Alastair Reynolds, Peter f Hamilton, some of Stephen baxter .Time Machine was good.Destinys children also. Larry Niven was interesting.

stamp said...
ray bradbury, robert heinlein, isaac asimov, douglas adams

. They've written the classics. Really great stuff. Frank Herbert too.

Harry Harrison was a leading "mind". Make Room Make Room (Soylent Green) is probably one of the most accurate future predictions Ive come across bar 1984. He had too many books for me to remember them all. One of his interesting ones was a planet that reflected your own impulses. Approach it defensively and that was what you got, aggressively and look out! But come in as a peace loving hippy and it looked after you. The world is what you make it.

Which raises an interesting thought, can I slip George Orwell in the list? I mean he was a social and political writer but 1984 is sci-fi and is also one of the most important books written spanning all 3 genres.

The greatest science fiction author of all times would easily be Jules Verne. Second greatest, HG Wells. Surprised nobody has mentioned AC Clarke yet.

OK love all that have been posted & collected works of harry Harrison he's funny too but Phillip k dick has too be there & its funny I'm off to the library now & they make my life easy all sf has green sticker the

David Gemmel , not really sci fi but fanatsy

dinsdale said...
Orson Scott-Card - especially the "Enders" series.
Anne McCaffrey - especially the "Singers" and "Dragons" series. Liked the "Crystals" series too.

Have to agree with orson scott card. Sheer genius. If you're interested enough in scifi to be reading this thread, and you haven't read his ender series, you don't know what you are missing

A lot of the 50's sci fi books were really cool. Cardboard characters and flimsy plots, but written purely to explore a "what-if" scenario. John Wyndham among others

And Arthur C Clarke was prescient in so many of his ideas. Geosynchronous orbits for communication satelites (including estimating the size of the solar cells required). Space elevators


And Douglas Adams had a better understand of the sheer lunacy of physics than most physicists. A very deep thinker with a profound understanding of the world. He died too soon

in terms of productivity kilgore trout would be my pick.
he wrote over 117 novels and over 2000 short stories.
my apologies for copy-paste, but just to show what sort of creative character he was.
this is one of his stories in brief:

"It was about an
Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and
plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.
They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food
was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities
were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of
business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.
They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don
said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were
really
dirty, and Don
replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”
This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty
movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-
cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to
think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already
seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house
lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn't
any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then
the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male
humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on
his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his
time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his
slurpy mouth, the camera focussed on his Adam's apple. His Adam's
apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these
words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:
THE END
it was all faked, of course. There weren't any pears anymore. And the
eating of a pear wasn't the main event of the evening anyway. It was
a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to
settle down.
Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and
their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an
hour and a half—soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed
potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed
more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam's
apples. And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they
could take part in the orgy, too.
After a while, the actors couldn't eat any more. They were so stuffed
that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they
didn't think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they
dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
The audience went wild.
When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by
humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and
butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn't actually deliver
these goodies, of course.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would
cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and
full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

stamp said...
ray bradbury, robert heinlein, isaac asimov, douglas adams

I picked up Farmer in the sky by Robert Heinlein last year from a stall at the Dunsborough markets, he tells a good story.

Stanislaw Lem

landyacht said...
just finished reding peter hamiltons newey,"the great north road"
gripping and interesting right to the lsat of its 1000 pages.
trouble was I bought it in an airport and it wouldnt fit in any bags , so i had to carry every kn where on holiday
wifeys now 1/2 way through it and hasnt spoken to me or cooked ,cleaned or shopped for 3 days

I only just finished that a week ago or so.
It was ok, but didn't find it as good as his previous works, glad he's not turning it into a series as I'd still be compelled to read it all.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Phillip Jose Farmer, now there's a good bit of old school sci-fi, Riverworld in particular, but not limited to.

More science fantasy I guess but David and Leigh Eddings deserve a mention, the Belgariad/Mallorean series covers 13 books. It predates the Game of Thrones by nearly 30 years but there is a lot of similarities in characters and geography. I guess it seems to be a winning combination.

Philip K dick, robert heinlein, isaac asimov, Kim stanley Robinson, Philip Jose Farmer, A C Clarke. Heinlein has to be my favorite though

China mieville is a great author, not strictly scifi more along the lines of Orwell, but "the city and the city" is a great book, incredible concept and well written.

much as i hate to admit it..............

found a couple of these mags in a second hand book store many years ago!
treasure trove of short stories and early stuff from some of the best known and unknown writers with a little hint of nerdy art thrown in
and free

http://archive.org/stream/omni-best-of-1/Best_of_OMNI_1_1980#page/n88/mode/1up



ben bova
william gibson
george rr martin (game of thrones is based on his books) check sandkings on the link
edgar allen poe ......when i had the time to decipher his writing style