Other than the image - are there any sci fi which are written is as good as the best literature

other than the image - are there any sci fi which are written is as good as the best literature.

PKD has many good novels. I also loved Solaris. They are not War and Peace tier but they’re still above average

The Russians do sci-fi literature very well.

Roadside Picnic - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
Solaris - Stanisław Lem.
Master and Margarita/ Heart of a dog - Mikhail Bulgakov.

There's one major one I can't recall right now.

Gravity's Rainbow

The Shadow of the Torture by Gene Wolf
Dune by Frank Herbert
Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang
Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

We

I, Robot

Do androids

Brave new world

Farenheit 451

Left hand of darkness

Ringworld

Slaughterhouse V

solaris is polish

This isn't sci fi user. It's a philosophical novel that incorporates sci-fi, surreal and metafictional elements in a typically postmodern style.

Good sci-fi is a pearls before swine type situation. Genre trash readers can't distinguish it from the rest of the garbage because they are only there for the superficial space ships and lasers aspect.

>does the book feature technology that doesn't exist yet?
>does the book insert existing technology into a time period in which it doesn't belong?
>does the book explore an exaggerated future for humanity without focusing on technological advancements?

if the answer is yes to any of these, then it's science fiction

Margaret Atwood having to deny that The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction just to be taken seriously as a literary author is embarrassing.

These are some old questions which can be used, and were used over half a century ago, to distinguish classical "literary" fiction from science fiction.


The convergence of highbrow genres occuring in the XX century allowed various elements of misc. genres to be featured in works from way higher genres, much like similar changes occuring during e.g. victorian era or romanticism allowed elements of poetry to be put into drama, etc, thus rendering lots of such
questions useless.

>does the work feature ghosts and wraiths? does it take place during more than one day?
if the answer to any of these is yes, then Shakespeare is a NOVELIST.

>does work feature lengthy monologues of the speaking subject?
if the answer to this question is yes, then Byron is a PLAYWRIGHT.

>does the novel feature a teenage, misguided main character?
if the answer is yes, then Salinger is a YA WRITER.

So, yes, go ahead, use these rhetoric genre-determining modes which are older than your own grandma and aren't respected by contemporary scholars anymore, and obviously the answers gonna be bullshit.

The Book of the New Sun is great. It's an amazing sci-fi work, and can even be considered as literary fiction.
Most of these are high-school tier. Androids is great though. Slaughterhouse is pretty good too.

Hi Charls

this is user - What I am trying to say is - More like this please - and with sci fi as a contextual feature of the narative

I getcha. Seems that user listed some fair examples of non-all-out sci-fi, but then again, Solaris could probably be considered fully sci-fi and it's still top tier.

>are there any sci fi which are written is as good as the best literature.
The answer to this question is definitively "no", but this has to do with the way you asked it. This is because any science fiction that actually *is* well written more or less ceases to be classified that way and becomes "literature". I am not saying this is in any way fair or legitimate, this is just how it goes. For example, you wouldn't find Bleeding Edge or Bend Sinister in the SF section at your local bookstore.

Not to be pedantic but what do you mean by "written good" (written well)? To me the best prose stylists would be so called high modernists and post modernists like Faulkner, Woolf, Nabokov, Pynchon, etc. More often than not, this aesthetic is almost antithetical to the project of SF. For what it's worth, Delany might be what you are looking for. I've never read him. People here mentioning Herbert, PDK, Vonnegut, etc. being on par with the best literature in terms of prose style are fucking insane, though (I have read and enjoy these authors).

Wuz

i suppose what i am idealistically looking for is crime and punishment set in space with individuals from alien cultures described as well as Shakespeare describes his protagonists.

I love sci fi and i love 'quote' literature but i rarely see them meet

The Nova trilogy, specifically Nova Express.

i also like pkd, possibly my favorite author. Martian Time Slip is my favorite or scanner darkly

I, Robot is a bit of a thinker. It's fun to contemplate potential malfunctions before the author's reveal.
It pretends to be sci-fi, but it's really just a good mystery.

Tzars

N

I tried to look for something similar a while back. There isn't much, but a sci-fi writer that was suggested who I felt did write well was Ian Banks. His prose is much better than that of the most sci-fi writers.