Un otro interrogative
Ah, but the estranged child who returns to lead a people onward and upward, if the sex is male, is RAH's "A Stranger in a Strange Land" which you might say is a kind of fantasy and I'd be inclined to agree with you but most will say it is a bright star in the sf firmament.
[quote]f you can't be appealing to the reader, IMHO, you need to be invisible to the reader.[/quote]
Been reading Ron Rosenbaum's "The Shakespeare Wars", a Christmas gift. Said wars rage over language and what it means to be Shakespearean. Point is: when you say you'll read and go where Mieville goes you are implicitly endorsing his prose; it takes you where you want to go. Old Wild Bill took his medieval audience where they wanted to go and they came back time and gain for him to do it again. For me, RAH did the same thing; as does Tepper and Tan, Cherryh and Scaldi, Haldeman, and Resnick, Radthorn and MacDibble. They all write in a way that appeals to me so I read whatever I can get my hands on.
I believe that goes much deeper than story, ma'am. I am fairly certain that speaks to quality of writing, or, in another word: prose.