I do like his writing, well, most of it, when he keeps away from politics. I just can’t see myself getting on well with a Republican, though.
Similarly, I’d have reservations about Orson Scot Card’s homophobia, and Gaiman’s scarily-close relationship with Scientology, for that matter.
What about Stephen Colbert?
If Goulart wrote them, I might actually try them out. He did a great job continuing The Avenger series, in addition to his own work.
As for the question in the OP, I’d go with Gibson just because he gets mentioned so often in the general press as the inventor of the term cyberspace. I haven’t heard anyone in the general press mention Card in years.
If we’re talking dead writers, I’d put Philip K. Dick above either Asimov or Clarke.
Indeed, and I strongly suspect that there’s a correlation between his lack of visibility in the general press, and when he started using his bully pulpit to oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
Everyone is familiar with adaptations of Dick’s work, but how many are aware that he’s behind them? I’d argue that the only people who would know about him would be science-fiction fans (who would thus also know Asimov, Clarke, etc.).
Oh, his name stands for the “what is reality” kind of plot. He also is big in academia and literary circles. There is a Library of America edition of his works. I see him mentioned in the pages of the Times Book Review far more often than Asimov or Clarke, and especially more than Heinlein.
Asimov might be a runner up because the three laws of robotics are becoming uncomfortably relevant as people get scared of AI.
Probably mostly true, but as an adolescent, if I liked a Star Trek episode, I’d hunt up print work by that writer.
Holy smokes, has this thread blown up! I’m sorry I can’t reply to all who deserve it, but these back in the pack caught my eye on my return.
Clarke was a distinctly minor writer - of sf or anything else - until his book The Exploration of Space was chosen as a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. That got him a front page review on the New York Times Book Review and shot him to massive fame. By 1955 eight of his books were released or re-released. He exemplified the future as a scientist and a writer. I wrote a condensed version of the story here.
The distinction among genres has historically in the US been driven by publishers. Publishers care only - well, almost only - about sales. They firmly believe that buyers - a much, much larger number of potential sales than fans - want to read specific genres and that their books must be siloed into those genres. Covers of paperbacks must instantly inform browsers of the contents. For a very long time, cross-genre works were extremely hard to sell, until paranormal and romantasies became major subgenres within romance.
Fantasy was a respectable mainstream genre for most of the first half of the 20th century, with science fiction a bizarre and subliterary offshoot. Until WWII. Suddenly sf was as hot as all things atomic and fantasy was a silly abandonment of the real world. For the next 20 years publishers built lines of sf, both in hardcover and later in paperback. (YA was considered a totally separate area, as were children’s books. That was because the best stable customers of book were libraries, and libraries also liked to group books separately for perceived groups of readers. Mysteries and westerns also continued to be important genres with their own publishing lines. Romance hardcover lines followed a bit later.)
That changed with the Tolkien paperbacks in the 1960s. Suddenly publishers saw an audience for fantasy and Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey started a fantasy line in the 1970s that was wildly successful. Tolkien imitators crawled out of the woodwork like an ant swarm and they all sold. By 1991, the Science Fiction Writers of America changed its name to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, over the loud protests of the purists who insisted that the two were separate and, sotto voce, those damn fantasists can get their own organization. That most of the members of SFWA wrote both sf and fantasy and other stuff was ignored. But the old school lost because the publishers always win and most of the new fantasy crowd wrote little or no sf, yet they wanted recognition and most of them sold to the same publishers.
Fantasy brought a wave of women into the field, both as authors and fans. They’ve dominated the Hugo and Nebula Awards for the past few years. But there is a measurable difference in their reading preferences. See this You.gov page for a breakdown in 21 categories/genres. Scroll down to “Mystery and romance books were read by more women in 2023, while men read more history and sci-fi”. (Disclaimer: I’ve read repeatedly for more than a decade than romance sales are 50% of all paperback fiction sales and that women read far more fantasy than men. This chart doesn’t say that. Take either one with a grain of salt.)
So when I asked for the most famous living science fiction writer (and, dammit, I used the word “living”) I was making the distinction along historic, publishing, and fan lines, knowing that fantasy, especially YA fantasy, outsells all sf by a huge margin and has hugely more recognition in books. No consensus candidate has appeared, either. I wouldn’t have foreseen that as someone who started reading The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 60 years ago.
Hey, I like plenty of modern SF. Scalzi, Egan, Jemisin, Seanan McGuire, Sarah Pinsker, Naomi Kritzer, Ted Chiang, Cory Doctorow, etc. All folks who are currently active (and several of which who started in this millennium); not very famous other than Jemisin.
Doctorow and Chiang write the kind of “think pieces” that get picked up by newspapers and news magazines - the kind of thing that Asimov and Clarke did when they were famous, but it hasn’t translated to the kind of public awareness that Isaac and Arthur got.
Since January 2021, I’ve read Jemisin, Doctorow, Scalzi, Collins, Le Guin, KS Robinson, Butler, Wells, Griffith, Egan, Bujold, Yu, Nix, Robson, Addison, Liu, Winterson, Schrefer, Vale, Mandel, Kowal, Edwards, Chambers, Brennan, PD Clark, Leckie, Walton, and Rather, most of whom are female, people of color, a/o queer, as well as Zelazny, Heinlein, Blish, and Clifton and Riley. I’m looking forward to The Last Dangerous Visions. I just don’t have a lot to say about most of them, here, most of the time.
I’m guessing you haven’t been reading a lot of Marion Zimmer Bradley retrospectives either.
–Oh, yeah, and Okorafor.
She still gets mentioned with respect more than I would have expected.
Joe Haldeman mentioned?
Considering that by every account I’ve heard Ellison was an unbearable asshole and Asimov was a lecherous old pervert, that can’t have been too difficult.
My recollection is that it was both very funny, and rather painful. 
What I disagree with is the idea that any single event “dragged” Clarke to fame. As you say yourself in that article, Clarke was “perhaps the most famous science fiction writer of all time”. I agree. He was always my favourite SF writer because he was brilliantly imaginative and tended to base his stories on plausible scientific premises more than most other SF writers. And everyone starts out being a “minor” writer early in their career.
I was looking for a mention of Peter F. Hamilton’s name. Not only did I find one, I got another author (Neal Asher) to recommend to my husband. He’s already read Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds.
Depending on the upcoming Murderbot series on Apple TV, maybe Martha Wells’ name will become better known.
And that’s the point. Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov became famous without movie deals or television shows. I don’t consider J.K. Rowling a science fiction writer, but she is one of the of the few recent sci-fi/fantasy authors that became well known based only on their book sales.
When doing a little bit of searching, I did find that Barack Obama included one of Ted Chiang’s books in his 2019 reading list. I never heard of Ted Chiang until the movie Arrival. And having a movie made from his book isn’t enough to make him a household name.
I think Stephen King is much better known than Alan Dean Foster. And he’s still writing.
For people who write movie/tv tie-in books I’d think Timothy Zahn is more famous than ADF. But still virtually unknown outside of genre fans.
Asher is imaginative, but not someone that I would get on with politically, either. His Polity universe reads like a right-wing riposte to Iain Bank’s The Culture.