Has SF left me behind?

 For the fourth or fifth time in a row, I'm struggling with a highly regarded award-winning SF book. 

I'm starting to question whether it isn't the books, but me. Maybe I've just changed. 

The current book is full of intrigue. It reminds me of Dune, but it is also highly annoying, all the keen looks and double meanings and secret messages. In real life, I find that the really devious people are the ones you don't know are being devious--they don't tend to telegraph it. In real life, I find constantly clever conversations to be exhausting. 

It just feels a little ludicrous: "Does she mean what she says, or am I taking it wrong, or both, or is what she said innocent, but perhaps it has a secret meaning, and what is that slight downturn in the mouth mean, and is she my enemy or my friend, and oh, that word she just used, it can mean two different things, and how do I answer in a way that is diplomatic but also gets to the point, and before I can say anything, she winks at me."

Pages and pages of that.

This book also had zero action for 85 pages, then an explosion, and then no action for the next 75 pages or so. The author has plenty of opportunities for action but foregoes them. This seems to be the current trend, and I'll be damned if I understand it.

However, unlike a couple of my other attempts at reading an award-winning SF book, this book has good enough writing to keep me going. It has one hell of a lot of interior monologue, which is something I hardly do in my own writing, so I'm fascinated by that, as well as the wealth of signifiers (at least, that's what I call them)--those little actions we take when we're talking to someone or carrying on routine motions. I've always found these to be difficult, and this guy is pretty brilliant at it, though it is exhausting sometimes to have signfiers with every line of dialogue, especially as noted above when it all supposed to be very cunning and crafty. It starts to get kind of silly

As I say, it got me to thinking about Dune and the Foundation trilogy (which in my memory also didn't have a whole lot of action.) I loved both of these stories, but would I love them today? 

I think part of it is that most of the "smart" and "devious" stuff is unearned. That is, we are told rather than shown. One of the things I absolutely loved about the early books of the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster's Bujold is that she shows us the main character, Miles, being clever and smart and having a heart. It's hard to show that in a book; the surprise twist where you realize the protagonist has figured it all out and gotten the result he wanted and you are as caught off-guard by it as the villains are. And it is legit, not just told. 

There is some prodigious world-building in this book, which is also something I find difficult--one of the reasons I write horror and thrillers more often than anything because I don't have to create a whole world for my stories to take place in.

I know this review is annoying because I'm not telling you the title of the book, but I really don't want to give a negative review. It's the overall trend of avoiding "action" (unnecessarily in my opinion) that I'm addressing. 

I don't think a story become more "literary" simply because you don't fulfill the expectations of the genre. I've read magical realism stories that do something similar, but I think these authors tend to be much better writers and can pull it off. With SF, it just becomes annoying to me.