The SFX Top 100 List (continued)

49. H.P. Lovecraft
Classic 1920s writer, best known for his Cthulu Mythos series of stories and novels, which other writers later expaned upon.

48. Mervyn Peake
The author of The Gormenghast Trilogy. After The Lord of the Rings, arguably one of the most important, 'classic' works of fantasy of the 20th Century.

47. Jules Verne
19th Century early SF author, best-known for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

46. Alastair Reynolds
British SF author, best-known for his Revelation Space series of novels, novellas and short stories. Chasm City is his finest work.

45. Neal Stephenson
Major post-cyberpunk SF author, best-known for Snow Crash, The Diamond Age (soon to be a mini-series), Cryptonomicon and the enormous Baroque Cycle.

44. Clive Barker
British horror-fantasy writer, author of novels such as Weaveworld and Imajica, but probably best-known for being the creator of the Hellraiser series of movies.

43. Jim Butcher
A relative newcomer, but one who has made a major impact with his Dresden Files series of urban fantasies and his Codex Alera fantasy sequence.

42. Tad Williams
American fantasy and SF author whose Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy is usually cited as the first work (excepting Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series a decade earlier) of epic fantasy explicitly aimed at adults, with more interesting and deeper themes than the Brooks/Feist/Eddings school of fantasy which predominated in the 1980s. His series of Otherland SF/fantasy hybrids is his strongest work to date, although it suffers from his continual problem of overwriting. His current Shadowmarch Trilogy, which returns him to epic fantasy, has received mixed reviews.

41. Kurt Vonnegut
Classic American SF writer, best known for Slaughterhouse Five.

40. Trudi Canavan
A relative newcomer and one of the new wave of Australian and New Zealand SF&F writers to make an impact on the genre. Her Black Magician Trilogy was a huge success when published in the UK a few years ago.

39. Michael Moorcock
One of SF&F's most prolific and interesting figures, also noted for producing interesting works of mainstream fiction. The centrepiece of his work are the Tales of the Eternal Champion, a massive collection of stories and novels spread across multiple worlds, universes and incarnations of the central hero. Of those tales, his Elric of Melnibone series is the best-known. Mother London and The Dancers at the End of Time are among his other works.

38. David Eddings
Although his later novels - particularly the near-unreadable Tamuli series and everything published since - can best be employed for cat litter purposes, Eddings' Belgariad series was a gateway to the genre for many young readers, and continues to do so since it was re-purposed as a YA series. Eddings later acknowledged that his wife Leigh, who sadly passed away last year, was his collaborator and co-writer on all of his fantasy work.

37. Alan Moore
Probably the most iconic writer in modern comics publishing, having written The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, V for Vendetta and the seminal Watchmen (the movie version of which will be released in June 2009), although he got his break by writing for Doctor Who Magazine's comic section and 2000AD. Infamously scathing of the film adaptions of his works, Moore is one of the defining SF&F authors of the modern age, and Watchmen should be required reading in the genre.

36. Orson Scott Card
An interesting SF&F author whose popularity is based mainly on his extremely accomplished mid-1980s novel, Ender's Game. His Alvin Maker and Homecoming series have also proved popular. In recent years Card has mostly spent his time churning out additional Ender books of variable quality, and his most recent stand-alone, Empire, may rank as one of the worst novels published by a reputable publishing house this millennium.

35. Stephen Donaldson
Major SF and Fantasy author whose Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series is generally held to kick-started the modern fantasy boom when the first volume Lord Foul's Bane, was published within a few weeks of Brooks' The Sword of Shannara in 1977. Although Covenant is Donaldson's best known series, his SF series, The Gap, is probably his most accomplished work.

34. Gene Wolfe
A surprisingly low entry for one of the best speculative fiction authors of the modern age. The Book of the New Sun is a stunning achievement, a work to rival Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings for significance and resonance, and even more startlingly its sequel series are important works in their own rights and not mere cash-ins. Still producing interesting work, Wolfe should frankly be in the Top 5 of this list at the very least, but such are the ways of polls.

33. China Mieville
An author who is something of a breath of fresh air in the genre, whose Perdido Street Station kick-started his quasi-horror, semi-steampunk SF/Fantasy hybrid Bas-Lag series of very loosely connected novels (also incorporating The Scar and Iron Council). Outside of this series he has published a very fine urban fantasy (King Rat), an exceptional YA novel (Un Lun Dun) and an excellent short story collection (Looking for Jake). Still in his 30s, Mieville's greatest work may still lay ahead of him, although what has come so far already marks him as one of the best SF&F authors of the new millennium.

32. Raymond E. Feist
Feist's 1982 novel Magician remains a readable and exhiliratingly entertaining epic fantasy novel incorporating the clash between two worlds (the medieval Europe-influenced Midkemia and the Oriental-stylised world of Kelewan) when they are linked by a magical rift in time and space. All but one of Feist's subsequent 26 novels have been set in the same universe. His Empire Trilogy, cowritten with Janny Wurts, is an excellent dynastic fantasy set on Kelewan, and shows the freshness and originality that epic fantasy can still achieve when it moves outside its comfort zones. His later novels reached their zenith with the bloody war novel Rage of a Demon King, but with the exception of another collaboration with William Forstchen (Honoured Enemy) all of his later novels have been disappointingly pedestrian.

31. Lois McMaster Bujold
American SF author, best-known for her Miles Vorkosigan series of space operas which, sadly, I have not read yet.

30. Roger Zelazny
Another major 'classic' SF author, best-known for the lengthy Amber sequence of fantasy novels, although his Lord of Light and Damnation Alley are also highly accomplished.

29. Anne McCaffrey
American SF author, currently resident in Ireland. Best-known for the Dragonriders of Pern and The Ship Who... series.

28. Steven Erikson
Canadian fantasy and SF author, best-known for his enormous Malazan Book of the Fallen series which is now one of the most dominant epic fantasy series on the market. He has also written an SF novella (The Devil Delivered) and has worked on a web-based SF series, The Dark.

27. William Gibson
Major SF novelist best-known for Neuromancer and is sequels and is credited as the originator of cyberpunk, although his more recent work has been dominated by near-future and mainstream novels.

26. Guy Gavriel Kay
Another Canadian fantasy author, but whose credentials are impressive: he got his first break in the genre when he assisted Christopher Tolkien in editing The Silmarillion for publication in 1977. His earliest work, The Fionavar Tapestry, is also his most traditional, but he is best-known for producing four classic stand-alone novels that evoke particular times and places in the real world: Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Last Light of the Sun. His Sarantine Mosaic duology and Ysabel, a semi-sequel to the Fionavar series, are also of note.

25. CS Lewis
Classic British SF and fantasy writer, best-known for The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as his Christian views that influenced much of his later work, most controversially in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle.

24. Diana Wynne Jones
Author of numerous SF and fantasy books for children and adults alike, although her most notable work may remain The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a hilarious guidebook to the tropes of the epic fantasy subgenre. Anyone who sets out to write an epic fantasy these days without consulting this book first may find themselves on very shaky ground.

23. John Wyndham
Classic British SF author, best-known for his enormously influential The Day of the Triffids, but also wrote many other books of note, including The Chrysalids.

22. Philip Pullman
British author of fiction for children, some of it falling into the SF&F genre. His most notable work is the hugely successful His Dark Materials Trilogy, which can be seen as a thorough rebuttal of Lewis' Narnia series but also a major and influential work in its own right.

21. Robin Hobb
One of the biggest-sellers of epic fantasy in recent years, with her 'trilogy of trilogies' (The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Traders and The Tawny Man) attracting a huge number of fans, although her more recent Soldier Son Trilogy has attracted more mixed reviews.

20. Stephen King
One of the biggest-selling authors of all time, with his total lifetime sales likely to be incalculable. He has written many works of horror, some supernatural and some not, as well as a smaller number of pure science fiction and pure fantasy stories. However, almost all of his work takes place in the extended universe of The Dark Tower, with characters and motifs repeating themselves across many different books. The Dark Tower itself - seven novels written between 1970 and 2004 - has divided readers due to its highly controversial concluding volume.

19. Ray Bradbury
Major American SF novelist and writer, best-known for Farenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles.

18. Arthur C. Clarke
Probably the most famous SF writer of all time, the author of several seminal SF novels (Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, The City and the Stars and A Fall of Moondust most prominent among them) and the co-writer of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with director Stanley Kubrick. He also had a huge impact on popular science through his 1970s and 1980s documentaries and TV series (most notably Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World). He also popularised the idea of geostationary communications satellites in the 1940s, which has led to the geostationary orbit also being dubbed the 'Clarke Orbit'. Clarke passed away earlier this year at the age of 90.

17. Robert Jordan
The author of the hugely successful Wheel of Time series which, despite a major lapse in quality in its eighth through tenth volumes, is nevertheless a major work which popularised the idea of SF&F series lasting more than the traditional three volumes. Despite longeurs, the series is notable for its themes of the mutability of knowledge and the interrelationship between legend, myth and history. Jordan died of the blood disease amyloidosis last year having begun the twelfth and final Wheel of Time novel, which will now be completed by Brandon Sanderson for publication in late 2009.

16. JK Rowling
The most successful author of the 21st Century, whose seven-volume Harry Potter series has sold some 350 million copies worldwide and been credited with interesting an entire generation in reading.

15. Robert Heinlein
American SF author, one of the 'Big Three' alongside Clarke and Asimov, best-known for Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers.

14. Frank Herbert
The author of Dune, the single biggest-selling SF novel of all time. His other work, particularly the five Dune sequels, are variable in quality and the 'tribute' novels by his son and Kevin J. Anderson should be avoided at all costs. But Dune itself remains a powerful and unique work of science fiction.

13. Peter F. Hamilton
British SF author whose work encompasses near-future detective thrillers set in a Britain flooded by global warming (The Greg Mandel Trilogy) and enormous space operas spanning dozens of planets and thousands of pages (The Night's Dawn Trilogy). His fast-paced, page-turning style mixed with a tremendous capacity for invention (a PFH book is "Fifty lesser SF novels rolled into one," according to critics) has won him enormous success and legions of fans. Hamilton is at his best writing gigantic blockbuster space operas with intelligence, and The Night's Dawn Trilogy may be the best work of 'pure' space opera since the original Dune.

12. David Gemmell
British fantasy author who started his career with Legend. He eventually wrote some thirty novels which combined hack 'n' slash fantasy adventures with musings on the human condition, and he was capable of tremendously cutting observations and poetic turns of phrase when required. Tragically, he died two years ago from a heart attack just before completing his finest work to date, a historical trilogy based on the fall of Troy, although the final novel was ably completed by his wife Stella.

11. Ursula K. LeGuin
Still one of the most influential of all SF and Fantasy novelists, best-known for The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea series.

10. Robert Rankin
Prolific British comic fantasist whose work owes a lot to the zany observations of Spike Milligan. His books come across as 'tall tales' rather than conventional novels. He is variable in quality (the Armageddon Trilogy is vaguely amusing but nothing more, whilst his Hugo Rune series is hilarious), but usually has some interesting ideas going on.

9. HG Wells
One of the most important formative writers of SF, the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man, although his greatest success was probably depicting the use of nuclear weapons in The World Set Free, written some thirty years before the testing of the first A-bomb.

8. Philip K. Dick
A major SF writer of the 1960s and 1970s, whose novels were enormously influential. His best-known works are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later filmed as Blade Runner), The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

7. Iain M. Banks
British science fiction author who has also had a highly successful career as a mainstream author (writing under the name 'Iain Banks'). He is best-known for his creation of the Culture, the ultimate utopian society, and its depiction in major SF novels such as Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons and Player of Games. His non-Culture SF works, Feersum Endjinn, Against a Dark Background and The Algebraist, have not been as notable. His mainstream work, which sometimes touches on SF&F tropes through fantasy and dream sequences, most notably in The Bridge, is also accomplished, most notably his classic debut novel, The Wasp Factory.

6. Isaac Asimov
The most prolific author on this list, with some 500 books to his name. In SF he was best known for his enormous future history sequence incorporating the Robots, Empire and Foundation series into a massive framework spanning over 20,000 years, and also for the short story Nightfall which was voted the best SF story of all time as recently as the 1980s. He also wrote mainstream detective fiction and dabbled with fantasy, most notably the Azazel series of comic fantasies, but he will be best-remembered for coining the Three Laws of Robotics.

5. George RR Martin
The highest-ranking non-British author on the list. GRRM has been writing in the SF&F genre for forty years, penning some highly-accomplished short fiction from the late 1960s onwards (including Nightflyers, Sandkings, A Song for Lya and many more). He started writing novels at the end of the 1970s with Dying of the Light, and achieved a major success with the excellent Fevre Dream in 1981. However, the commercial failure of the subsequent The Armageddon Rag led GRRM to get work in Hollywood, where he worked on The New Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. At the same time, he won new legions of fans by cowriting and editing the lengthy Wild Cards series of 'realistic' superhero stories. In 1991 he began work on his Song of Ice and Fire series, one of the most critically-acclaimed series (SF or fantasy) of modern times, which now extends to four novels and two novellas with more on the way. Whilst A Song of Ice and Fire has to some extent eclipsed his earlier work, the release of his Dreamsongs collection has demonstrated his versatility as a writer.

4. Douglas Adams
Comic SF author who got his start by scripwriting for radio and for TV series such as Doctor Who, where he was a script editor in the late 1970s. His own best-known creation is The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which began as a radio serial and became a BBC mini-series, five novels and a disappointing movie adaption. He also created Dirk Gently's Holstic Detective Agency (which was supposed to be an ongoing series, but only reached two novels and a third half-finished at the time of his death). Adams suffered from writer's block for much of his working life, explaining his low output, but the work he did produce continues to entertain new generations of SF readers.

3. Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman rose to prominence in comics, most notably with The Sandman, which ran from 1989 to 1996. When taken as a single, 2,000-page work, The Sandman is an astonishing accomplishment and one of the most significant works of fantasy of the modern age, an epic combining myth, dreams and fantasies into a surprisingly tight narrative surrounding Morpheus, the Prince of Dreams. Outside of this work, Gaiman is best-known for his novels Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett), American Gods and Stardust (later adapted as a successful movie). The Graveyard Book, a macabre take on The Jungle Book, is his latest novel, due at the end of the year. He also created the television mini-series Neverwhere, which became a successful novel and comic book.

2. JRR Tolkien
The creator of Middle-earth and the writer of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit probably needs little introduction here. No author is more significant in the development of 20th Century fantasy or more influential in the number of other writers they have inspired, whilst the three-part movie adaption of his Middle-earth stories (soon to be joined by two more) is the biggest success story in cinema this century.

1. Terry Pratchett
A surprising winner? Possibly not. Pratchett has written some 30 novels set in his Discworld setting and another dozen outside it, making him one our most prolific authors. With nearly 60 million sales to his name, he is also the biggest-selling living author in the genre with the exceptions of Rowling and King. However, Pratchett combines success with almost continuous critical acclaim and increasing mainstream literary respect. His books are sometimes just pure comic entertainment, but more often than not they are also keen-eyed satires and observations on culture, history and the world, displaying a formidable intelligence and attention to detail,a ll of which have won him plaudits including regular comparisons to Dickens. Easily one of the most significant authors of fantasy of our time.

So there you have it. A fairly decent list, all round, although I can hear various cries of "But what about..." and "WHO is number one?" across the Internet from here. As always, there are some notable absences: a list that has Douglass, Goodkind and Eddings on it cannot spare room for Kearney, KJ Parker, Celia Friedman or Walter Miller? Disappointing.

The SFX Top 100 List

The UK's SFX Magazine recently published it's Top 100 List in its summer special about SF and Fantasy literature. This is the latest in a number of such polls to be conducted on the Internet in recent months, but the SFX one is of interest as it directly informs the buying habits of many of its readers, and other magazines and papers sometimes pick up on such stories run in SFX.

First some number-crunching. SFX is in its thirteenth year and is Europe's biggest-selling SF&F monthly, shifting somewhere in the neighbourhood of 35-40,000 copies per month. It is not a literary-focused magazine and mostly focuses on TV and film. However, its literature section is reasonably decent compared to other media mags of its type (the disappointing SciFi Now comes immediately to mind) and I have SFX to thank for introducing me to several of my favourite authors, including Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson, Paul Kearney, Guy Gavriel Kay and Peter F. Hamilton. One of the side-effects of the mag not being literary-based is that the list offers an interesting insight into those who pick up SF&F novels but don't really discuss them on-line (you know, the 90% of the SF&F book-buying public that all of our blogs and forums and review sites have no impact on whatsoever). On that basis, the list is surprisingly decent. The magazine's reasonably non-partisan nature also makes the list more useful than some of the other recent polls: Westeros.org, the George RR Martin forum, voted GRRM as its Best Author; Malazanempire.com, the Steven Erikson forum, voted Steven Erikson as its Best Author; and Wotmania.com, the Robert Jordan forum, voted Robert Jordan as its Best Author. In each case the result was not really a surprise.

That said, SFX is a UK mag and a lot of the feedback for the poll from outside the UK has been of the flavour of, "Who is Robert Rankin? James Herbert? Simon Clark?", which is certainly understandable.

Approximately 185 people voted on the SFX Forum for the list. But more than 3,000 other votes were also counted for the list, which makes it far bigger than any of the other recent online polls.

For reasons of length, I've broken coverage of the list in two pieces. Expect the second part in the next few days. The Bottom 50 looks like this:

100. James Herbert UK horror author, best known for The Rats and several sequels, and also for writing the novels that inspired the mid-1990s movies Fluke and The Haunted.

99. Gwyneth Jones
Haven't read.

98. Sara Douglass
Australian fantasy author. He first series, The Axis Trilogy, started off as light popcorn fare and made it as far as the third volume before becoming too cheesy to really stand up. I'm told her later books are better.

97. Charles Stross
One of SF's current big hitters, whose novels are nominated for Hugos almost automatically every year. I have tried a couple of his hard SF novels and not really found them to my taste, although I plan to try out his fantasy series, The Merchant Princes, at some stage.

96. Terry Goodkind
The most controversial author in fantasy, whose Sword of Truth series has been a big hit but whose ultra-right-wing tendencies and lead characters who seemingly base their leadership ideas and military tactics on George W. Bush aren't really to my taste. However, the series did give us the Chicken That Is Not A Chicken But Is Evil Incarnate, one of the seminal moments in modern fantasy, which may account for its place on this list.

95. Brian W. Aldiss
Underrated classic SF author who's still churning out important new work (his latest novel, H.A.R.M., is on my to-read list). Non-Stop, Hothouse and The Helliconia Trilogy, still the greatest achievement in SF worldbuilding to date, are bona fide classics of the genre whilst Report on Probability A still makes peoples heads hurt to this very day.

94. Ken MacLeod
Scottish SF author, known for mixing up left-wing politics and SF to interesting effect. Another author on my 'to read' list.

93. Olaf Stapledon
Formative writer of early SF who gave us massive, far-visioned works such as Last and First Men and Star Maker.

92. Michael Marshall Smith
An interesting author whose mid-to-late 1990s SF output (most notably Spares) marked him as a writer to watch, but he diverted into writing mainstream thrillers as Michael Marshall instead.

91. Jon Courtney Grimwood
Regrettably, another author I have to read.

90. Christopher Priest
Probably the most underread author in SF, although that's now starting to change thanks to the recent movie adaption of his novel, The Prestige. Priest explores themes of duality, memory and reality in his fiction, but arguably never better than in his most recent work, The Separation.

89. Jonathan Carroll
Another author I have to read.

88. Scott Lynch
A relative newcomer to the genre, but The Lies of Locke Lamora made an impact like few other debut novels in recent years have when it landed two years ago.

87. David Weber
Author of the interminable Honor Harrington series of space operas. I have one of his more recent SF/Fantasy crossbreeds, Off Armageddon Reef, waiting to be read.

86. M. John Harrison
Probably second only to Goodkind for the controversy he causes in the genre. Probably the most polarising author on this list, with people who read him seemingly fairly evenly divided between those who love him and those who hate him. Unfortunately, I fall into the latter camp: the Viriconium omnibus is one of a very small number of books that I disliked so immensely whilst reading that I couldn't finish it.

85. Jacqueline Carey
Her Sundering duology is on my to-read list, but she is better-known for her Kushiel series of erotic fantasy novels.

84. Kim Stanley Robinson
American hard SF author, best known for his interesting Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, the first book in the series, remains his single finest novel) but his Years of Rice and Salt and earlier novels set in California in three different parallel timelines are all worth a look.

83. Theodore Sturgeon
Classic early SF novelist, although possibly best-known for coining Sturgeon's Law: "90% of science fiction is rubbish but 90% of everything is rubbish."

82. J.V. Jones
British fantasy author whose Book of Words trilogy was a decent beginning to a career which really took off with the much darker and more interesting Sword of Shadows quintet (Book 4 due in 2009).

81. Joe Abercrombie
British fantasy author whose First Law trilogy has made a substantial impact on the epic fantasy field over the past three years, bringing a wry sense of humour and fusing with character-building which approaches GRRM levels on occasion. His 'difficult second album' due next year, Best Served Cold, will no doubt determine whether we see him stay at such a lofty position or - gasp! - climb even higher in future years.

80. Joe Haldeman
Dispiritingly, I have never read The Forever War, but I did enjoy Haldeman's Worlds Trilogy.

79. Simon Clark
British fantasy/horror author, best-known for his sequel to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, the inevitably-titled Night of the Triffids, which won him the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2001.

78. George Orwell
Arguably only two of his novels fit into the genre, but when one of them is Nineteen Eighty-Four and the other is Animal Farm, that's all you need. An essential writer to read.

77. Samuel R. Delaney
The author of numerous critically-respected SF novels in the 1960s and 1970s, probably the best-known of which is Babel-17. Another author I haven't read.

76. Charles de Lint
Prolific Canadian fantasy author. Not read as yet.

75. Julian May
A well-known female SF author, best known for her Saga of the Plioscene Exile series, which I tried a long time ago and couldn't get into. A re-read may be in order.

74. Edgar Rice Burroughs
The creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars and a formative writer in the pulp SF-adventure field.

73. Robert Silverberg
Hugely prolific author in both SF and Fantasy. His finest single novel is probably Dying Inside, but he is best-known for his Majipoor series.

72. Susanna Clarke
A surprisingly high entry for someone with only two books to her name: the massively successful novel Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell and the Ladies of Grace Adieu collection. Definitely an author to watch in the future.

71. Stanislaw Lem
Polish SF author, best-known for Solaris, which inspired no less than two movie adaptions.

70. Larry Niven
A major SF author of the 1960s-80s, best-known for Ringworld and his other Tales of Known Space.

69. Alfred Bester
An excellent SF author. The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!) is one of the most essential books to read in the genre. His Demolished Man is also a majorly influential novel.

68. Katherine Kerr
An author I haven't read, despite multiple attempts to penetrate her huge Celtic fantasy Deverry series, which after thirteen volumes is finally drawing to a close with her next volume.

67. Jack Vance
In my opinion, one of the five or six most vital authors to read in the entire SF&F field, whose Dying Earth and sequels inspired a huge number of other writers (including Dan Simmons and Gene Wolfe). His Lyonesse Trilogy is also excellent.

66. Harry Harrison
Comic SF author best-known for The Stainless Steel Rat and umpteen sequels, plus Bill, the Galactic Hero. Steer clear of his later alternate-histories though.

65. Marion Zimmer Bradley
An American SF, Fantasy and horror writer, best-known for her Darkover and Avalon series, although the only book of hers I ever read was a mediocre horror book called Witch Hill. The Mists of Avalon is on my to-read list.

64. Richard Matheson
The author of the excellent I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man.

63. Dan Simmons
I read and reviewed the first two books of his superb Hyperion Cantos recently.

62. Elizabeth Haydon
An author I have not read.

61. Terry Brooks
Brooks' 1977 novel The Sword of Shannara (which critics most kindly describe as 'inspired' by Tolkien) kick-started the entire modern epic fantasy explosion, for good and for ill, so his impact on the genre cannot be doubted. That said, the Shannara series is best read as a 'gateway' series for younger readers starting out in the genre. On that level, his books work well as adventures. His more recent novels have shown signs of growing ambition as he fuses urban and epic fantasy together.

60. Richard Morgan
Probably the most striking author to enter SF in the last few years, whose blistering Altered Carbon and sequels rocked a somewhat staid genre as very few books have, whilst his most recent, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Black Man stirred up a fair bit of controversy. He is now taking on fantasy with his new novel, The Steel Remains, due in August.

59. Stephen Baxter
The natural heir to Arthur C. Clarke, who combines hard SF with broad-canvas epic stories about humanity's future. His single finest novel remains The Time Ships, a stunning sequel to The Time Machine taking in the history of the universe itself.

58. Jennifer Fallon
57. Mercedes Lackey
56. CJ Cherryh
Three authors whose work I am not familiar with, although I vaguely recall trying a Lackey novel once and putting it down after three pages, but I may be wrong about that.

55. Harlan Ellison
Probably the finest SF short fiction writer of the 1960s and also responsible for the best episode of the original Star Trek (The City on the Edge of Forever), Ellison is better-known for his personal reputation these days rather than his often innovative and interesting fiction.

54. Jasper Fforde
53. Octavia Butler
Two authors I am not familiar with, although in the latter case I know that is a massive oversight.

52. J.G. Ballard
Better-known for his mainstream novels and memoirs (the first of which was filmed by Steven Spielberg as Empire of the Sun) these days, Ballard started out in SF with a series of books depicting possible futures for our world, such as The Drowned World. His 1973 novel, Crash, caused a lot of controversy on release, which was repeated with the 1996 movie version directed by David Cronenberg.

51. Robert E. Howard
The creator of Conan the Barbarian, which arguably stands alongside the likes of Dunsany, Tolkien, Vance and Peake as a vital piece of formative fantasy. Those reading Conan for the first time today may be surprised at how fresh it still feels (certain odd attitudes towards female characters notwithstanding), and how mercifully easy it is to divorce the character from the image of Arnie once you actually start reading the books (Conan the Barbarian is a good movie, but not tremendously true to the more cunning in-print character).

50. Sherri S. Tepper
An interesting SF author, best-known for her early 1990s novel Grass, which is on my to-read list.