He’s still alive? Cool…I would have guessed otherwise. (And I read that and always though of that when playing Halo.)
I can’t stop laughing at this.
Margaret Atwood should place pretty high. Not as prolific as most of the greats, but The Handmaid’s Tale had a recent TV adaptation that was well-regarded and presumably increased her name recognition.
She has denied that she writes science fiction, saying that she writes speculative fiction instead… but that’s really just her idiosyncratic definition. She admits that what Ursula K Le Guin means by science fiction, she calls speculative fiction. Everyone else agrees that Le Guin writes science fiction.
A couple of years ago, I would have said Ernest Cline but it’s funny just how quickly and thoroughly he dropped off the radar. Ready Player One was everywhere, it apparently sold over 2M copies and the movie was the anticipated Spielberg blockbuster of the summer. But then the movie was terrible and the sequel was terrible and people went back and realized, oh yeah, the original book is terrible as well and we just moved on like we did with bell bottom jeans and never talk about him anymore.
Oh, we can also add The Mist, since that’s definitely also Cthulhu Mythos inspired (and I would consider the Cthulhu Mythos to be inherently sci-fi) and IIRC it was a government lab that unleashed the titular fog upon rural Maine.
Stan Lee (mentioned upthread) - recently died.
Ursula LeGuin (mentioned upthread) - recently died.
Other real SF writers who are recently deceased include Terry Pratchett, Greg Bear and Vernor Vinge.
That really only leaves David Brin and Stephen Baxter from that cohort. Not really household names.
Yea, Larry Niven is still alive; he should be more famous than he is, although (like Orson Scott Card) I have a feeling I wouldn’t enjoy his company.
What “other reasons” dragged Arthur C. Clarke to fame? If you’re thinking of his collaboration on 2001: A Spacey Odyssey, I was an avid fan of Clarke and reading everything of his that I could find long before the movie, and I think he was quite well known long before. Childhood’s End (first published in 1953) may have been the first novel of his that I ever read, but I also loved his short stories. I have a big heavy book that I found about ten years ago that contains all the short stories Clarke ever wrote. He was a master of the SF short story.
I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t any really good SF writers any more or because my interest in the genre has waned and perhaps others followed the same path. None of the authors I can think of are still living. They include big names like Asimov, Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. One of my special favourites is the husband and wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, sometimes writing under pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett. Sadly, Kuttner died in 1958 at the young age of only 42, and IIRC Moore never produced much after that. I’m still haunted by their beautiful short story Vintage Season.
FTR, I’m one of those who had never heard of Neil Gaiman.
In terms of fame, the popular YA authors like the aforementioned Suzanne Collins , James Dashner or Patrick Ness are going to eclipse any adult SF writer, barring King, IMO.
Card has also written plenty of fantasy - the Alvin Maker series, for instance. So is he a Science Fiction writer or a Fantasy writer?
I’m just amused, as usual, by the alleged SF/fantasy dichotomy. Only fans seem to care about the difference; actual writers obviously don’t.
Apologies for the poll then, which must have been published a bit before his death.
This is me too. In fact I was the guy who launched the whole “Who the hell is Neil Gaiman?” digression. And, to my embarrassment, in a rather impolite nearly threadshit-ful fashion.
I was an avid SF reader through HS where I was bored shitless by school. Once I got to college and the coursework load and my job(s) picked up, my free time for recreational reading crashed, but I stayed mostly with SF.
Since leaving college in the late 1970s I’ve read the original Dune (only), the entire Mars trilogy, Snow Crash, and tried (and failed at) the Three Body Problem trilogy. All of which were recommendations I found in non-SF sources. And probably attempted a few others I can’t now remember. So 6 books in 4 universes over ~45 years.
So my knowledge of SF authors is rooted in ancient history.
As a separate matter, I think there’s been a real blending of “traditional” SF and fantasy genres. I do not enjoy anything about fantasy writing and actively shun it. I find the idea of JK Rowling as a “science fiction” writer to be either laughable or a total non-sequitur WTF. A talented writer? Sure. Famous? You bet. Even I instantly know who she is and what she’s written despite never having leafed through one of her books.
I’m sure folks here can write an impassioned defense of the idea that fantasy and SF are so closely aligned as to be conjoined twins. Sorry, this classicist fuddy duddy aint’ buyin’ it.
ETA: And right on cue, this got posted near above while I was typing. With no disrespect or disagreement meant to @Alessan; they just put it very neatly right here right now.
I’m going to suggest there are two factors.
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The kind of world-building needed for each is similar, so someone whose mind is suited to creating one genre probably has solid professional-level aptitude at the other.
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The market for fantasy is 10x to 100x the market for traditional SF, even “soft” SF. Follow the Benjamins.
From my POV the preference for SF over fantasy is purely a matter of personal taste. The fact the publishing industry and the critics industry have even coined the term “F&SF” says they see a lot more similarities than differences. And commercially, they’re correct. They’re both escapist alternate realities, but are not romances.
I was going to nominate Vernor Vinge but went to check his Wikipedia and well… RIP.
I think some of the inability to come up with answers is down to the board’s demographics more than the dearth of authors. Among others I’d offer up that haven’t been presented yet are Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow and Ted Chiang.
The Dope is interesting, because there’s a ton of interest in science fiction here, but relatively little interest in any science fiction written in the current millennium. So many folks are interested in stories about the future, but only if they were written in the distant past.
I don’t know if NK Jemisin is the most famous, but she’s arguably the best living science fiction author. I’d make that argument.
Scalzi is also a good pick. He’s nowhere near the juggernaut of an author that Jemisin is–his books tend toward “dumb fun”–but he’s a helluva lot richer.
I was going to say the same. I’ve recently started reading novels again, after a hiatus of decades. I was delighted to discover there are oodles of really good authors who started writing since i stopped reading.
1 i suck at remembering names
2 my tastes lean more towards fantasy than sf
3 i am probably too out of the loop to have a good sense of who is most popular these days
But there is a nice field of active living authors writing stuff that’s eligible for Hugo awards.
I’m totally with you on this. In general I have no use for fantasy.
One of the things I liked about Arthur C. Clarke is that he often ventured into “hard science” sci-fi, which is pretty much the opposite of fantasy. A story like Technical Error, for instance, had a plot centered on the tightly bound relationship between space and time. It may not have been scientifically accurate, but it was plausible, as opposed to fantasy that just conjures up magical worlds.
One might ask why I admire Kuttner and Moore’s Vintage Season so much when there’s no “hard science” in it. It’s because not every SF story has to belabor the science, it just has to have a premise that is at least plausible (in this case, time travel) as opposed to pure magic. It also resonates with emotion, which seems typical of stories in which Moore had a significant hand. It’s just a damn fine tale that has little focus on science but cannot be dismissed as scientifically impossible.
Not necessarily “only” if written in the distant past, but that does add an interesting element to them. I have a three-volume set of sci-fi short stories from around the 1930s, maybe extending into the early 40s, called something like The Golden Age of Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov. It’s a fascinating insight into the science thinking and futurism of a bygone era, which makes stories that are often entertaining in their own right that much more interesting.
Admittedly, the thread title says nothing about “living.” It wouldn’t be the first time an SDMB thread had a title and an OP that asked different questions.
This is a good suggestion.
Clearly, we’re having trouble agreeing on definitions and criteria. My own interpretation of the question would be "Who is most famous specifically for being a science fiction writer? That is, if you saiid their name to a random member of the general public, who has the highest probability of getting the response: “Oh, they write science fiction”? As opposed to either: “Oh, they [something else]” or “Who?”
Larry Niven is definitely a science fiction writer, he’s definitely very famous at least to SF fans, and he’s definitely still living, but I don’t think he’s still writing. There are recent books with his name on the byline, but I think they’re all “co-authored” with the other author doing all of the work, and he just gets credit because they’re based in worlds he created. I also don’t think anything he wrote ever got a non-book adaptation, so his fame among non-SF-fans is probably much lower.
Yes, if we’re looking for fame among the general public, we would be looking for someone whose work has had successful adaptations for the screen, preferably with their name prominent in the promotional material. And/or someone who’s a celebrity, in the sense of appearing on talk shows and magazine covers, or whatever the equivalent is nowadays.