Neil Gaiman’s name up in another thread. (Don’t know how to link on my phone. We’re having an outage.) To the readers of f&sf, he’s a big name. Yet a number of posters said they had no idea who he was.
I said he might be the most famous f&sf writer in the world. That quickly got shot down. J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin surely top him.
Neither is a writer of science fiction, though. (Martin did some long ago before his game.) So who is the most famous living sf writer? They can be media famous, but it has to rest on books, so George Lucas doesn’t count.
If we don’t count Rowling or Martin, or writers who focus on horror (Steven King, Dean Koontz) or other genres that aren’t strictly science fiction, then, according to this YouGov poll on “contemporary writers,” Gaiman has 48% “fame” (awareness, I’m guessing); the only arguably sci-fi author above him is Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games), at 60%.
In that case, I nominate Stephen King, since a good chunk of his most well-known books (It, The Stand, The Dark Tower etc.) are at least sci-fi adjacent.
Do sci-fi authors who are not famous for being sci-fi authors count?
Perhaps the Tek-War series by William Shatner or Kendall Jenner, et al’s, Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex Livia is probably a sci-fi (“In a world of the far future…”). They are both certainly famous, but not primarily for being authors.
It would be nice to nominate just people who truly are sf writers, like Asimov and Clarke were even though they got famous for other reasons that dragged their sf into bestseller status.
It’s telling that people need to drag in others because no obvious answer is in sight.
And Shatner never wrote a word of his sci-fi books.
Weren’t Shatner’s books ghostwritten? If we’re counting ghostwriters, then George Lucas wins since his name was on the novelization of A New Hope despite it actually being written by Alan Dean Foster (who is also still alive and writing.)
Yes, though maybe not as prolifically as he used to (bear in mind that he’s now 72 years old). His bibliography on Wikipedia shows several novels and short stories published in the last few years, across several different series.
I can’t really think of anyone today that is famous to the general public in the way that Clarke, Asimov, etc were famous. It might have to do with SF writers of the 20th century being actual degreed scientists in addition to writers and therefore were more likely to be brought on TV to be asked real science questions, the role Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku have today.
Shatner named the ghostwriter of each novel in the acknowledgements. The first two thanked Ron Goulart, for instance.
I’ve heard that Shatner wanted to name a coauthor for the books, but his publisher felt people wouldn’t think Shatner wrote any of it. It appears he did come up with the premise for each book.
It’s gotta be Stephen King even if he is better known as a Horror writer. His SF output alone is more prolific than that of most writers who exclusively write Science Fiction.
Certainly not the most famous but up there: Neal Stephenson burst onto the SF scene with Snow Crash in 1992 and has been regularly publishing since. I know that views of his work are deeply divided on this message board but I’m a fan.
Most famous is hard, because there are people that are famous in the genre but if we’re talking about the whole, SF authors normally only become widely famous if there’s a TV/Movie adaptation of their works that gets mass market attention outside the genre.
There’s also the issue about quantity as opposed to quality, as there are SFI series with a huge number of sequels, sub sderies, and secondary series (For example David Weber) who has a metric ton of scifi novels (Safehold, Honorverse, Empire of Man plus others) with countless novels written and sold, but isn’t in any way famous for the reasons mentioned earlier (no TV or Movie Series).
So back to @Exapno_Mapcase - do you want famous, alive, and (ideally) still writing to the general population? Or within readers of the genre? And how narrowly do you want to define science fiction, which encompasses a huge variety of subgenres.
