Two of my favorite authors are Marge Piercy and Douglas Adams. I don't
enjoy them for remotely similar reasons, but I consider both of their
writings to be great fiction -- and sometimes I'm in the mood for one,
sometimes for the other.
All this talk about what makes good i-f has been very interesting (and
helpful, as I work on my next project), but before we start getting all
absolutist in the search for the perfect i-f canon, I think we should
acknowledge that *most* of this comes down to a matter of taste.
("Detective" excepted, of course.)
For some reason, this competition has loosed a lot of tongues in this
newsgroup. Used to be, everyone bent over backwards to praise authors
just for having produced a game. Lately, though, there's been a lot more
sniping at games and less constructive criticism, and this latest trend
of arguing over what constitutes "real" i-f similarly seems more likely
to scare people off from writing games than to encourage them to do so.
(All IMHO, of course.)
Neil