I'll use the same format as before. Unfortunately SF is harder to divide into neat categories than fantasy... Hard SF - the author tries to give scientific and/or technobabble explanation for all the technology. Alternate history - the story shares the same history as the real world up to some point of divergence. Retro SF - a term I just made up to describe works set in the future (usually on other planets) where the technology and culture has reverted to medieval/renaissance levels. This covers most of the SF/fantasy gray area... Humor - obvious. Military SF - focuses exclusively on warfare in the future, with characters taking entirely secondary importance to the space battles and miscellaneous blowing up of things. Soft SF - no technobabble, nor any of the other categories above. If I don't state otherwise, a story is in this catchall category. ======= Reviews Frank Herbert - _Dune_ is in my opinion the best science fiction novel yet written. Its sequels are of highly variable quality however. Daniel Keys Moran - everything he's written is outstandingly good and equally hard to find. _The Long Run_ is the best of the bunch, though it won't make much sense unless you've read _Emerald Eyes_. For the most part he writes near-future stories; the three existing volumes of his future history (the first two I have named above) span the years 2030 to late summer 2076. David Brin - one of the few authors who can write good Hard SF stories (he's a Caltech alumnus from the class before my dad, and has a PhD in astronomy). He has won several well-deserved Hugo awards, most notably for _Startide Rising_. Most of his work follows the impact of humans bursting upon an ancient, very conservative, and loosely controlled civilization of thousands of intelligent species, all of which are far more advanced than humans and our chimpanzee and dolphin companions. Iain M. Banks - a Scottish author writing very thought-provoking stories. There's no particular connection between any of them, but most are set in the Culture, a highly advanced anarchic utopian society where humans have long since passed all real work to AIs since the latter have become almost infinitely more capable than anything biological. Most stories involve people responsible for contacting and interacting with less advanced societies, since that's about all the AIs can't do. _The Use of Weapons_ is my favorite as much for its construction as anything else. Two parallel plot lines in alternating chapters, one running forwards in time and the other backwards. Only at the end to you see any relevance of one to the other... C. S. Friedman - _In Conquest Born_ is the one of her two SF works I've read. A fascinating story about an endless war between two extraordinary empires, one enlightened, scientifically and mentally advanced trying to defend itself and the rest of the galaxy against a rapaciously brutal people glorifying military conquest above all else. The history behind this, which is only gradually revealed, is just marvelous. Lois McMaster Bujold - she may have won more Hugo awards than any other author by now; certainly more than any two other authors put together over the past fifteen years. Her Vorkosigan series is marketed as military science fiction, but it is not. Adventure/espionage stories in many cases, but she writes about some of the most richly developed characters I've ever encountered. I liked _The Vor Game_ best, but frankly they're all excellent. ======= Alphabetical listing Douglas Adams - Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series; classic humorous SF, you're probably already familiar with it. Roger MacBride Allen - _The Torch of Honor_ and _Rogue Powers_ are military SF, though pretty good as such things go. Poul Anderson - the Dominic Flandry series is classic SF espionage stories set during the fall of the Terran Empire. I really liked _The Boat of a Million Years_, about a handful of people throughout history who are biologically immortal. The latter is recommended. Isaac Asimov - the Robot/Empire/Foundation future history, one of the all time classics. Some are better than others, the earlier work in particular is odd to read now, since women tend to have weak and minor roles, and many people are still smoking thousands of years in the future. Recommended. John Barnes - an amusing alternate history trilogy culminating in _Caesar's Bicycles_ (I've forgotten the first one, though). Heinlein-ish dimension hopping to foil equally capable yet mysterious Forces of Evil(tm). Not bad. Greg Bear - _The Forge of God_ was OK as apocalyptic novels go, but _Anvil of Stars_ tried and failed to be valid hard SF. I liked _Eon_, an intriguing story of an asteroid ship from the future which travels back in time after a really funky extradimensional tube is opened out of it. The sequel _Eternity_ wasn't so good, but wasn't horrible either. As you can see, I've had mixed results with him. Gregory Benford - his own work (near future exploration and First Contact) didn't grab me, though it's not bad. He did a nice collaboration with Brin, _Heart of the Comet_. Marion Zimmer Bradley - retro SF; her Darkover series is the grayest of gray areas between fantasy and SF. Over a thousand-ish year span, she traces the development of an inadequately prepared colony, as they lose technology and develop unique cultural traditions to cope, as well as quickly gaining powerful psychic abilities in a few bloodlines. F. M. Busby - I read several of his novels as a kid, and all I can remember is that they were good enough to finish, but not to reread. There seem to have been severe inconsistencies between novels in the series... C. J. Cherryh - Mixed but generally favorable results. My favorites are her Chanur series (_Pride of Chanur_ and sequels) about a distant sector of the galaxy when a human exploration vessel is first captured; the Morgaine series (_Gate of Ivrel_ et al.) about a woman whose life's work is to close Gates between the worlds before disaster strikes; and her loosely connected future history novels (_Downbelow Station_, _Cyteen_, _Merchanter's Luck_ which IMHO has a one letter typo in the title, _40000 in Gehenna_, and a few others). I've listed the latter in order of quality, the first two are good while the latter failed to impress me. Arthur C. Clarke - classic author; _2001_, _Rendezvous with Rama_ and others are great, their sequels generally aren't. Allan Cole & Chris Bunch - the Sten series, military/espionage stories with fairly shallow characters; mind candy at best, not recommended. David Drake - _With the Lightnings_ and _Lt. Leary Commanding_ are great military SF with well developed and unique main characters. Most of his other work is more typical of the genre and not worth much interest. He has also written an alternate history series with Eric Flint. In that series, two powerful intelligences from the far future go back in time to the beginning of Justinian's reign, one to build up a really vicious sect in northern India in order to conquer the world and extinguish civilization, and the other (much like the Terminator movies) restricted to indirect action to prevent this - fortunately Belisarius is available as an ally... The writing style is overly heroic at times, but I love the plot so far. Drake also collaborated with Stirling on _The General_ series of five novels plus loosely related sequels. These are also based on Justinian and Belisarius, though set in the far future on a world just regaining 1850s technology. The _WtL_ series and the alternate history Belisarius series are recommended, the rest are not. Jane Emerson - _City of Diamond_ is excellent, there were supposed to be sequels but they haven't come out yet. Intrigue on a city/starship, plus its interactions with diverse planetary cultures. Eric Flint - _1632_ is an amusing alternate history, where a modern West Virginia mining town plops down into Thuringia late in the Swedish phase of the 30 years war. Alan Dean Foster - the Flinx and Pip series; I loved these in high school, but don't remember much more. I need to dig them up and reread them... David Gerrold - Chtorr series, military SF about 2070s Earth fighting (and so far losing) against an alien ecological invasion. Pretty good; a couple of tangents he goes off on for a few pages are among the funniest pieces of writing I've ever seen outside a humor column. "Grant Naylor" - those are the last names of the creators of BBCs Red Dwarf TV show. Like the TV show, the books are wonderful British comedy in a sci-fi setting. Joe Haldeman - _The Forever War_ and _Forever Peace_ both justly won Hugo awards. Some aspects of the former strike me as overly bitter and unrealistic, but his Vietnam experience was fresh when he wrote it... Haven't read _Forever Free_ yet, but I look forward to it. Recommended. Harry Harrison - _Return to Eden_ trilogy, a bizarre alternate history where stone age humans coexist with intelligent dinosaurs. Pretty good from what I remember. Robert Heinlein - I initially didn't like his work, but that's because I started with some of the later and weirder novels, with lots of dimension hopping and new characters appearing who are written as if the reader should know them already. What he did in these books is try to tie together all of his past work into one multi-universal whole. His old-fashioned values and politics are sometimes irritating, but he also had some good stories. _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ and _Methuselah's Children_ are probably the best of the non-weird novels. Ursula LeGuin - _The Left Hand of Darkness_ won one of the first Hugos, but I didn't like it too much. Addition to the fantasy reviews - the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy (of four books) is pretty good, though very sparse compared to verbose modern authors like Jordan. Anne McCaffery - the other great SF/fantasy border series. Excellent stories of a colony on a world in a solar system where another planet has a very elliptical orbit passing close by every 200-400 years, somehow dropping spores of life forms very destructive to the natives of Pern and Earth. Since insufficient technology remained from the landing, local fauna were bred and genetically engineered to be more intelligent and to be big enough for humans to ride. These animals happened to look like dragons, and if fed a particular kind of rock they can breathe fire... Highly recommended. Walter Miller - _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ is a novel of a distant post- apocalyptic future. Recommended. Larry Niven - His various Known Space novels are generally quite good. _Ringworld_ is a classic. _Neutron Star_ contains many of his best short stories. Recommended. Pournelle - military SF, not recommended. James Schmitz - _The Witches of Karres_ was quite good, though I don't remember much more than that. Robert Silverberg - Majipoor series, adventures on a huge and diverse but not technologically developed world. Recommended. E. E. "Doc" Smith - classic '40s space opera. He tried to write hard SF, but given the knowledge available at the time it's understandable why some things are wildly off. A greater obstacle is the cultural bias at the time; most characters smoke, and female characters tend to be pretty weak and helpless. Star Trek - mostly not recommended. Exceptions would be Diane Carey (_Dreadnought_ and sequel, about a young officer and her Vulcan sidekick, with Kirk, Spock, et al. making only brief appearances), John M. Ford, Diane Duane, and some Peter David. Star Wars - Timothy Zahn is great, the rest mostly aren't worthwhile. Steakley - _Armor_ is military SF I can hardly remember. Not recommended. Neal Stephenson - _Snow Crash_ is the best cyberpunk novel I've ever read, mostly because it doesn't take itself seriously (the main character is Hiro Protagonist). Highly recommended. Marc Stiegler - I really liked _Earthweb_, though there is a glaring question remaining. The setting is near-future, with Earth struggling to fend off a sequence of robot Death Star things. Where/why/how these things are made is unexplained. Other than that it's a cool story. S. M. Stirling - two unrelated series. _Island in the Sea of Time_ and sequels are among the best alternate histories I've ever read. Premise: modern Nantucket is transported back to around 1250 BC. You can imagine how much fun an author can have with that! :) His other work is also alternate history, where he creates a race of evil bastards who make the Nazis look like choirboys (by taking Revolutionary War loyalists and putting them in South Africa instead of Canada/England). Not the most plausible idea... The last book (_Drakon_) is pretty interesting, where one of these people, who had long since genetically engineered themselves into their conception of the "master race", comes through a dimensional portal to our world and tries to take over. That book also has the distinction of being the most pornographic piece of literature I've ever read. Harry Turtledove - more alternate history, this time an invasion by rather inept aliens in the summer of 1942. Very entertaining! Vernor Vinge - _A Fire Upon the Deep_ is widely admired (I think it won a Hugo), but the physics involved bothers me. To me it's another failed attempt at hard SF, to most others it's really good. David Weber - if you've read C. S. Forester's Hornblower novels (historical fiction set in the Napoleonic era), you might like this, otherwise it's the ultimate mind-candy military SF. He writes great space battles but couldn't do realistic characters to save his life. Steve White - like Weber, without the space battles. He did do some amusing Arthurian alternate history, though. Connie Willis - _To Say Nothing of the Dog_ is very unusual alternate history, I'm still not quite sure I understood everything that happened. Pretty good, though, especially if you like the Victorian era.