Many of us are coming back to science fiction after a long hiatus. Perhaps we became snobs about great literature at some point. I know that after my sophomore year in college at University of North Texas I picked up a Frank Herbert novel after reading Light In August and couldn't get through the first two pages.
The sentences. It was like a child was writing them. Awkward doesn't begin to describe it. Also existentially jarring since the first thing that comes to one's mind is that you have been mistaken about something's excellence and have told other's of this excellence and more sophisticated minds must have kept their eyes from rolling completely back in their heads and laughing derisively.
Something must have happened in the interim. SF writers got better. Tim Powers and Ian M. Banks are the first two I began reading again, primarily through the fact that Ian Banks wrote a novel that Melody Townsel told me was crap and I always read everything she doesn't like. She doesn't like Cormac McCarthy either.
