Favorite Science Fiction Writers and Their Works?

[CountryGent]

The title kind of says it; who are some of your favorite science fiction authors?

Which of their works do you like the most? Any that weren't so great? A lesser known work that deserved a wider audience?

If their novel featured a date future from the present setting of the work, which ones accurately predicted the future as it is unfolding? Which really missed it?

Thanks.

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[Alexx1401]

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love. Only book I have ever read, then gone back years later and read again. It was his first I ever read, never was much on this kind of book. After that read many of his books. Some I had a real hard time staying with at all. None were as great as that one to me.

 

[Andy54Hawken]

Robert A. Heinlein....
Glory Road...
Tunnel in the Sky...
Starship Troopers...
Stranger in a Strange Land...
Farnham's Freehold..
Citizen of the Galaxy...
And the afore mentioned Time Enough For Love....

Ray Bradbury...
The Martian Chronicles...
The October Country....
Something Wicked This Way Comes...
The Halloween Tree....
Fahrenheit 451...

Edgar Rice Burroughs...
The Pellucudar series....
John Carter of Mars Series...
The Land That Time Forget trilogy...

George Orwell...
1984...
Animal Farm...

L.Ron Hubbard...before he got too weird....
Final Blackout...
Battlefield Earth...

Richard Matheson...
I am Legend...
The Incredible Shrinking Man...

Jerry Pournelle....
Janissaries...
And with Larry Niven....
Lucifer's Hammer...

Sterling E. Lanier...
Hiero's Journey....
The Unforsaken Hiero...

Harry Turtledove...
The Guns of the South...

H.Beam Piper....
Little Fuzzy series...

Pat Frank...
Alas Babylon...

Stephen King...
11/22/63

Even if some of the books with their plots or story line are somewhat dated...
Any of the above make for an outstanding read.
Also...any of the above are within easy reach in my library...

Sorry for the long post...
To paraphrase a famous movie quote :
You went full book nerd...Never go full book nerd...

Andy

 

[jackrv]

Robert A. Heinlein, all books.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, most books.
Andre Norton
Poul Andersson
Tolkien
Dr. E.E.Smith, Lensmen series.
Robert E. Howard
Fritz Lieber

Jack

 

[Bacchus]

Asimov: Foundation Trilogy
Pournelle/Niven: Mote in God's Eye, Lucifer's Hammer, Neutron Star
Forward: Dragon's Egg (sounds like Fantasy, but it's "hard" sci-fi)
Saberhagen: Berserker series
Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama
Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Weir: The Martian

 

[Bon Sauvage]

The members of this site have good taste and I have pleasant memories of the works that their selected authors have provided, but is there no love for the great Jack Vance? By far my favorite writer.

Foreverness - Raise a Toast to Jack Vance!

Jack Vance passed away at home on the evening of Sunday May 26, 2013, ending a long, rich and productive life. Recognized most widely as an author, family and friends also knew a generous, large-hearted, rugged, congenial, hard-working, optimistic and unpretentious individual whose curiosity...

foreverness.jackvance.com

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Larry Niven: Anything in his "Known Space" works, in particular his "Ringworld" series.

ETA: John Steakley's "Armor."

 

[titsonritz]

George Orwell...
1984...
Animal Farm...

Not sure this qualifies as fiction (science or otherwise) any longer.

 

[Flopsweat]

Every one of my favorites is listed in the first 7 posts except one obscure one: Frederik Pohl. The Gateway series. The first two books are terrific. The third is OK and fourth is somewhat difficult to find and not very good.

Book 1: Gateway
Book 2: Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

 

[titsonritz]

Stephen King's 'The Stand' is one of my favorite books, not sure it qualifies as science fiction any more either considering recent events.

 

[bradsteen]

Neal Stephenson is generally pretty solid. He brings some great humor to his writing, and isn't confined to one style or time period. Two books I would recommend:

Seveneves is 3 "books" in one. It was really good until Book 3, at which point it feels like he ran up against a publishing deadline or something and tried to rush through it instead of ending it and writing a sequel. In spite of that, I think it's worth reading for the first two books alone. If you read it and stop at the end of Book 2 you lose little in the way of storyline, and you save yourself from some highly convenient writing at the end, though some of the tech advances he talks about are pretty neat.

The Rise and Fall of DODO is one of my favorites. It's written entirely in memo form (journals, letters, emails, etc), which might sound weird but it flows surprisingly well, and is absolutely hilarious. If you've ever worked in an office environment, you'll love it. I'd almost classify it as sci-fi comedy, and I highly recommend it.

And now that I think about it my list of solidly entertaining reads is just too darn long to expound on, so I will simply list them:

• AG Riddle's Long Winter trilogy
• Dennis E Taylor's Bobiverse series
• Andy Weir's "The Martian" (it's a lot better than the movie, and the movie wasn't pretty darn good)
• Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries
• Michael Crichton's Timeline and Prey

 

[gryghin]

A lot of my favorites are listed.

Don't know if Star Wars qualifies as Sci-fi... I think it does.

Timothy Zahn lives in Oregon and his Thrawn series is excellent. He also wrote the Cobra series.

 

[Flopsweat]

Neal Stephenson is generally pretty solid. He brings some great humor to his writing, and isn't confined to one style or time period. Two books I would recommend:

Seveneves is 3 "books" in one. It was really good until Book 3, at which point it feels like he ran up against a publishing deadline or something and tried to rush through it instead of ending it and writing a sequel. In spite of that, I think it's worth reading for the first two books alone. If you read it and stop at the end of Book 2 you lose little in the way of storyline, and you save yourself from some highly convenient writing at the end, though some of the tech advances he talks about are pretty neat.

The Rise and Fall of DODO is one of my favorites. It's written entirely in memo form (journals, letters, emails, etc), which might sound weird but it flows surprisingly well, and is absolutely hilarious. If you've ever worked in an office environment, you'll love it. I'd almost classify it as sci-fi comedy, and I highly recommend it.

And now that I think about it my list of solidly entertaining reads is just too darn long to expound on, so I will simply list them:

• AG Riddle's Long Winter trilogy
• Dennis E Taylor's Bobiverse series
• Andy Weir's "The Martian" (it's a lot better than the movie, and the movie wasn't pretty darn good)
• Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries
• Michael Crichton's Timeline and Prey

I forgot about Chrichton! Timeline is a very good read. The Andromeda Strain and there's another one by him that I can't recall at the moment.

While I'm at it, I must say Azimov and Heinlein are my all-time favorites.

I also just remembered the Dune series. Herbert created a fascinating universe in this series, and develops characters very well.

Let's not forget Douglas Adams - Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy

Spider Robinson deserves at least honorable mention for the Callahan series. It was great for about 5 or 6 books and then kind of ran out of real estate.

 

[Bacchus]

A few stories that I greatly respect, not because they're so well written, but because they have a terrific sci-fi concept:

Dragon's Egg, by Robert L. Forward
Miniature life forms (cheela) surviving on a neutron star, which is the collapsed core of a supergiant star, with a total mass of 20 suns but in a much smaller volume. A human being would be immediately crushed into a pancake by the immense gravitational force, but the cheela, maybe the size of a cucumber seed (I forget), have so little mass that they can withstand the gravitational forces. In addition, their generations are so short that "one earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years," so they progress much faster than the humans who have detected them from orbit.

Tau Zero, by Paul Anderson
A space ship with a crew of 50 is on a 30 light-year journey at near the speed of light. Meteor damage results in the ship accelerating to very near the speed of light, with the result that the crew barely ages at all while the entire universe has time to cycle between death and rebirth several times in maybe a billions years, until the ship can finally be repaired. This book isn't written as well but you can forgive a lot with this kind of concept.

Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin
The three-body problem in physics is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation. ... Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions (from Wikipedia).

In the story, the situation is a planet with two suns. Because that represents three bodies, it is impossible to predict the dynamics of the various rotations and revolutions. The result is that the planet's inhabitants can't predict the seasons or even day-night cycles. They alternate between extreme cold and hot seasons with very short notice. To survive a hot season, for example, they have to submerge in a large body of water, but they have to carry that knowledge forward from one season to the next to know to prepare.

My descriptions are sloppy, I haven't read these recently and the concepts were big.

 

[Bon Sauvage]

I also enjoyed the Hammerhead series (3 books) written by PNW writer Jason Andrew Bond. The third book just came out in February 2023. It's a good read!