favorite science fiction/fantasy authors - what are yours?

[dumbledore11214]

Carol]:
| So let me turn the tables a bit and ask the rest of you: Why
| read sci-fi or fantasy or both? What's the attraction of those
| genres, and do you prefer one over the other?


Alla:

Interesting question and the answer will be long. I am the person who will read practically any genre as long as it engages me. The only criteria is that I have to find it interesting, really; therefore I never read any particular genre for any particular purpose besides enjoying the book. Ah, I guess I would not read pure horror story. Note I do not mean *violent story*, I mean staff like Steven King's, that I would not read period, no matter how well it is written, simply because I know myself to be very very easily scared. I do not watch horror movies either. Everything else I will read as long as I like it. But it is certainly an interesting question to reflect on.

I had always read a lot of sci fi even back home, but I should say I have not read any fantasy before I came here. I think there were simply not many books available, for some reason traditionally Russian writers did not do a whole lot of fantasy (they certainly do now), and not too many translations were available either (it definitely changed).

But I have certainly read a lot of sci fi in translations and done by Russian writers. Lem. Heinlein, Bradbery, Asimov, you name them I had read them.

I had read sci fi because I am certainly interested in the scenarios of how the future society can develop, but there was another very significant reason.

Sometimes sci fi writers could get past censorship just a bit more than the writer of regular fiction would be able to, during soviet times. I mean, it was also not a guarantee, but see it is one thing to write a book about the nowadays soviet society which oppresses your freedoms in different ways, but it is a different thing to write a book about imaginary society in the future that may looks awfully like soviet society, but you can never be sure what writer really meant.

So that was a reason that played out too, sometimes sci fi writers did better with using Aesop language and writing a better story, more multilayered in many ways.

Because too much of the fiction available was you know, praising the regime in many different varieties, of course I was growing up in the perestroika times so all the stories were slowly made available to the public eventually, but still those were interesting times.

I had started reading fantasy for the most part when I came here. I mean, no I read part of LOTR in Russian translation back home, could not finish and thought it was too boring lol. When I read it in the original, I realized it was just a very bad translation.

I guess escapism definitely explains part of the reason of why I got interested in fantasy. My first years of adjusting to new life here had been extremely stressful for many reasons and what can I say, I was looking for a lighter reading than I would usually go to. The thing is, while I got into it, I had seen a lot of wonderfully complex books with great characters and while yeah, they usually have a resolution contrary to the books I used to read and love, and often a positive one, the journey to get there is often wonderful.

Now I am also a student of history, I majored in history in college and loved it all my life and read a lot of historical sources, but I had always been interested in the alternate history, specifically what would happen, how the history of any given country will go if one or several key events will go differently. There is a famous saying that the History does not like the word IF. Well, I always had been interested in that and fantasy is a good genre to see it. For example Naomi Novick in her Temeraire books explores what would have happened in the Napoleonic wars if from very old times everything in our world would have been the same except the dragons being the part of armies of many countries for centuries. I found those series to be fascinating.

Does it answer your question?