I thought Blindsight did people very well. I do not know that I'd ever read another of his books, but it was well done. And I've seen 'alien' and people-who-are-not-like-us done very well in a lot of fantasy.

But it's something I've noticed particularly in science fiction - Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds and perhaps one or two others aside - the problem of varieties of peoples and varieties of worlds and varieties of ways of looking at worlds (this last especially) is approached very conservatively.

I suppose you could say that I am looking for a more anthropological approach to people in my modern science fiction, and not be too far off. But it seems that so many science fiction books are populated with characters who see the world very similarly to your average moderately liberal denizen of modern North America. And this seems to me to be quite unnecessarily limiting.