You can also try Donaldson’s Gap Cycle. It’s hard SF in that it mostly sticks to actual science (or at least more so than most SF), but it’s still a character-centered story. Bear in mind that it’s an extremely dark tale filled with horrible people doing horrible things to one another, with a side order of Germanic myth.
Adding to the Octavia Butler love, I found Wild Seed to be incredibly moving.
I’ll second this recommendation and it’s by Frederik Pohl.
Thirded. The first book in the series is one of my all-time favorites.
+1 on this.
Try his short story collection first. The Selected Stories collection with an intro by Jonathan Lethem is a good sampling of his entire career. I also find his short stories to be more focused and clearer when compared to some of his full length novels.
My recommendation to the OP is Robert Charles Wilson. He writes exactly the kind of thing the OP is describing - “strongly-defined characters going through extreme circumstances”.
Huh? Its genre is “police procedural”, that’s hardly a spoiler.
This is a real spoiler:
If you leave the genre description there, it’s not a spoiler, and also not appropriate for a thread on science fiction. But it’s a great read for this kind of SF fan, even though–and this is in a spoiler box for a reason–there’s no actual reason to consider it SF. That’s the kind of genre discussion I was talking about when I said discussing its genre is spoileriffic.
I have read, or tried to read, many of the books and authors mentioned in this thread, especially the 70s and 80s stuff, and they do not strike me as good reads, or interesting reads. I won’t name names, cause there are a lot of them, and I’m not really interested in stirring up shit, but I just want to warn you that if you read some of these books and find them turgid and dull, well, there’s probably a reason and it isn’t that you’re just not “getting” them.
That said, Iain Banks’ book “Use of Weapons” sounds like what you’re looking for. It’s about a Glorious Leader type who is, or has been, a psychopath, who is being used by an advanced civilization to help sort out nasty violent conflicts in less advanced civilizations to make them less nasty and violent. In the course of the book, the protagonist must confront who he is, and who he has been. Psychological enough for ya? It’s INCREDIBLY well written.
I just finished a book that might fit the bill quite well for you. It’s called “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood.
It’s definitely psychological and character driven, and although it won an award for being the best sci-fi book of the year, the author herself doesn’t even think of it as sci-fi. It is set in an alternate reality, with some technology that we don’t quite have but nothing really vastly different than what already exists. It’s a dystopian novel about a super religious government that is kind of like 1984. In fact, if you liked 1984 and consider that a sci-fi book, this basically is just like that. Except, this book specifically focuses on women’s issues and how women would be treated in such a society, especially considering that successful births are rarer and rarer and a population crisis of a sort is happening in the book, or could happen.
Anyway, it’s definitely a feminist piece of literature but I really enjoyed and I think it fits the bill for what you’re looking for. I think it will really make you think about things in new ways, and the author had a great way of writing that made me just aware of a lot of ideas that I might not have really thought about otherwise.
Great suggestions by everyone, but the OP’s last activity here was in 2004.
One of the benefits of forum threads is that other people who have the same question as the OP can benefit from them. I’ve found a few good suggestions here myself.
So have I, but in a negative sense. I don’t like at all the type of books the OP wanted, so now I know to avoid most of what have been recommended in this thread. Win-Win.
Check out The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s very much character driven.
J.