The reading lists I've put together for this page are neither exhaustive nor objective. I have purposely NOT listed classic writers like Asimov and LeGuin in order to concentrate on younger or less well-known writers. If you haven't read much SF and are looking to get acquainted with the genre, I suggest you start by going to the Hugo and Nebula Awards sites and looking at the lists of past winners. This is a good way to get to know the genre and figure out what you like.

Or of course you could just read Frederik Pohl. That's a joke . . . but only partly. He's one of my very favorite SF writers, and his career - especially when you add in the stuff he co-wrote with the bitter and brilliant C. M. Kornbluth - spans almost every literary movement and major concept in modern SF. The Space Merchants should be required reading in every high school in America. The Gateway series is sublime. The World at the End of Time has my vote for the single novel that most perfectly expresses all that is wonderful and worthwhile about hard SF. And besides ... well ... the man just plain knows how to glue your eyeballs to the page!

Anyway. If you like Frederick Pohl, and your tastes generally run toward some combination of hard SF, space opera, and cyberpunk with a good dose of politics thrown into the mix, then we probably like similar things, and you might want to check out some of the stuff I list below. If not . . . well, I can do nothing to improve your taste. Sorry.

I can't do anything to improve my own taste either. I've tried. It itched. So there are plenty of wonderful writers missing from this list. In some cases it's merely because I haven't yet found out about them or gotten around to reading them. In other cases . . . well, they weren't my cup of tea. What can I say? Books are personal. Still, if there's someone you really think should be on here, drop me a line. I'll read their stuff if I haven't already read it. And if I have read it and didn't like it, then at least we can have fun arguing about it.

Finally, I prefer to recommend writers rather than individual books. Honest readers can always disagree on which book is a particular writer's best, and many of the writers on this list are very original thinkers who tend to write quite differently from one book to another. Anyway, the writers below are all big favorites of mine, and I hope you'll discover some new favorite writers of your own among them . . . .

THE LOST, THE FORGOTTEN, or the MERELY MISSHELVED (writers who you may not find in the SF section of your local bookstore, but who I think are well worth looking for)