I really like Ursala Le Guin's writing because her focus is usually ideology and the characters within a sci-fi universe. The Dispossessed focuses mainly on one character same with The Left Hand of Darkness if you're interested.

Here are some of my favorite character driven scifi books. If you haven't checked them out I highly recommend them.

Murderbot Diarys by Martha Wells

Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers (her novellas are great too)

Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal

Also Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler has amazing character work in my opinion, though I wouldn't call it purely character driven. But it is an amazing book.

Are you familiar with the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold?

I know it's a sort of small reference pool to recommend something I learned about on Reddit to someone on reddit, but the Murderbot Diaries are very character-focused, very much about one character dealing with the world around it. Things happen, but nothing world-altering or ending... just governments being shady and people being kind.

I think there's plenty of character focused Sci-fi, I'd just say the difference is that it's more of a 50/50 split of character driven and thematically driven. Like Dune is probably good example where it's core is the themes, the critique of imperialism, prophecies, a white savior,, and a very strong ecological focus, etc. Characters can tend to be more secondary to the themes it's trying to convey which is common as scifi is often used a way to critique and comment current society or the path society could be heading down. Where as - while there are exceptions - fantasy tends to lean more towards pure escapism with some vague or more general social themes.

A few people have already brought up some good recommendations, Urusla LeGuin is an excellent choice. She wrote both scifi and fantasy with fantastically fleshed our characters and their journeys that also happened to tie in with some larger ideas.

A few of my own recommendations would be the Metro Trilogy by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It's post apocalyptic and pretty bleak as far as the world goes but it's all character driven. The first and third books follow Artyom, initially a very sheltered young man who dreams of the outside world but knows nothing about it. The first book is essentially his growth as a person, learning about the beauty and horror in equal measure of life. The third book jumps ahead several years and is similarly a character driven story but acts as a deconstruction of the post journey hero. Once the "grand quest" for the hero has been completed, what's left? It explores a lot more by in terms of his character story its much darker with hints of optimism but is similarly entirely driven but his character and experiences.

By the same author is Futu.re, which explores a world where a vaccine has been developed against aging. This leads to number of unintended consequences such as overpopulation, increasing wealth disparity, conflict with religion, purpose, and the like. To combat over population a law has been put in place that if a couple wishes to have a child, one of the parents must give up their immortality to attempt to keep the population stable. However it's a not a flawless system and so to enforce the law, a paramilitary group is formed that forces both parents to give up their immortality or face immediate death. The story follows a member of this paramilitary group as he wanders aimlessly through life and is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the world he lives in. While there are grander events unfolding around him, he himself doesn't really play a part in them as the story is more personally focused on his own life and struggles.

Other good character driven stories would be On the Beach by Nevil Shute that is entirely driven by characters and emotion, there isn't really an "overarching" story more just a gut wrenching portrayal of people living the final months of their lives.

The Foreigner Series by CJ Cherryh is intensely character focused and an amazing series (at least what I've read of it). I think there are more than you realize, it just might take some time to find them.

I'd say Honor Harrington is deeply focused on character, albeit not just one.

...it's just too bad that Honor is barely a character, she's more of a Saturday morning superhero.

I would say that Dune is very character driven series.

Some other character driven science fiction that comes to mind is Bester’s The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, Heinlein’s Lazarus Long books ie Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough for Love as well as Stranger in a Strange Land, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and my favourite work of science fiction A Canticle for Leibovitz by Walter Miller Jr.

I think Andrew "Ender" Wiggins evolves into a pretty good character in the second book after Ender's Game, "Speaker for the Dead". I've learned a lot from him as a character and was able to connect.

While many of these series focus on more than one character, they are all very much character-driven (and fantastic!!):

- Ancillary Justice

- The Collapsing Empire

- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

- The Expanse

- Old Man’s War

- Murderbot

- The Three-Body Problem

- The Calculating Stars

- A Memory Called Empire

I think all of Nick Harkaway's books are excellent, character focused sci-fi

I can think of several:

Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn and Ensign Flandry short stories and novels.

James H Schmitz' Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee short stories.

Jerry Pournelle's John Christian Falkenberg stories.

Martha Wells' (Murderbot) Raksura books, about a humanoid alien called Moon on another planet, still coming to grips with living in a population of his own species.

The Liaden (lee AY den) books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, although that's more about a family.

I would say the Lilith's Brood trilogy is pretty character focused. I haven't read all of Nancy Kress's Beggars series, but what I read of it was pretty character focused as well.

I would recommend Xenos by Dan Abnett it's a Warhammer 40,000 book so I know many won't read it because of that but I thoroughly enjoyed it as the first entry into a trilogy and has 5 other books based around the same setting and characters.

Bill, the Galactic Hero

Bujold. Bujold, Bujold, Bujold.

Grab the nearest book by her. She's written several series, but every book also functions as a stand-alone, and if you delay the joy of reading her by trying to track down books from the 1980s, you'll be delaying the utter delight of the people she writes about.

She started with space opera, (The Vorkosigan series) she's now mostly writing fantasy, but not the sort you'd expect after reading "The Lord of the Rings." I've seen her "Five Gods" series described as "speculative theology" by actual theologians. It is vibrant and imaginative and utterly delightful.

She's won as many Hugo awards as Heinlein, with a somewhat smaller set of works, and she's still working, mostly at self-published shorter e-books that let her get more royalties and are all about her semi-retirement.

Jim Butcher has done TWO AMAs here the first AMA & the second AMA :) Here's a link to all of our upcoming AMAs

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Brandon Sanderson did an AMA here you might want to take a look :) Here's a link to all of our upcoming AMAs

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