"Twelve Greatest Living Science Fiction Writers"
By adamosf@Visions of Paradise. [via SF Signal]
All well known authors & C J Cherryh is the only one I've not personally read. Interesting bits, to me at least, are not the authors but their works he lists - a few that I'd not heard of.
Gene Wolfe is the only one I would specifically take off this list. I've read perhaps dozen of his short stories - mostly the highly recommended ones from anthologies or award lists - & all but one completely went over my head. One that was actually comprehensible, "Memorare", wasn't really that good.
Bits I've read of Samuel Delany & Michael Bishop also didn't work for me, but I've read just a couple of their pieces, & may be it's unfair to judge an author on that. On the other hand, I've read only a couple of John Varley stories, & he's very much on my all time greats list.
Actually, if I were to pick genre greats from this list, I would pick just 5 from his 12: Pohl, Bradbury (for some of his fantastic short fiction; certainly not for "Fahrenheit 451" in spite of its reputation), Vance, Varley, & Robinson. But I might look up some specific works of others too on the list - on hope.
Related: "best of" lists.
2 comments:
I like your site. Glad to see Jack Vance in your list of favorites; he is my favorite SF author. I even like his 'fantasy' stories, in spite of disliking fantasy in general. (By the time I finished reading Tolkein's works, and even though I rather enjoyed them, I was tired of all things elfen and sword-n-sorcery-laden and haven't read any since....except for Vance). Vance's fantasies are in a class by themselves.
Yes - I'm yet to dislike anything by Vance.
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