Lois McMaster Bujold and Martha Wells also leap to mind as authors who aren't necessarily ~*poetic*~ but nonetheless have regularly slain me with their prose style, just...SUCH a voice and a way with words
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I'd add the late great Terry Pratchett to your list. Sparse, yet recognisable. The cadence and word choice suited to his humor and point. Perhaps what we recognize is that connection between idea and verbiage? The mechanical Turk can not reproduce that thrust because it is sparse in the data.
jul 12, 2025, 8:11 pm • 2 0 • view
Difficult to express on a phone. That there are a few in the "school of LeGuin" but that contingent of texts is overwhelmed by the writing of mystery, thriller, military SF... such that the machine cannot recognize it as pattern and reproduce it. It's outside the bell curve so it doesn't exist.
jul 12, 2025, 8:18 pm • 1 0 • view
That's prob part of it but I wonder if AI could even approximate that kind of language without actual human understanding...my guess is that it would end up word salad instead, the kind of thing that might scan if you don't think about it but doesn't actually make any sense
jul 13, 2025, 2:21 am • 1 0 • view
I have also run into, tho rarely, books that aim for poetic and land at, well, word salad 💀 you can't just throw ANY metaphor at the wall, I SWEAR there's an objective difference betw "ooh what a surprising and original way of expressing that" and "uh those words don't really go together that way"
jul 12, 2025, 7:55 pm • 4 0 • view
Yay Bujold mention! Absolutely obsessed with her dialogue. Also, Douglas Adams has a way of stringing words together that evokes imagery but isn't necessarily grammatically brilliant. His voice is a constant cognitive dissonance that you can't help but laugh at
jul 12, 2025, 8:11 pm • 3 0 • view