I didn’t necessarily read a lot of books from each of the writers on the list, so the list may be a bit biased as the sample size may or may not be small, depending on the writers.
S Tier
For writers that almost always write nearly-perfect or at least good novels. All of their books would be guaranteed a good read.
金庸
金庸 is the absolute god of not just Chinese martial art novels, but the entire fiction world. Mesmerizing storytelling skills. Compared to him, those classic American popular fiction writers in roughly the same era are like babies in terms of storytelling.
A Tier
For writers that generally produce good novels and may have some attributes that make them special.
Brandon Sanderson
Have Brandon Sanderson not written some stupid ass sci-fis like Skyward and Legion, he could have easily been in the S tier.
Still, Brandon Sanderson’s novels are generally high quality. The most special part about his books is the magic systems. His magic systems are always very carefully crafted with clearly-defined rules. Unlike those soft-magic fantasies where the powers of the magic of the characters are almost random to the audience, as in Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, Marvel Cinematic Universe and all those cheap crappy incel Japanese light novels, Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems serve as the physics of each of his fantasy worlds.
Since his magic systems have well-defined limits, does it mean that they’re boring? Hell no. All of his magic systems, even in his mediocre fantasy works like Warbreaker and The Rithmatist, are so creative that they never bore you.
People in r/bookcirclejerk love to shit on his writing skill, complaining its too simple and repetitive, but I haven’t notice it, plus I generally care more about the plot than the writing techniques.
劉慈欣
I’ve only read Ball Lightning and The Three Body Problem so it’s a bit early for my to judge honestly.
The Three Body Problem is obviously a masterpiece. If I were to name my top 3 novels, it would definitely be on the list. The world settings are amazing, and the hard sc-fi parts are fun to read, but what’s truly incredible is probably the plot progression. From book 1 to book 3, the scale of the plot increases exponentially. Compared to book 2, the plot of book 1 feels so tiny, and compared to book 3, everything happened in book 2 feels so insignificant. I’ve read plenty of user reviews complaining about the lack of depth of its characters, but honestly, given the scale and the span of time crossed over the whole trilogy, it’s only reasonable that none of the characters is given enough pages for details and development.
Ball Lightning, however, is a huge disappointment. The sci-fi part of the book is completely wrong, like, I know there are still a lot of mysteries to be solved in quantum physics, but it just does not work that way. I find it hard to believe that a writer with a STEM background and the ability to write a hard sci-fi masterpiece like The Three Body Problem, did not know how the most basic quantum physics work. I really think that he deliberately wrote it wrong, just to make the story more interesting and mythical.
The Three Body Problem is an S, while Ball Lightning is a F. Thus, I give him a weighted average of A. Really looking forward to the Netflix adaptation btw. Has all the potential to be a massive hit. All they have to do is keep the main plot and settings as it is and add some cool ass visual effects.
B Tier
For writers that occasionally produce good novels.
Philip K. Dick
I’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, and Valis. Not much, but already enough for me to get a hold of what kind of writer Philip K. Dick is.
I love his writing style, not sure how to describe it but it just feels comfortable to read. But that’s the only good part about his books. He added a lot of mysteries in Ubik and Valis, but most of them turned out to be redundant as they were never utilized, and the finale of his books is always underwhelming. But I mean, what can you expect from a drug abuser?
I would still want to read more of his works tho.
C Tier
For writers that write okay novels and may make me feel reluctant to read more of their books.
Robert Jordan
I’ve read 5 of the 14 books of The Wheel of Time, and I really couldn’t see how is this considered one of the greatest fantasies of all time.
The story is mediocre, the writing is mediocre, the characters are flat and forgettable, the magic system is very random and soft with no rules at all (it’s pretty cool tho), and the world settings are the typical classical black and white high fantasy settings, which is nothing special and moreover, dumb.
That’s all.
Isaac Asimov
I’ve read the Foundation trilogy and The Caves of Steel, and all of them are very mediocre.
The Caves of Steel as I recall is just a dumb and short detective story, so I’ll just talk about the Foundation trilogy. The idea of “Psychohistory” is interesting, but a bit lack of details and not enough to support a trilogy. The stories, the characters and the world settings are even below mediocre. Plus, I’m never a fan of space opera. One of the dumbest genres ever.
Probably won’t read another Isaac Asimov book. These “classic” sci-fi novels are so overrated. Foundation is mediocre, Dune is a high fantasy (I believe it is set in the same world as The Wheel of Time, or reverse), 2001: A Space Odyssey is meaningless, and The Forever War is all over the place and retarded. Obviously part of the reason is that technologies improve so fast and all those classics are from the last century, but their poor writing skills also didn’t help.
F Tier
Terrible writers that belong on my blacklist.
Neal Stephenson
I’ve actually only read Seveneves, so I’m not really qualified enough to give a rating to him, especially an F rating, but Seveneves is so terrible that I can’t help but shit on him.
For the first 2/3 of the book, the science fiction part is minimal. Instead, he kept writing about how the most boring and ordinary thing works. I’m a huge fan of hard sci-fi, so if he’s explaining how a fictional futuristic tech or theory works, I’m all in. However, all he wrote about are high school physics. It’s almost like I’m reading a fucking engineering math textbook. Even Halliday is more interesting than it.
He also has the habit of describing every single detail of a person on the first-ever appearance of that character in the book. Like, does he even know how to write a novel? You bring out the settings, the details of the world and the characters through the plots and the dialogues, not by spitting out all of them at the very beginning, isn’t that common sense? No one wants to be overwhelmed by details they don’t even know if they should care about. This principle actually suits not only novels but also tv shows, movies and story-driven games, right? But Neal Stephenson doesn’t seem to know about it. How?
The most surprising part is that, no one seems to care about his problematic writing styles. Read the reviews on Goodreads and the comments on Reddit, seemed like not a single person is bothered by it. Again, how? I’ve read some comments about The Three Body Problem, complaining about how 劉慈欣 spent a lot of time explaining his fictional science, and somehow no one’s troubled by Neal Stephenson taking half of the book explaining basic physics and math??
I’ve heard good things about Neal Stephenson’s other books, such as Anathem and Snow Crash, but I don’t think I’ll ever try them out. Seveneves along has successfully made him the very first entry of my writers blacklist.
Conclusion
I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of diversity in the nationality of the writers on the list honestly. Thought there would be more, like not even one from the UK? Why are they all Americans?