Vance, Zelazny and Wolfe have been listed, so I’ll offer Dan Simmons. He’s relatively new, but his best science fiction is perhaps the best science fiction ever written.
Lord of Light is his best, Creatures of Light and Darkness is the one you’ll enjoy the most, but like many listed here, his best stuff was his short stories. Look for any of the anthologies.
Oh, and avoid the *Amber *series. It’s highly overrated.
Poul Anderson, Vance & Clarke edges in. He doesn’t write people, in common with Heinlein and Asimov, but escapes it by the depth and value of his scientific imagination. They’re the moderns, with apologies and omissions.
Verne and HG Wells, but also Mary Shelley and yes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Horror and Detective Fiction, they’re branches off the same tree.
Must read this Cryptonomicon (?) guy.
Another anti-Heinlein vote here.
I’d vote for either Cherryh or Le Guin. Then Banks, Lovecraft, Clarke, Herbert, Asimov in decreasing order.
Cyril Kornbluth and Mary Shelly deserve at least a pity nomination.
Been lurking in this thread - fun to think this stuff through; it’s been a while.
I have to go with Dune, too - my first epic, and with such a layered world of politics, religion, culture and empire.
Heinlein and many others mentioned are great - I dug in deep with a lot of them. But Dune still holds up to me.
Larry Niven, with Heinlein a close second.
And a shout-out for Jerry Pournelle.
A lot of my favourites have already been mentioned but I’ll throw John Brunner and Kim Stanley Robinson into the mix as well!
I gotta go with Fredric Brown.
Great post. Also, what a lot of people overlook when checking Verne’s contribution to literature is that he was extremely badly translated in English originally. And while he’s considered a serious author in France, whose books make nice gifts for young boys, in England he was often considered as a hack writer because of the lousy translation. I think he has been retranslated recently, if you ever go for a Verne book in English, you definitely need to check out the status of the translation.
So, my pick would be between Verne, because, almost all by himself, he defined the genre, and his stuff still compares well to all the “recent” authors (Im talking about the SF craze of post WW2). And Philip K. Dick, in my opinion one of the greatest writers ever even if he mostly wasted his talent.
P.S: I have to add a small salute to Pohl and Kornbluth whose numerous short stories proved that you could write SF and still have a wonderful sense of humour. Definitely not a common trait among SF writers.
That guy was Asimov for me, so he gets my vote.
Bester?
True. There’s been a Verne Renaissance going on since the 1960s, with works being re-translated, and especially in the past ten years, when first-time-ever english translations appeared of The Kip Brothers, The Invasion of the Sea, and The Mighty Orinoco. In addition, works that had never been published in any language before (along with their English translations) have appeared – Paris in the 20th Century, Journey Through the Impossible, and the editions of The Meteor Hunt and The Golden Volcano with Michel Verne’s lengthy additions excised.
I strongly recommend Walter James Miller’s annotated editions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon.
(I think the only Verne novel not yet translated into English is Bourses En Voyage. now.)
It’s not a question that admits of a satisfactory answer, at least to me, but I’ll certainly give my nomination for the most original science fiction author, although he’s little known today other than by hardened SF addicts. After the publication of the story A Martian Odyssey in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories science fiction was never the same again. Its author was a young man called Stanley Weinbaum and his death the following year robbed SF of one of its true titans.
You must not have read Callahan’s Con–I think that was the last one I read. Hated it for several reasons, but he does kill off a major character. For no particular reason, apparently.
Even that death was a painless joke.
Ditto.
Robert Anson Heinlein
I don’t really care for her but people (feminists) seem to like Ursula K. Le Guin.
Orson Scott Card
And Ray Bradbury is wrong, his stuff is Science Fiction, everything in The Martian Chronicles is as plausible as The Foundation series.
Asimov.
And if we’re playing ‘might have been’ nominations…
H. Beam Piper
He got ‘blood and thunder’ SF before most anyone else and in a way that was entertaining and fun. A great author cut short by suicide.