Robert Jordan … heeheeheeheeheehee
Anyone else read Harry Crews?
The Gypsy’s Curse is probably my favorite, followed by A Feast of Snakes.
And I feel I identify with many of Walker Percy’s protagonists.
I definitely have to put my 2cents it this one, as i love literature.
Henry Miller
Leo Tolstoy
John Steinbeck
Charles Bukowski
J.R.R. Tolkien
J.D. Salinger
Not in any order, those are just my fav’s.
Fiction:
Jonathan Lethem
Don DeLillo
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Heinrich Boll
Jorge Luis Borges
Haruki Murakami
David Foster Wallace
T C Boyle
Lorrie Moore
Mark Twain
Kate Wilhelm
Ursula LeGuin
Harlan Ellison
Sherwood Anderson
William Faulkner
George Orwell
Arthur Miller
Albert Camus
Non-Fiction:
Stephen J Gould
Jared Diamond
Richard Rhodes
Todd Gitlin
Barry Lopez
Jon Krakauer
E. B. White
Lewis Lapham
Poetry:
W. S. Merwin
Mark Strand
Denise Levertov
Dylan Thomas
Rainer Maria Rilke
Charles Bukowski
Emily Dickinson
James Dickey
James Wright
William Blake
and that Shakespeare guy.
Short List (in no particular order):
Fiction:
Kurt Vonnegut
Mark Twain
John Steinbeck
Feodor Dostoevsky
Thomas Pynchon
Umberto Eco
Harper Lee
Non-Fiction:
William Least Heat Moon
H. L. Mencken
P. J. O’Rourke
Viktor Frankl
Robert Pirsig
I dunno about Harlan Ellison… Sure, he’s got edge, but it seems to me that he doesn’t have anything but edge. The best sci-fi author currently alive (I don’t know what hemisphere he’s on) is probably Larry Niven, but I’m sure others would debate that.
I’d have to go with Dave Barry. I guess he’s “officially” an author, not a columnist, since he put out Big Trouble.
Yay, another Harlan fan!
Dostoevsky.
He is the best author at getting a philosophical/existential point across while making it an entertaining story, rather then shoving the point in your face like most philosophical authors do.
Okay, I’m going to try to be nice here.
Sci-fi is a term invented by lazy editors. The term is “science-fiction”. Alternatively, you might use “speculative fiction.” As for Harlan Ellison, he has written in pretty much every style and genre one could imagine: mystery, science-fiction, romance, horror, etc. Larry Niven has been a fine author, but he seems to me to have lost an edge in the past few years. For some Ellison examples with a little more honed of an edge, try “Rowing Christopher Columbus Ashore” from Slippage or from the Best American Short Stories of 1994. Alternatively, try his audio readings. I highly recommend, though not written by him, Ellison’s reading of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” from Great American Speeches.
Since my husband and I agreed to give up TV for a year, I’ve read more in the last 10 months than I have in the last 10 years. Some favorites (in no particular order):
E. Annie Proulx
Anne Tyler
John Irving
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dominick Dunne
Cecil Adams (naturally…)
P.J. O’Rourke
Noam Chomsky
Patrick Susskind
Jane Austen
John Updike
Actually, “Sci-fi” was coined by Forry Ackerman, noted fan figure and occasional editor/publisher (e.g. Famous Monsters of Filmland). Very very few people actually involved with SF professionally can stand the term “sci-fi” (and those few are exclusively of the younger generations – all of the old-timers hate it with a passion). The preferred abbreviation within the field is “SF” (see the spines of most paperbacks, the David Hartwell-edited Year’s Best SF series, and so forth). Ellison was one of the writers who led the push for “SF” to stand for “Speculative friction” (on the grounds that the latter was more inclusive than “science fiction” and thus covered fantasy, horror, and the uncategorizable works that Ellison himself writes), but that fight was lost in the early '70s.
Lazy editors have nothing to do with it.
For myself, I’m still fighting a rear-guard effort for Hugo Gernsback’s preferred term, “Scientifiction.” Hard to spell, hard to pronounce; how can you not love it? It abbreviates to “stf,” which some old-time fans still use.
Oh, and SF people generally pronounce “sci-fi” as “skiffy.” It’s meant as a term of contempt, as in “That last Star Wars movie was just skiffy; it didn’t have a single idea in its addle-pated head.”
Tom Clancy
Dale Brown
Stephen Coonts
Clive Cussler
Mick Foley
Nelson DeMille
Stephen King
And of course…
Cecil Adams
This isn’t easy–I read almost anything–but here goes:
J.R.R. Tolkien (of course)
P.C. Hodgell (<grumble> best fantasy since Tolkien, and she has hell getting it printed!)
Robert Heinlein (wrote the 1st novel I ever read)
Larry Niven (physics is fun!)
Anne McCaffrey (How can you not love SF with dragons?)
Stephen King (if he’ll finish whatever the hell he’s up to and let us read it!)
Barry Hughart (insanely funny ancient Chinese fantasy, sorta)
Mercedes Lackey (Don’t start. I like her characterizations, and she’s prolific enough to help me keep the monkey on my back fed.)
And, of course, what nonfiction section would be complete without Cecil?
David Foster Wallace
Tom Wolfe
Douglas Adams
Douglas Hofstadter
Stanislaw Lem
Cecil Adams
Piers Anothony (all)
Asimov (all)
Philip Jose Farmer (the dungeon series)
Robert Jordan (the wheel of time series)
Winston Groom (Better times than these and Forrest Gump)
VC Andrews (all)
Clive Barker (The great and secret show)
Robert Adams (The horseclan series)
And I adore the chronicles of Narnia but I can’t remember the author. 
Kricket, I think the author of the chronicles of Narnia was C.S. Lewis.
Gordon MacQuarrie and his stories of the Old Duck Hunter’s Association…
Perhaps never a finer outdoor’s writer has ever existed.
You mean besides me?
Frederick Forsyth
Mark Twain
Dave Barry
Robert Heinlein
Lucian
Fredric Brown
I pick up anything by these guys and I’m hooked
Apologies on the use of the term “sci-fi”-- I probably do know better, but never realized that I do. I must say, though, that I’m not too keen on trying to squish science fiction and fantasy together, a’la “speculative fiction”. Don’t get me wrong, I love SF, and I love fantasy, but they’re two different genres.
Oh, and I think I forgot to put C. S. Lewis on my list; him too. 