Top 10 science fiction writers

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.