Well, Marooned in RealTime has a technological artifact that is definitely impossible, though I consider it one of the best SF books I ever read. The Peace War, the book that introduced the idea, is not that good IMHO.
Vinge was trying for a different effect in
The Peace War.
And since we are in this subject, what is the HARDEST SF you ever read?
I'm tempted to say,
Neutron Star, but
King David's Spaceship and Michael McCollum's
Antares novels are also quite good, though none of the three does all that great a job on the characterizations; McCollum is probably the best of the three at that, but has plotting trouble.
If you want to stay away from highly speculative stuff and stick with stuff that's near-future and highly likely, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a trilogy on the colonization of Mars,
Red Mars, Blue Mars, and
Green Mars that I thought was the best of the burst of Mars colonization tales that seem to be everywhere in the last decade or so. Bova's wasn't bad either, but he's nowhere near the writer that Robinson is. Robinson's characters stand up and breathe and you never assume you know what they're going to do.
Greg Bear did a pair of books,
City of Angels and
Slant, that are near-future, and are extremely good as well. Bear picks good mcguffins, writes believable characters and good dialog, and has a very practiced hand with a plot. I used to think that Brin was the best of the "killer Bs" but Bear has grown on me.
Anyway, I've read a lot of SF books, but interestingly enough I started liking historical fiction as well. I guess I like to read about different cultures, moral codes, what-if scenarios, etc.
I like some fantasy, but I'm very picky. It's really no different from SF in terms of the writing quality; in fact, I'd say that's true of most genres of literature, if not of the world at large. Sturgeon's Rule pretty much covers it: 90% of everything is crap.
I read
The Lord of the Rings about every 3 years, and have for the last three decades. In my opinion, it may be one of the best stories ever written in the English language. And yes, I have read Joyce, and Faulkner, and all that "lit'rature" ◊◊◊◊, most of which was either so involuted that it wasn't worth reading or so completely divorced from reality that it was completely irrelevant. I don't like paintings by people who are too damned aware of their technique and forget to pay attention to the picture, either. Papa was a good writer, with a fine hand; he's one of the few who knows how to paint a character in a paragraph, and doesn't need to touch it again unless it changes.
For Whom The Bell Tolls is one of the ten best books ever written in the English language, IMHO, and may be one of the five best. But "real literature" is as filled with hacks as SF or fantasy ever thought of being.
I am a longstanding fan of C. S. Forester's
Hornblower books, and my mother (who likes historical novels as you do) kept telling me how good Patrick O'Brien's
Aubrey and Maturin novels are. I picked up
Master and Commander not long after seeing the Russel Crow movie, and was instantaneously hooked as I expected I was going to be from her description. I own all of them. O'Brien's untimely death was a great disappointment, but his legacy is incredible, far beyond anything Forester ever contemplated and as a body of work perhaps one of the major accomplishments in English language literature.
