My two favorite SF writers are Charles Stross (who was mentioned in passing above) and Steve Brust (who has not been I believe). You can argue that they are fantasy, but then so are FTL drives.
Yeah, his work seems to be of the allegorical, socially relevant type that many SF fans tend to roll their eyes at.
Even if you count some of what Stross does as fantasy, he writes a lot of science fiction
His most famous series, The Laundry Files, where Eldritch horrors take over the government, are more political satire than fantasy. Bankers turning out to be vampires is not very fantastical. He also has the problem that real events keep being more absurd and horrific than what his demons from outside reality do.
He has written lots of great pure science fiction, too.
My biggest problem is he can’t possibly be that famous, because he is one of my 9 followers on Mastodon. I have no idea why he is following me.
He’s playing with Lovecraftian tropes, and when Lovecraft was writing, what he wrote fell into the category of science fiction - the setting was a universe vast and old (the scientific universe) and the monsters were aliens or pre-human intelligences, dangerous because they had vast knowledge. Lovecraft and Stross’ magic is explicitly “science we haven’t discovered yet” with mathematics turning out to have a direct influence on reality (an idea that recognizably hard SF writers like Egan, Stephenson and Greg Bear also use - without calling it magic).
(In my opinion) Being political satire doesn’t exclude a work from being fantasy or being science fiction or being ‘realistic’ fiction.
I recognize the Egan and Stephenson works you’re referring to. But I haven’t read a whole lot of Bear. Which one(s) is it? (just looking to add to my reading list)
I’m thinking of Anvil of Stars - the sequel to Forge of God