The Best SF Author of All Time

Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper

So, I can’t actually pick one, or even rank ten, but by decade (when they made the works most important to me) it’s down to a short list:

  • 1830s: Edgar Allen Poe
  • … long empty stretch …
  • 1890s: H.G. Wells
  • … shorter empty stretch …
  • 1930s: H.P. Lovecraft
  • 1940s: A.E. Van Vogt
  • 1950s: H. Beam Piper, Clifford Simak
  • 1960s: Brian Aldiss, Robert A. Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Frank Herbert, Andre Norton
  • 1970s: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Katherine Kurtz, Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey, Michael Moorcock, “James Tiptree, Jr”, Roger Zelazny
  • 1980s: Mary Gentle, William Gibson, Elizabeth Moon, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams
  • 1990s: Pat Cadigan, Greg Egan, Neal Stephenson
  • 2000s: Neal Asher, Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds
  • 2010s: Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire), Martha Wells

I can make an argument for almost any of them to be “my favorite” depending on mood, but Piper might be the winner in a bracket contest. I suspect I’d get down to something like Piper vs. Egan and my head would explode trying to compare Space Viking with Diaspora.

My first pass at this, there were only 3 female authors (Pat Cadigan, Mira Grant, and Martha Wells). Several were only fantasy: Which I think less of, but I do read—and Leiber and Moorcock’s science fiction are not their best works.

Many only had a few great books or short stories surrounded by a giant midlist of dullness, but that’s also why Niven, Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, and Poul Anderson never made it. Several I do list produced dullness after their peak, like Gibson objectively only wrote one short story collection & 2 thin novels worth reading, one should not read McCaffrey’s post-trilogy extended sequels, and anything Stephenson wrote after The Diamond Age needed an aggressive editor to cut out about 2/3 of his text. And yet many continue to write exactly what I like, decades later.

The ’60s-’80s really produced a LOT of SF I liked. Was it objectively better? Or was it just “the golden age of SF is 12” which was 1982, so I read what was still in print?