangely enough The Dragon and The Unicorn had a huge impact on my life, partly escapism from a difficult time and partly opening my young eyes to different viewpoints on faith.

[kcf]

Heh, I know a few people find him to be a chore to read. Strangely enough The Dragon and The Unicorn had a huge impact on my life, partly escapism from a difficult time and partly opening my young eyes to different viewpoints on faith.

well, different people, different opinions. I thought The Dragon and the Unicorn was pretty awful new age crap and another derivative Arthurian retelling. I wanted to like it - much of the philosophical and religious explorations should have appealed to me, but I thought the presentation was dreadful.

[False Alarm]

think wolfe is a wonderful stylist, though not always beautiful, exactly. depends what he wants to do in a given passage.

peter beagle's prose is pretty kickass from what i've read. kim stanley robinson when he's on does some of the most beautiful prose i've seen in SFF. he does curdle sometimes too though.

[Little Valkyrie]

Wolfe is a wonderful stylist in part because the prose is so carefully pitched to the material. Severian as a narrator doesn't sound like Latro (nor should he), and I almost threw the Book of the Long Sun across the room at the end with the revealed spoiler about the nature of the narrative itself.

I find Valente's prose too cluttered and monotonous to be consistently beautiful.

My nominee in the category of maximalist but beautiful is James McCourt, especially the utterly wonderful Mawrdew Czgowchwz (which is, by he way, pronounced 'Mardu Gorgeous'). Oh, the dialogue...but you have to be a serious opera fan to get 90% of the jokes.

[kcf]

and since my only contribution to the thread so far has been a disagreement - a few authors that have good prose that I haven't seen mentioned yet

Ted Chiang

Charles de Lint

Ursula le Guin

Gregory Frost

Margo Lanagan

J.M. McDermott

Michael Moorcock (sometimes)

Nnedi Okorafor

Holly Phillips

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Here's a bit of Clive Barker 'Books of Blood.'

THE DEAD HAVE highways.

They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view.

They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections.

It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world. The traffic is heavy at the cross-roads, and the voices of the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable feet.

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Possibly the greatest of opening passages. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I usually love rich,poetic prose but the clinical exactness here is what really impresses me.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

[Guest]

Glad the OP started this thread. Good, rich prose is my favorite quality in a book. As my tastes in books have changed over the years, I find that I enjoy the prose-centric authors more than the plot-centric. I would put ASOIAF in the latter. Rarely have I encountered an author that excels in both.

My favorites:

Salvador Plascensia - People of Paper blew me away

Margaret Atwood - she's one of the few who excels at plot, world building, shifting narrators, stories-within-stories, characterization, and prose. My favorite of hers is the Blind Assassin

Vera Nazarian - have only read the Lords of Rainbow, but I was impressed

Italo Calvino - don't care what anyone says. He's a fantasy author.

Michael Ondaatje - some people hate his sparse-yet-poetic prose, but it makes me swoon

Other favorites that have already been mentioned:

Valente - recently read the Prester John series and I am in love

Attanasio - don't waste your time with the Arthur series. Read Wyvern (pirate/adventure story set in Borneo in the 1600's)and the Last Legends of Earth (best SF novel I've ever read). He's the master of painting lush images in your head. Better yet, he doesn't waste words to paint a scene.

Cherryh - I read the Faded Sun trilogy and really enjoyed her prose. Her writing mechanics slip easily into the background so that you can just sit back and enjoy the story without picking apart her technique.

Peake - duh.

Tiptree - she's proto-cyberpunk genius

Good, but overrated:

Wolfe - I learned Latin in school so his mish-mash of new/old words doesn't really impress me. His prose bores me to tears.

Tolkien - Tried to re-read the LOTR trilogy, and while I loved it as a teenager, I think I've outgrown it.

Le Guin - she's not exactly overrated, it's just that she has the same voice throughout all of her novels. Just like Vonnegut, she doesn't vary her prose at all. Still enjoyable though.

[Sci-2]

From its first low growls in the Deep South of the Depression, the blues was born to make new legends for itself, with Robert Johnson standing tallest and proudest among them, like some Voudon loa caught for an instant of time in a grainy old black and white photograph, like the Lord Eleggua himself, standing at a crossroads in a dusty, grey three-piece suit and wide-brimmed fedora. The blues was always the dark side of gospel, the devil’s music, a music made of pain and hard, hard sorrows, with the bluesman as a hero of a kind, murderer, adulterer, searching for the lost chord, making pacts with the devil, hellhounds on his trail.

There’s one story, one legend, says that if you take your guitar down to a crossroads and play it – play it good enough, that is – eventually the devil will come along behind you, tap you on the shoulder and take your guitar off of you. You don’t turn around to look at him – you don’t ever look the devil in the eyes – just take your guitar back when he’s done tuning it for you, and from then on you’ll play the bittersweetest blues was ever played . . . from that day on until the day you die and the demons come to drag your damned soul down into hell where it belongs.

Duncan, Hal (2011-08-11). Vellum (The Book of All Hours) (pp. 139-140). Macmillan Publishers UK. Kindle Edition.

[zorglub]

What a great thread, my reading list has greatly expanded.

I'd like to second nickg's recommendation of Jack Vance and Keep Shelly in Athens's recommendation of Italo Calvino (especially If on a Winter's Night a Traveler).

Roger Zelazny (particularly Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness) really should be included.

[Captain Sheepf*cker]

Nice necro pull. I'll add Felix Gilman; fucking beautiful stuff. Love everything he's touched. Love Kay. Love Mieville. Valente. K.J. Bishop. Vandermeer. For short, sweet, and sharp, I'll go with Morgan, Lawrence, and Abercrombie.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Bakker, Mieville The Scar, Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road.

Sci, if you were going for specific passages, I'd have to something specific for Bakker or Chabon, but the opening of The Scar that's all in italics strikes a chord.

[Happy Ent]

Not much to add: Duncan, Chabon, Bakker, Mieville, Tolkien’s Silmarillion, …

[Serious Callers Only]

Nalo Hopkinson. Midnight Robber.

[UndergroundMan]

My favorites are Wolfe and Mieville. Kay and Atwood are up there, as well. Bakker has a very unique prose style.

[Suttree]

Bakker is ace.

One I haven't seen mentioned is John Crowley and "Little Big".

Outside of fantasy can't go wrong with Don Delillo, Pynchon, and William Gaddis.

[Inkdaub7]

Salvador Plascensia - People of Paper blew me away

Completely agree.

My favorites in this area won't add anything new to the thread. Gene Wolfe, Felix Gilman and Mervyn Peake are all picks of mine.