Top 10 science fiction writers

The top science fiction writers of all time

We're going to get hammered on this one. Nothing divides science fiction (SF) fans like the best authors. Nevertheless, Shaun and I have put on our thickest skins and decided to give it a shot. Buckle in, because this is going to be our longest Top 10 ever.

SF writers have played a key role in inspiring research and eventual technological development. There have been numerous devices that existed in the mind of an SF writer before they even made it into the engineering departments, but more importantly a good story can inspire something entirely new. This is why if you find a computer geek you've almost inevitably got an SF fan on your hands.

One thing you won't find on the list is anything from the realms of fantasy. Fantasy books often get lumped in with SF and it's more than a little irritating. SF deals with the possible and sets specific constraints on the writer. Fantasy, to my mind, is just an excuse to develop alternative realities with no reference to the real world.

There were a lot of names that didn't make it onto the list. As I'll mention later, I would have liked to see Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for their creation of Red Dwarf. Roger Zelazny would also be on my list, as would Olaf Stapledon, Harry Harrison, Orson Scott Card and Jerry Pournell. Shaun too had a list as long as his arm, but we had to make the cuts somewhere and it was very hard.

[Update - 12 hours later] OK, before you write in we did make one glaring error: no Philip K Dick. Neither Shaun and I are particular fans of his work but the man's contribution is undeniable. I'd put him in around number five - Shaun may disagree - so we'll publish a video next week to apologise and discuss.]

All Top 10 lists will be subjective by nature, but this is one that will no doubt stir up a lot of feeling about who is and isn't on the list, mostly angry feelings, I imagine. As always, we welcome comments about who we missed and what it says about our mental capacity. Just try to leave our mums out of it this time (Mother's Day is coming up, after all).

Honourable Mention: Gene Roddenberry
Shaun Nichols: I had a long and contentious battle with Iain over whether to include television and movie writers on the list. Among the names to get axed were Joss Whedon, the Wachowski siblings and the team of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

One name that I stood fast on, however, was Gene Roddenberry. Faced with my own compelling arguments (and the threat of an army of angry Trekkies laying siege to the site) Iain relented and Roddenberry was made an Honourable Mention.

A former Los Angeles police officer, Roddenberry wrote the original Star Trek series and played a key role in the development of its many movie adaptations and spin-offs.

The result was the establishment of a sub-culture devoted to the Star Trek universe and Roddenberry's establishment as a geek icon.

Iain Thomson: I still think this should have gone to the boys from Red Dwarf. Star Trek wasn't that good, after all. The first series was more of a western in space that displayed some of the worst of Hollywood's costume designs while giving William Shatner an excuse to snog aliens, so long as they were humanoid enough.

Don't even get me started on the endless Next Generation spin-offs, which were yet another flaw in the space/time continuum episodes that repeat endlessly today.

Nevertheless, Roddenberry deserves kudos for his gift to the genre of SF. Star Trek has inspired millions to the ideas behind good SF, even if some of the show's followers are a few flying buttresses short of a cathedral.

You only have to look at the way an entire subculture has built up around the show to see its power. There are now more speakers of Klingon than some native American languages, and university courses are devoted to the study of the show's themes, although one suspects that the graduates of such a course can be seen asking if you want fries with that.

Roddenberry also scripted, and fought to retain, the first black female actor in a serious prime time role (even if the women's costumes were about as practical as a chocolate teapot) and also came up with, or at least popularised, some ideas that have inspired the real world.

I suspect that the inventors of automatic doors, clamshell mobile phones and wearable microphones all have a debt to pay to the show.

Honourable Mention: Charles Stross
Iain Thomson: I was handed a copy of Charles Stross's Glasshouse after a particularly good dinner in Putney, and picked it up the next day to distract me from my crushing hangover.

By page 50 the headache was forgotten and I was getting the same 'hairs up on the back of the neck' feeling I'd had when Neuromancer first seared its way into my consciousness.

Stross is one of those new writers who really gives me hope for the field of SF. He takes concepts and stretches them in new and unusual ways to make you really think about what you're reading.

What would be the effect of a worm on a society based on online personae? How much would an imprisoned society give, wittingly or otherwise, for material paradise, and what would it cost? Stross even takes on the hallowed world of Roger Zelazny's Amber epic and gives it a tech fix.

He also has that great writer's talent of the opening line that sucks you in whether you like it or not. Iain Banks set the bar high with It was the day my grandmother exploded and I'm still fond of George Orwell's It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

But for a SF novel The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd takes some beating.

If he doesn't work himself into an early grave, I suspect Stross will become one of the greats of the genre. He understands the hard and soft aspects of technology, has a swarm of interesting ideas and is mature enough to sort out the fads from the fictionally realistic. British SF has a bright future with people like this at the helm.

Shaun Nichols: One of the reasons I was secretly dreading this list was that I knew that, by the end of it, I would have a huge list of books to hunt down and purchase. We are not even out of the honourable mentions and I've already got a sizeable list going just from the works of Stross.

Not every SF author has a great love for technology. I suspect this is in part why we have so many works in the genre that deal with the horrors that we will bring upon ourselves through perceived scientific progress.

Stross, however, has a great interest in technology and the chops to back it up. He has a degree in computer science and for a time wrote a column on Linux, while maintaining an excellent blog and releasing some work under Creative Commons.

As Iain noted, Stross is a relative newcomer to the genre, but his ability to craft a story, coupled with a prodigious knack for churning out copy, leaves me optimistic that great works of SF will be coming for some time.

So far, Stross has shown incredible promise as an author and I hope to be shelling out cash for his books for some time.

10. Iain M. Banks
Iain Thomson: Iain Banks leads a dual life. By day he's a writer of darkly funny mainstream fiction with classics such as The Crow Road and Complicity under his belt. By night, under the name Iain M. Banks, he writes some of the best SF you'll find on bookshelves today.

Most of his SF output takes place in the Culture universe, a polyglot society of roughly humanoid ancestry tens of thousands of years ahead of today. It's a society where computer and human minds meld, where technology comes close to magic and yet the same old human (and alien) concerns come to the fore.

He's also beloved among British SF readers for his past conduct of coming to conventions, getting absolutely bladdered and then trying to climb things - stages, bar tops and even hotel buildings. All too often SF writers are quiet sorts and it's nice to see an Oliver Reed character slipping into the profession.

Banks combines a wicked love of language and satire with a social perspective that deals with everyday concerns on a galactic basis. I'm sure some of his detractors would like to see him burned at a stake, but I suspect he wears that with pride.

Shaun Nichols: One of the great things about SF is that the author can pretty much create an entire universe free of the historical or logical constraints that limit other genres.

An historical fiction author can't give Henry VIII a hovercraft mounted with dual chainguns, and a mystery writer can't make the killer in his story a synthetic parasite controlled by the resurrected brain of a ruthless dictator. SF writers, however, have the ability to work free from such limits if they are imaginative enough.

Banks is a great example of this. He constructs an alternative reality where the story can be told without the reader doubting its feasibility. The Culture universe operates without any of the limitations one would have to assume if the story were to take place on this planet or even with this species.

It is also refreshing to see a writer that enjoys a drink or three and likes fast cars like a normal person. It sometimes seems that SF writers are almost always crushingly dull in person or accompanied by personality quirks that make you a bit afraid to ever consider associating with them.

9. H G Wells
Shaun Nichols: Apologies to the late H G Wells for leaving him so far down the list, but in our case he's a bit of a victim of the times.

While his works were hugely influential and are still popular, they were written decades before Iain or myself were born. They are still excellent works and highly recommended reads, but the passing of time has pushed Wells down on the list.

That said, let's rattle off a few of his achievements. Among his works are The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, two of the most famous SF works ever. Wells is also remembered for his social and political efforts, most notably his advocacy of the League of Nations.

Iain Thomson: I too would have liked to see Wells higher on the list but the competition was fierce.

Some compare Wells to Jules Verne, but Wells's Victorian background and industrial slant give him an individual air that makes him a completely different read. He was relatively scientifically literate and used the emerging technologies of his day to extrapolate on the present and future state of society.

Works such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, which dealt with the fields of physics, chemistry and biology respectively, are still watched and reworked today, with varying degrees of success.

Some of his future history work was scarily on the ball too, although his belief in a single world government and the triumph of the egalitarian culture as the future of mankind have yet to come anywhere close to reality.

His fiction has also inspired the creators of the orbital rocket and fusion bomb. In the latter case he was less than enthralled. A devout pacifist he had envisaged that nuclear weapons would make war impossible, but when he died in 1946 the reverse was becoming the case. He said his epitaph should say: 'I told you so. You damned fools.'

8. William Gibson
Iain Thomson: The best SF can open your mind to totally new ideas. Given that Gibson's debut novel was published in 1984, the author was not only far-sighted, but way ahead of the game in terms of what this new technology would mean.

Barely a year after IBM introduced its first PC, Gibson described the future of online communications and the story potential of artificial intelligence in such an environment.

It was a mental leap that left the rest of the SF world scrambling to catch up. Gibson's style and subject unleashed a whole new form of SF onto the market in the form of 'cyberpunk'. He mixed in genetic engineering, advanced data mining and the concept of the electronic persona made real.

Gibson also came up with one of the most enduring images of the internet age, that of data passing though a world's cables and being transmogrified into patterns of light.

This mental leap allowed the easy visualisation of the entire internet; it was about data that the new future would be made. It is an image that persists to this day. Sure, other SF writers had used the concept but none had enunciated it so clearly.

In truth, Gibson has gone off the boil a little in later years. That original flash of brilliance extended to his first few books but lately, in my opinion, he's been rehashing mental zeitgeists and living off his reputation.

He has, however, also done some brilliant journalism, and anyone visiting Singapore should read his account of Disneyland with the Death Penalty. I'll read everything he writes for those beautiful concepts that come every chapter or so, but I've yet to see anything to match his early work.

Shaun Nichols: I think part of the reason why some SF fans have been turned off by Gibson's recent work is that it deals with a very near future, or even the present day.

As I mentioned earlier, so much of the appeal of SF is that it can be set far enough in the future that any sort of environment the author wants to create is possible. Gibson's recent books don't take that liberty, so the reader isn't presented with the fantastic imagery that works such as Neuromancer were able to present.

I happen to like it. Works such as Pattern Recognition and Spook Country work within our current worlds and technologies while still creating a great story and exploring fascinating possibilities. Some would argue that they aren't true SF, but I'm a big fan.

His earlier work, of course, needs little introduction. Neuromancer and its sequels were monumental in the genre and, while the future Gibson portrayed doesn't quite look to be working out, the early concept of the internet was fairly close and did after all coin the term 'cyberspace'. All in all, Gibson has helped to revolutionise the genre and, if his recent works are any indication, he's far from finished.

7. Neal Stephenson
Shaun Nichols: Many SF writers are deceptively low-tech. William Gibson famously wrote Neuromancer on a 1920's manual typewriter, while Gene Roddenberry spent more of his life walking a police beat than behind a keyboard, and even Harlan Ellison has long expressed a distaste for computers. Neal Stephenson, however, is one writer who can safely say he out-geeks most of his readers.

The son of an electrical engineer and a biophysicist, Stephenson has had a long-running interest in technology and it shows in his work. Stephenson's novels reach heavily into emerging technologies and cutting edge fields such as nanotechnology and cryptography.

He also can lay something of a claim to having inspired online 3D communities. In his novel Snow Crash, Stephenson describes a future internet which is fully 3D and navigated by users in the form of 3D avatars. It's no wonder that he's particularly beloved among Second Life enthusiasts.

Iain Thomson: I once heard of a director in a Silicon Valley startup who was at a board meeting when the chief executive came in, slapped a copy of Snow Crash on the table and announced that this was the company's business plan. Needless to say, the company crashed and burned, but the book came at just the right time when internet fever was growing.

While Stephenson's earlier work, particularly Zodiac, is more scientific than technical he hit his SF form with Snow Crash and followed through in 1995 with Diamond Age, a brilliant examination of nanotechnology and the way society, commerce and computing systems will be changed by new technology.

Cryptomonicon gave a similar treatment to the science of encryption and contains one of the most heartbreakingly sweet portrayals of Alan Turing in fiction.

Now that he's so successful we're getting ever longer tomes from the man; his last trilogy had to be split into eight books because it was so long. He's also taken to inventing an entirely new vocabulary in one book, which is impressive but irritating to read. It's also got to be said that, as a writer, he really sucks at endings. Nevertheless, I highly recommend him.

6. Robert Heinlein
Iain Thomson: Hand on heart, I think Starship Troopers is a work of satirical genius and that Stranger in a Strange Land should be required reading for any writer. For those two books alone, Heinlein deserves his spot on the list.

Heinlein was something of an enigma, and had elements of exceedingly liberal and conservative viewpoints in his fiction. His was a US Navy officer and Cold War hawk, as well as a campaigner for the socialist End Poverty in California movement earlier in life. He was also one of the first SF writers to include strong, intelligent female characters as a matter of course, putting him well ahead of his peers.

One of the real strengths of Heinlein's work was that he managed to interweave science and story successfully. Too much early SF was about transposing standard plots onto other worlds using technology. Heinlein made technology essential to the plot and true to scientific principles, but at the same time integrated it in such a run-of-the-mill way that it didn't dominate.

Heinlein was also part of a cadre of SF writers who got together in the latter stages of the Cold War to think up new weapons systems of the future. He had a major falling out with Arthur C Clarke over the proposed Star Wars missile defence shield, which the US is still spending billions of dollars trying to make work.

Heinlein saw it as essential and workable, Clarke felt that it was doomed to failure and would make the world less safe. They reconciled before Heinlein's death in 1988, but his ideas still have a direct impact on the modern political landscape.

Shaun Nichols: Heinlein, along with Clarke and Isaac Asimov, form a powerful trio of minds who helped to create and popularise the SF genre as we know it. In addition to excellent stories, Heinlein contributed the idea that you can make a poignant social and political commentary while still telling a great story.

Starship Troopers sometimes gets knocked for promoting militarism but, given the time and culture in which it was written, the work was fairly run-of-the-mill and indicative of the Cold War climate and thinking.

With the Red Scare raging and politicians laying on the propaganda heavy, it was really a pretty tame work, all things considered. Yes, it may at times read like a Bill O'Reilly monologue, but all-in-all it's a great work.

And Heinlein is hardly the only SF writer to have been a polarising figure outside his work. H G Wells was extremely active in left-wing causes and was an early proponent of the League of Nations.

As Iain mentioned, Heinlein was at odds with Clarke over the Star Wars system, but what really matters in the end was that all three were great storytellers.

5. Harlan Ellison
Shaun Nichols: While he's known for his work across multiple genres, Ellison's work has been particularly influential in the SF world.

Stories such as I have no mouth and I must scream and Repent Harlequin said the Tick-Tock Man are long-running favourites in the SF community, and Ellison contributed scripts for SF television programmes such as Star Trek and The Outer Limits.

Ellison's greatest contribution to the genre, however, is cultural. In the changing climates of the 1960s and early 1970s, Ellison wrote, and inspired other authors to write, stories that pushed the boundaries of SF.

His dark, edgy works helped pave the way for contemporary SF styles such as cyberpunk, and helped the genre mature and adapt to changing attitudes.

Iain Thomson: As Shaun points out, Ellison has been critical in nu rturing the second wave of SF in the late sixties and seventies. His Dangerous Visions series helped foster an entirely new wave of SF that moved it from antiseptic futures full of clean machines, to dark nightmare cities populated by cruel and brilliant species.

Ellison himself is, by most accounts, a bit of a git in person. The first time he met Issac Asimov he asked him repeatedly if he really was the Asimov. The man replied that he was, and Ellison looked at him for a second and said "You're not that much," and stalked off.

The diminutive writer is also fiercely protective of his ideas and byline, and has roasted the toes of many a corporate executive who thought he or she could pull one over on him.

Ellison, and others like him, took SF from the speculative to the real world, and focused on its ability to extend and magnify the reach and actions of mankind, not always for the better.

No clean uniforms and universal replicators for Ellison's characters. Just gritty fights for survival and success in worlds that mankind is better off not trying.

4. Isaac Asimov
Iain Thomson: I argued against including Asimov on the list because, as we had him on last week's Top 10 science and technology writers list, Clarke should have been on there as well. Nevertheless, Shaun's a huge fan and beat me down over time.

Asimov wrote some great SF to be sure. The Robot stories were light years ahead of their time in terms of understanding the thinking behind artificial intelligence (AI) programming and the consequences of getting it wrong.

Some of the early Robot short stories should be required reading on any programming course as illustrations of the dangers of poor logic loops. He was also prescient in seeing the problems that man would have with humanoid robots and advanced AI systems.

The Foundation series was also key to the development of SF that dealt with the way technology is integrated into the long-term futures of society. The concepts of psycho-history and the role of technology in a society's ability to control others were far-sighted and have relevance today. The first three are also a cracking good read, and are short enough to be easily disgestible.

Asimov was a master of the craft, but I can't help feeling he was a scientist who happened to be a writer rather than a writer who dreamed about science.

Shaun Nichols: Whether he's a scientist or a writer is of little consequence. The important thing was that the man penned some of the greatest works of SF ever. He's also the only person to make our list as a science writer and science fiction author.

Asimov is best known for his Robot series of books. At a time when the semiconductor industry was in its infancy and computers were still the size of rooms, Asimov was able to conceptualise things such as AI and advanced robotics on a level that the rest of the world would only begin to consider decades later.

He also helped to inspire an entire generation of successors. Countless SF writers and fans have cited Asimov's works as among their first encounters with the genre, and more than a few novels borrow heavily on his ideas.

Though much of Asimov's non-fiction science writings looked to inspire young people to enter the field, it's his fiction that ultimately seems to have had the greatest impact on young minds.

3. Douglas Adams
Shaun Nichols: If you're a geek, Douglas Adams is a bit like chocolate. Any time you run into someone who doesn't like him, you're absolutely dumbfounded with the idea that anyone could find his work anything short of divine.

Adams thrived because he mixed a great sense of humour into his work. Starting as a television writer and making a brief appearance on Monty Python's Flying Circus, Adams was later employed to write a radio series for the BBC. What followed was one of the most beloved works of SF in the past half century.

That series was, of course, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and it was so successful that it has been adapted to nearly every form of mass media. The series has been remade as a book, a television mini-series, a movie and a computer game.

Aside from keeping the audience laughing the entire way through, Hitchhiker brought a magnificent sense of adventure and poignant social satire. Anyone who has ever had to pay a visit to a government office can appreciate the plight of the Vogons, for example.

Iain Thomson: Many people of my generation know what they were doing the day John Lennon died. For our parents it was Kennedy's assassination, but hearing the news that Douglas Adams had died really stopped my clock for a second. To go so tragically young, and in such a pointless way (suffering a heart attack in a gym) was a tragedy.

Adams did for SF what Monty Python did for comedy: underwrote an entire generation with a line of talent. Hitchhiker was a revelation and news spread like wildfire that something entirely new was out.

I suspect I've still got the C90 cassettes of the radio show somewhere, and my first edition of the book is sitting, battered but still occasionally returned to, on my bookshelf.

But there was a serious point behind Adams's humour in a lot of cases. He used SF to point a finger of fun at much in modern society as well as the conventions of SF in general. Marvin the Paranoid Android is the perfect foil to HAL or Robbie the Robot, while the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is a work of dark comic genius.

His later works, and the Dirk Gently series, continued to win him more fans and he's certainly one of the most influential SF writer of the past 20 years.

2. Jules Verne
Iain Thomson: If you're talking about strict SF, Verne is the one that really kicked it all off. While you can argue that Gulliver's Travels or even Arabian Nights is SF, to my mind you have to have science before you have SF.

Verne was a child of the industrial revolution and took technology and wrote it into stories that inspired generations. As someone writing at the dawn of modern science, he was well placed to apply modern reasoning and learning to fictional formats.

Verne's writings predicted a host of inventions, including everything from air conditioning to helicopters. Many of these were foreseeable - Leonardo da Vinci had envisaged helicopters hundreds of years before - but many were fantastic in the minds of his readers. Some of his writing was also prescient. One story involved three astronauts launched from southern Florida in a capsule that splashes back to Earth.

Verne mixed with some of the finest French writers and is still honoured in as one of the country's literary greats. But the French always did have the excellent knack of recognising great writers.

Shaun Nichols: France may have the edge when it comes to writers, fashion, food and art, but at least you Brits still have comedy. I mean, really, Jerry Lewis? Plus the whole not-surrendering-to-Germany thing should be a nice feather in your cap.

Verne was not only a great author, but an incredible visionary when you look at the time in which he crafted his works. When Verne wrote his greatest novels there were no aeroplanes, deep-sea vessels or rocket technology. Yet he still wrote stories such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the World in 80 Days. Amazing when you think about it.

You also have to wonder just how intimately Verne is connected to some of the great achievements of the 20th century. Certainly he inspired more than a few people to take up science as a profession, but how driven would we have been to make achievements such as the Moon landing or deep sea exploration had Verne not had our imaginations mulling over that possibility for several decades?

At the very least, Verne is to be credited as the father of SF. At the very most, he can also be credited with helping to inspire some of the biggest breakthroughs of science in the 20th century.

1. Arthur C Clarke
Shaun Nichols: Considered a pillar of the genre, Sir Arthur C Clarke is in the top spots of just about every list like this.

Best known for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke penned a number of other iconic works of SF that entertained and inspired millions, dealing almost exclusively in hardcore SF.

One of the great things about SF is its ability to examine many of the basic characteristics and behaviours of mankind without the constraints or biases of our current society. The most popular question asked by SF authors is 'What makes us human?', a query that Clarke regularly made with his most popular works.

Another great element of Clarke's work is the use of fantastic, larger than life images. He has a flair for crafting stories in which the entire world seems to change dramatically. To conjure up the images Clarke required an amazing imagination, and to clearly convey them required an even more amazing writing skill.

Iain Thomson: Writing Clarke's obituary was a grim task. The man was so influential in SF and had lasted so long, that you suspected he'd stumbled across some secret elixir of life.

For anyone growing up in the latter half of the 20th century he was the man of popular science. His ideas, like the communications satellite, revolutionised our world and he was on hand to lend an opinion on everything from the Apollo launches to the possibility of the existence of Bigfoot. He also devised his famous three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke had a mind that could encompass the galaxy and he used tried and tested science and built it into story lines so that it was central to the plot but not overwhelmingly so.

I can well remember sitting under the covers with a torch reading Summertime on Icarus and realising that you could build a gripping story around low gravity transportation. He was also not above humour, ending one story with a line about a 'star-mangled spanner'.

Clarke's work has dated rather well, not least because he updated everything. In latter years he did too many weak co-written books (and a few good ones) but pick up almost any of his great works and you can relax in the hands of a master.