Full disclosure: This page contains some affiliate links to Amazon.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, I note that the header currently states:

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.

I thought this had a pleasing symmetry as I'd consider these to be the very faults of "The Reality Dysfunction". I used to read every book I started on the principle that I might like it in the end even if I didn't at first. Peter F. Hamilton's horrible writing is the main reason I discarded that policy.

Not that a lack of decent characterization is a fault unique to PFH, but his particular brand of interminable plotting stuffed with over-repeated buzzwords makes me want to go back to the simpler age of short buzzwordy garbage.

Never mind, here are a few current SF authors who can write a vaguely plausible character and/or leave you able to remember why Science Fiction is supposed to be fun.

• Iain M. Banks¹ (read Feersum Endjinn)
• Adam Roberts (read On)
• Richard Paul Russo (read Unto Leviathan)
• Wil McCarthy (read Bloom)
• Barrington J. Bailey (read Collision With Chronos)

I was going to list Barrington J. Bailey seperately as one of the lesser known late SF writers, but he seems to still be alive. Here's an outstanding and much lamented late SF writer instead. Quite well known though.

• Stanislaw Lem (read Fiasco)

¹Iain Banks, clearly a man with a sense of humour, has obviously spotted the tendency for our more ponderous SF writers to try to dignify their names with a middle initial. He therefore writes his mainstream fiction as plain "Iain Banks" to distinguish it from the relatively frivolous SF written as "Iain M. Banks." Mind you, I hear his latest book is going to be a real table-breaker.