People often mention being fans of someone’s earlier or later works, but rarer is the preference for those from the middle of their career. Are there any you have that preference for? Someone who evolved over time but over corrected for past mistakes, or someone whose styles shifted twice?
For me, it would be Ursula K. Le Guin and Sir Terry Pratchett. With Le Guin (specifically speaking about the Hainish cycle – I haven’t read her fantasy) to me her middle works strike the best balance in political or sociological science-fiction between vague speculation and outright allegory. This is kind of a milquetoast opinion, because The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are her most famous sci-fi books, but that’s because they are tighter and more insightful than her earlier novellas, without falling into “and here is ~~communist China~~ an alien planet” territory.
With Pratchett, his earlier Discworld books are obviously from a time when he was less experienced as a writer, and are also satires of a genre most modern readers have had the pleasure of not being familiar with. The last handful of books (while extremely impressive for someone dealing with Alzheimer’s) are more explicit in their politics and analogies. I think my opinion on whether I like his latter or middle works actually varies – the one-to-one analogues work better in his satirical style than in Le Guin’s in my opinion, and were present since the beginning – but they are distinct, and I would recommend them to different people.
Any authors that you know like this? Examples that don’t involve the specific case of political analogies?
by LeftComparison5775