Calling Cote and anybody else interested. I finished, 'Dune' btw.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Harder - I PM'ed you

Remus - Hyperion title comes from the poem by John Keats by the same name. It is about six people on a pilgrimage to Time Tombs, artifacts travelling backwards in time, presumably sent back by future generations. These pilgrims tell their stories one by one and the story of the book emerges from these different viewpoints and with different actors.

I wouldn't call it a terribly "sciencey" book. It is possibly one of the least "sciencey" sci-fi books I have read, in fact, comparable to Dune in that respect. However, its characters are carefully drawn and their thoughts & feelings elaborated. This is why I thought you would like it.

I quite enjoyed Hyperion but haven't bothered seeking out the second one yet, which is telling. I'd love to know what happens to the little Jewish baby girl, if someone wants to enlighten me via PM?

Basically Remus, Hyperion is about a group of hand picked people journeying to a distant planet called Hyperion to confront/figure out what is going on there with a giant scary time travelling thing called the shrike. On the way they each tell their tale, whats bought them there and why they want to find the shrike. It's been likened a lot in concept to Canterbury tales. They are each from a different planet as Earth has gone to shit. V good and it ends in a cliffhanger but the actual shrike but was a bit too sciencey and nerdy for me.

I love Dune (Dune and Children of Dune anyway). Also loved Lord of the Rings. I think in both the individual characters were not intended to be important, the books were about the history and culture of worlds and the great events that shaped those worlds. I enjoyed the "macro" nature of the books and was not really interested if Aragorn could be a self-obsessed or Paul was a petulant brat. I liken it to history books. I am not personally interested in the history of individuals but in the way their acts shaped their times and the future. Horses for courses though.

I like his short stories, eg The Martian Chronicles and The Day it Rained Forever - very thought provoking and emotional. I don't usually like short stories much but science fiction really lends itself to the format as many sci fi ideas are only really enough to support a short story (which I think is why so many longer science fiction novels are really more like fantasy/epic dramas)

I'm not a fan of SF but read Dune, when I was a teenager, I only really got it when I'd read the lot and talked to my DF about it. Ray Bradbury is much more approachable.

remus as you like Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel is on iPlayer at the moment, it was an afternoon play. It's 60 minutes long.

"'humanity' in the sense that they have feelings of some sort, and relationships of some sort, and connections of some sort"

I thought there were feelings and especially relationships in Dune. A spider's web of relationships, in fact.

Anyway, have we talked about Hyperion before? It is another great sci-fi book and I think you would find character development in it to be much better than in Dune.

hmmm. More Ray Bradbury would be my first suggestion.

Asimov I absolutely love, but he doesn't really do emotions or internal dialogue. (Personally I'm more about plot than internal dialogues, I tend to skip past any soul searching to find out what happens next ). Brave New World I imagine you've read. Have to admit Le Guin leaves me a bit cold.

2001: A Space Odyssey contains lots of psychological stuff as well as the science fiction.

The Philip Pullman trilogy?

Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 might fit your bill. If you haven't already read them?

Remus - I think we just read different types of books. I agree that you would expect characters to make mistakes & change in a coming of age book, for example, or where the book is about the psychology of ipthe protagonist, but not all books are like that. Thankfully so, because I for one can't stand books that are all about the feeeeeelings of main characters

Re "characters must be believable and have humanity" - Let's consider how different we are from Egyptians who built the pyramids. Can you imagine how different people who live 8,000 years in the future on various different planets will be from us? What does it even mean to say that those characters should have "humanity". You seem to expect them to feel like us and act like us. That would be the opposite of "believable" (Like in "Wool", I thought).

Imagine a child who is taught & expected to sit rock-still for hours to practice lowering his body temperature or moving one muscle at a time to catalog his mind-body responses. Imagine a culture where this is normal. Do you really think they would talk like us and think like us? No. So what does it even mean to talk about "humanity"?

(Genuine question. I'd be interested in your answer)

From memory, the first Dune book was good, the rest got progressively more shit as they went on. I can't remember at what point in the series I gave up - a several books in (3? 4?), I know that.

Oh and quite a bit of Margaret Atwood falls under science fiction - Handmaids Tale for eg.

Honestly it is a weakness of a lot of science fiction that the characters don't seem like real fully rounded people.

I hate making sweeping generalisations like this but I wonder if it's because they tend to be written by nerdy men who are more interested in the science than the people?

if you still want to try science fiction you could try seeking out books by women? Ursula Le Guin jumps to mind. I think her characters are a bit more developed though again they tend to be of the enigmatic sort...

Please explain this a bit. How do the characters need to be portrayed for you to care what happens to them?

I'm thinking of murder mysteries, spy stories, books about psychopathic serial killers, for example. Do you really need the characters to be rendered to your satisfaction to be interested in how the story will develop & end?