One of goldsmith's books was about someone who underwnet massive amounts of body 'improvement ' surgery -- it may beo one I couldn't finish...

Here it i s flavor of the month . I still don't remember if I finished it.

But, Deb, you're balancing one risk against another. Nobody's going to be saying "Oh, how ironic, she was just taking the interferon to make her collarbones shinier."

No.

Betsy, I was being ironic. I was just amazed that anyone would risk death to look younger just to go on a book tour. Too bizarre.

edit: risk death if they don't have to, I mean. Shiny collarbones? Not worth it. Wear a turtleneck, yo.

And if it was somebody close? My mom or someone? They'd be lucky to be dead as when I heard that was how, I'd want to kill them again.

OK, a quick-and-dirty "what I'm thinking of."

Idea/Metaphor books: Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Ringworld, Stranger in a Strange Land, Gateway, Rendezvous with Rama, The Forever War, Ender's Game.

Character books: Red/Green/Blue Mars, Barrayar et al, (Dune? Haven't decided), The Number of the Beast, Friday.

More to come - but hopefully this helps define my terms.

Actually, that just confuses me further. The Left Hand of Darkness is as much character portraits of Genly Ai and Estraven as it is an examination of the effect of rigid gender division on society and The Forever War and Ender's Game both work as character portraits of people under severe stress and unending military regimes. The Mars trilogy is as much about the effect of ideology on history as it is about any of the characters, who are (very deliberately) archetypes only filled in with personal details; it's in fact a big thought experiment about what manifest destiny would mean for a frontier without native sentients.

I mean, if the point is that really good science fiction will work both as a thought experiment and an exploration of character, I agree -- but if the point is that there was some kind of change in how SF worked, then I'm lost. Especially because of the dates, since there's a range of books published from the 1960s to the early 90s in both sections.

Edited to add: It is a truism among SF scholars that there's been a shift to more self-consciously "literary" techniques and character development -- but most of them place the shift as occuring the 1960s New Wave writers, so it's earlier than -- and affecting -- the books that Raquel mentions, except possibly Heinlein, who is definitely from the SF Golden Age, even if he was still writing into the 80s (although very far from his best work).

There are changes I personally might describe between 60s SF and contemporary SF, but they wouldn't be on the character vs. idea axis, so I'm still not clear on what Raquel is describing.

Curious if any one else has read something by Michel Faber?

The books in Raquel's first list seem to be more allegorical than those in the second list. I'm starting to get a better sense of the shift on those terms. Allegory came under very serious attack in all lit-crit in the late 60's, I dimly recall.