Science Fiction Authors (MidJourney)
Finest Four: All-Time Favorite Science Fiction Authors
- lists, science fiction
If you know me at all, you know I am certifiably obsessed with all things science fiction. What follows is a list I have curated comprising my personal all-time top four favorite science fiction authors (with some bonus honorable mentions). My thought process was admittedly simple: if I were stranded on a desert island with nothing more than my wits and a suitcase filled with works of science fiction—an unlikely scenario, I know—these are the authors whose works would fill that suitcase. Now, just as a disclaimer: this list is completely separate from my list of favorite living science fiction authors, and as such, everyone on this list is—unfortunately—dead. Furthermore, I did not go out of my way to list authors whose works would help me, say, strategically turn the desert island into a Swiss Family Robinson-esque paradise.
Ursula K. Le Guin (MidJourney)
4. Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin has garnered some mainstream popularity primarily for her commercially successful six-volume high-fantasy series Earthsea; but I’m here to focus on her science fiction work—namely the many novels and short stories of the Hainish Cycle.
The Hainish Cycle comprises six novels, a novella, and around seventeen short stories, which all take place in an alternate-slash-future history, wherein humans originated from the peaceful planet of Hain, and they have radiated outward to colonize the neighboring star systems—one of which just so happens to contain Earth. The stories are all sort of loosely connected with no direct sequels, but the universe feels very real, deliberate, and lived-in despite this lack of explicit continuity.
Le Guin’s writing style is very literary, and her prose is utterly gorgeous. Her work deals predominantly with themes of gender and sexuality; religious, social, and political systems and their failings; loyalty, language, and communication; and the relationship of humanity to the natural world. Her work is unapologetically feminist and anti-war, but it never feels like she’s preaching to you or being condescending.
While her science fiction work could certainly be considered sociological science fiction, her scientific ingenuity can be seen all over the place, perhaps most famously in her “ansible” invention, which is a method of faster-than-light communication that has been aped, referenced, homaged, and outright stolen by a veritable plethora of authors to follow in her wake.
My top three essential, can’t-live-without works from Ursula Le Guin are:
The Dispossessed (1974 novel)
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969 novel)
The Word for World is Forest (1976 novella)
James Blish (MidJourney)
3. James Blish
My father instilled in me a deep-seated love of Star Trek from a very early age, and James Blish is perhaps best known for his fantastic Star Trek original series novelizations, having penned a whopping thirteen Star Trek novels from 1967 to 1977.1
Blish’s true brilliance, however, can be seen most spectacularly in his own intellectual properties; namely his Cities in Flight tetralogy, which chronicles a group of humans who roam throughout space in enormous city-ships powered by anti-gravity engines called “spindizzies”. These stories are positively massive in scope, spanning thousands upon thousands of years, detailing humanity’s galactic expansion, as well as the birth of a new universe.
Blish has been described as a science fiction writer of “unusual depth”. His works deal largely with themes of identity, religion and morality, and the cyclical nature of time, with a good portion of his work being vaguely historically allegorical.
Blish was amongst the first to treat science fiction like it was a serious and respectable genre, and he judged his peers’ works by the same standards by which people judge great literature, treating it as an artform with potentially lasting merit, rather than mere pulpy drivel unworthy of good proofreading or aiming for scientific accuracy. Blish actually coined the term “gas giant” in 1952—a term even the average Joe has no doubt heard in reference to Jupiter or Saturn. Furthermore, in his 1956 short story collection The Seedling Stars, Blish coined the term “pantropy”, which is the process of using genetic engineering in order to modify humans to fit into a specific environment—a concept that seems a bit more considerate than the far more popular concept of terraforming, where an existing environment is modified in order for it to be more accommodating to humans.
My top three essential, can’t-live-without works from James Blish are:
Cities in Flight (1955-1962 tetralogy; 1970 omnibus)
Midsummer Century (1972 novel)
The Seedling Stars (1956 short story collection)
Arthur C. Clarke (MidJourney)
2. Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was one-third of the “Big Three” sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, which comprised himself, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein.
Clarke is undoubtedly best known for his Space Odyssey series—particularly his 1968 novel 2001, which was actually based on the film of the same name, which itself was co-written with the incomparable Stanley Kubrick, and very loosely based on one of Clarke’s earlier short stories, originally titled “Sentinel of Eternity”. While the Space Odyssey series contains massive ideas both brilliant and bizarre, Clarke has an extensive bibliography consisting of more than twenty novels and over a hundred novellas and short stories, wherein countless other fascinating and predictive ideas can be found.
In a genre that can tend toward bleak and nihilistic themes, Clarke’s work is refreshingly optimistic, dealing largely with a fledgeling spaceborne humanity still finding its footing, and deeply exploring the impact of technology on these future endeavors while interweaving poignant anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist themes within his narratives.
Arthur Clarke’s contribution to not only the science fiction genre, but actual science, is undeniable. He predicted global television broadcasts, online banking and shopping, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, tablet computers, and the restructuring of society that would be caused by the ubiquity of mobile phones. Furthermore, Clarke was among the first to articulate and popularize the concept of the geostationary telecommunications satellite—which has an orbital period that is equal to the rotational period of the Earth—and he did so nearly twenty years prior to the first placement of a satellite into this highly specific geosynchronous equatorial orbit, which is now often referred to as the Clarke Orbit in honor of the late great author.
In addition to the Space Odyssey series, my top three essential, can’t-live-without works from Arthur C. Clarke are:
Childhood’s End (1953 novel)
Rendezvous with Rama (1973 novel)
The Hammer of God (1993 novel)
Iain Banks (MidJourney)
1. Iain M. Banks
Iain Banks was a Scottish author whose works have captivated attentive readers with his signature dark humor and dazzling wit. In his roughly twenty-nine-year career, Banks published fourteen mainstream novels, thirteen science fiction novels, a sci-fi short story collection, and a non-fiction travelogue regarding the distilleries of Scotland. Of his sci-fi works, ten of them take place within his Culture universe, wherein people struggle to find meaning in a post-scarcity utopia controlled by very advanced AIs of their own making.
Within the pages of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, readers will find enormous ideas; conscious, conniving machines; sentient starships; loveable, loathsome, and deeply flawed characters; intense, thrilling, and sometimes brutal action; and sprawling, galaxy-spanning adventures that simultaneously and seemingly paradoxically feel very intimate. Similar to Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, the Culture series is only loosely connected from one novel to the next, with the occasional reference to previous events, as well as the very occasional recurring character; but the universe is nonetheless vast and exciting, drawing you in with its huge concepts and curious characters, and then permanently latching onto your consciousness unlike any fiction I’ve ever experienced.
Banks’ writing is transcendent, and he achieves literary heights few genre writers dare to even strive toward. He can—and often does—make you belly-laugh and then break your heart in the span of a paragraph; and while his prose can tend toward purple, it always serves the larger narrative, which is a testament to Banks’ masterful use of language. The thematic depth of Banks’ work cannot be overstated, and he fearlessly and effectively tackles themes of egalitarianism, power and wielding it responsibly, idealism, and the necessity of compromise, often steel-manning his own arguments with competent and persuasive antagonists, trusting his audience to draw their own conclusions, and never spoon-feeding or infantilizing them.
In April of 2013, Banks made the bleak announcement that he had been diagnosed with terminal gallbladder cancer, and that his forthcoming mainstream novel, The Quarry, would be his last. Two short months later, Banks passed away at the age of 59. In a blog post written shortly after Banks’ passing, the beloved Neil Gaiman writes “If you’ve never read any of his books, read one of his books. Then read another. Even the bad ones were good, and the good ones were astonishing.”2
In addition to the Culture novels, my top three, can’t-live-without works from Iain Banks are:
Against a Dark Background (1993 SF novel)
The Algebraist (2004 SF novel)
The Bridge (1986 mainstream novel)
1. It should be noted that Blish’s Star Trek novelizations were great despite his rather vocal disdain for “tie-in fiction”; and this greatness could very well be attributed—at least in part—to his wife, J. A. Lawrence, and her collaboration on many of the Trek projects.
2. Gaiman, N. (2021, June 5). Iain Banks. With or without the M. Neil Gaiman’s Journal. https://bit.ly/36YCHmY