Author! Author!

Mand suggested that a post of author recommendations might be a good idea. So here's a non-exhaustive list in no particular order.

• China Mieville. Start with King Rat and work your way into Perdido Street Station. It's fantasy-steampunkishness for grown-ups.
• Jon Courtney Grimwood has done some fascinating sci-fi, some alternate history world building, and is well worth a look. My own favourites include Remix and Red Robe.
• Robert Rankin is the master of Far Fetched Fiction, a man who has turned an evening in a pub with your esoteric mates into a collection of novels. He deserves a lot more attention. And money.
• Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War which is a Must Read, one of those rare books that everyone should read regardless of whether you like science fiction. It's a superb example of a really human story in a scifi setting that uses the genre to excellent effect whilst never really betraying the human elements of the story. The rest of his work is equally interesting.
• Robert A. Heinlein seems, in many of his novels, to be an arch conservative. But over the years I have come to appreciate him as a teacher. I often get the impression that he wrote books that said "here's my idea, now argue against me". Particularly important are Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, which use science fiction as a way to make points about the responsibilities of citizenship and the ways in which we treat relationships.
• John Sladek wrote some of the darkest, funniest novels I have ever read. Humour does not come blacker, or more twisted, and he was a very under-rated author. If you can find Tik Tok buy it, read it, enjoy it, then collect the rest of whatever you can find in print. He'd been dead since 2000, so it's really a race against time to grab what you can before it all goes out of print.
• Tom Holt is another great British comic-novelist, but once you've sampled something like Flying Dutch go on to read Olympiad and his earlier, serious works. Tom Holt is also One Of The Good Guys.
• Jasper Fforde is another of Britain's crop of humourists, but one bursting with strange and entertaining ideas. His books come with DVD extras, which you can find on the website.
  
• David Gemmell was a fantasy author, an excellent spinner of tales, and wrote some of the best heroic fantasy since Tolkein. Read Legend and tell me I'm wrong.
  
• Thomas M. Disch was identified as a leading light of the New Wave, a movement I really enjoyed. Alas, he too has been taken from us but he leaves a legacy of excellent and challenging fiction.
  
• Terry Pratchett is a lot more than just a humourist. The most recent batch of Discworld books demonstrates that. There's more to Going Postal and Making Money, or Monstrous Regiment than fantasy laffs and funny dialog, and the joy of the Discworld series is that, start to finish, it's a timeline of a style and form.
• Alfred Bester is another terribly important writer that people don't seem to have heard of, which is a shame. He's really good, and terribly clever.
• Christopher Priest is someone else who should be read. A lot. A lot more.

And this is now leaning on the long side for a blog post. Who have I left out? Everyone else. People like David Brin and Neil Gaiman, like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, like Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Anton Wilson, Charles Stross and David Langford. I left out Michael Moorcock (but that's OK because this list is a sort of tribute to passages in the Cornelius novels, I'll slip a Hawkwind reference in soon) and C.S. Lewis, I omitted E.E. "Doc" Smith and completely missed Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which is as unforgivable as missing H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne and Mary Gentle .

In fact, I've entirely failed to cover so many it's almost criminal. So remind me who I have missed and who is worth reading. Genre or not. It's what the comments are for, really. And here we stop, because lists are like roads - if you let them, they go ever, ever on.