No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet. – Lady Mary Montagu
Yesterday I told you about my favorite books, and today I’d like to tell you about my favorite authors. There’s less overlap than you might think; of these ten authors, only half have a book among my favorites (which also means eight of my favorites were written by people who aren’t on my top authors list). The reason for this is that five of the writers below have a consistently high average quality in my opinion, but just didn’t produce any one book I can truly claim as a favorite; conversely, eight of the favorite books were produced by writers whose other output doesn’t interest me remotely as much (you’ll see a similar dichotomy of artists and albums in “My Favorite Things (Part Two)”). After the top ten, I’m also going to share a “second string” whose work I enjoy very much but just don’t quite make it all the way up for one reason or another. Each list is arranged alphabetically.
1) Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
If you think I’m a prolific writer for having typed out almost 700 essays for this blog, consider that Asimov wrote over 500 full-length books and tens of thousands of letters. Though many of those were science fiction and a few fantasy, mystery and humor, a large fraction of his oeuvre was nonfiction; he wrote books on nearly every branch of science and even some on literature, mythology, art and other subjects, and on top of it all edited collections of others’ work…and most of it was pretty damned good.
2) Ray Bradbury (born 1920)
Bradbury’s earliest work was a unique blend of fantasy, science fiction and horror, and though over time the horror elements began to fade his style retained the uniquely poetic, lyrical quality that brands it as his. I love his earliest work best, but there’s very little he wrote before 1980 that I don’t like. His second book, The Illustrated Man, is one of my 13 favorites; “The Small Assassin” from his first book (Dark Carnival) is on my list of the ten scariest short stories (see this coming Monday’s column), and my own story “Penelope” is a tribute to The Martian Chronicles.
3) Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)
Burroughs wrote over 70 books between 1912 and his death, and I’ve read every one (except for a recent collection of previously-unpublished short tales I haven’t bought yet). Most of his work is adventure fantasy, often taking place on other worlds or exotic parts of our own; though his plots vary very little, one reads him for the descriptions of strange places, stranger creatures and the triumph of good over evil. In Burroughs, it has been said, all good men are strong and brave and all good women beautiful and wise, and though that’s a slight exaggeration it isn’t far off the mark. His Martian tales (taken together) appear on yesterday’s list of favorite books, my essay “The Girls from Tarzana” is about prostitutes in his works, and his ideas subtly suffuse my own conceptions of what a fantasy setting should be like.
4) Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
The pen name of Charles Dodgson, who in ordinary life was a mathematician; his boundless imagination and passion for nonsense combined with his skill at logic and mathematics to produce what many including myself consider to be the finest literature of the absurd ever written. I’ve loved the Alice books since I was seven; as I said yesterday, taken together they constitute my favorite book of all time, and I’m also fond of most of his other work such as “The Hunting of the Snark”.
5) Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
Along with Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein is considered one of the founders of the science fiction genre as we know it. Jeff introduced me to his juvenile novels when I was about 9 or 10, and they’re still my favorites of all his works except for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which may be the greatest political novel of all time. Once he was established he dared to embed libertarian philosophy, free love, discussions of humanist ethics and other such material in his work, and though some feminists have moronically insisted that he is a “sexist” for denying “social construction of gender”, he in fact repeatedly stated throughout his body of work that women were superior to men in nearly every important way. The same critics often call his female characters “unrealistic”, which I find hilarious because I’ve been compared to them on many occasions.
6) H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
In his life he was largely unknown outside of the readership of what in those days was called “weird fiction”, but he influenced so many horror writers who became famous in their own right (including Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley and Stephen King) that his fame began to grow in the late ‘60s and he’s now practically a household word. Lovecraft was the first important writer to use science fictional motifs rather than fantasy ones (i.e. his horrors are aliens rather than demons or spirits), which makes him the founder of practically the entire modern horror genre (including, by descent, vampire stories in which the condition is biological rather than the result of a curse). I’ve read his entire body of published work, which I can only say of two other writers on this list.
7) Arthur Machen (1863-1947)
Because he was one of Lovecraft’s influences, many people come to Machen via Lovecraft, but for me the two were unrelated discoveries: I read “The Novel of the White Powder” in a horror collection when I was about 11, and was hooked. If you are one of those people who need everything explained and tied up neatly in a horror story, do not read Machen because he is the absolute master of things left unsaid; he realized (as so few do nowadays) that the terrors a reader’s mind can conjure up with expert prodding are far worse than anything he could put on the page.
8) Larry Niven (born 1938)
Niven is a science fiction writer who slowly grew on me; like Heinlein and Burroughs he’s usually considered a “man’s author” and since Jeff never “assigned” me any of his books to read I discovered him via short stories in collections, then picked up Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eye during that awful year of 1995 when I was trying to fill every waking moment with something other than my troubles. There’s still a lot of his work I haven’t read, but his name on a story is a sure sign I’ll enjoy it.
9) Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)
I can’t tell you how old I was when I first read Poe, nor which was the first story I read, except to say that by the time I memorized “Eldorado” in second grade I already knew his name. All through the ‘70s I read every story of his I could find, and encountered adaptations of others on film, in horror comics and even read aloud on record albums. The only two “complete works” on yesterday’s favorite books list are his and Lovecraft’s, and he bears the distinction of being the only author in today’s column whose work (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) I actually taught in a class.
10) J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
Tolkien is one of the rare authors whose works do not daunt me with their length; the poetry of his language sucks me right back in as soon as I pick up the book again. I was introduced to him when I was 12, and like Burroughs he shaped my own concepts of fantasy forever after. The Silmarillion is the only one of his posthumous publications I’ve read, but his place on this list is secure even without it.
Honorable Mentions
1) Ambrose Bierce (1942-1913?) While not generally known as a horror writer, Bierce penned a number of very fine examples of the genre, often laced with sardonic humor.
2) Fredric Brown (1906-1972) Absolute master of the short-short story, a form which includes most of my own work. Here’s his shortest one: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”
3) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) Though I don’t care for the historical novels which he considered his more important work, I absolutely love Sherlock Holmes and am fond of the first two Professor Challenger novels.
4) Gardner Fox (1911-1986) One of the most prolific, inventive and imaginative comic-book writers of all time, especially in the superhero and sci-fi genres. Here’s a lovely example of his work, “Earth Victory – By a Hair!” from the January 1961 issue of Strange Adventures.
5) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) Though best known for his historical novels of New England, he also wrote many dark fantasies such as “Rappaccini’s Daughter”.
6) Tanith Lee (born 1947) She has written fantasy, horror and science fiction, much of it highly erotic, poetic, unconventional and dark. The first of her work I read was “The Secret Books of Paradys”, and they’re still my favorites.
7) Richard Matheson (born 1926) Though he’s written many novels and short stories I love Matheson best for his movie scripts and teleplays, including many of the best Twilight Zone episodes and a number of Roger Corman’s “Poe” movies starring Vincent Price.
8) A.A. Milne (1882-1956) I do love the Pooh books, but it’s really his poetry I like best; I know a number of them (including “Disobedience”, “Buckingham Palace” and “The King’s Breakfast”) by heart.
9) Carl Sagan (1934-1996) My favorite science writer of all time; I’m especially fond of Cosmos (both the book and the TV series), but find all his articles and books both informative and entertaining to a degree unmatched by anyone other than Asimov.
10) H.G. Wells (1866-1946) Though as you might expect I prefer his short stories to his novels, the sheer brilliance of longer works like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds earn him a place on this list.
One Year Ago Today
“…And Don’t Forget To Wash Behind Your Ears” is a discussion of one of the most egregious examples of nanny-state overreach imaginable: government-issued dating advice.
Brilliant!
I agree with so many. Doyle, Lovecraft. I’ve spent many happy hours playing a game (Call of Cthulu) based on his work, and have a diploma from Miskatonic University hanging on my wall. Lovecraft lead me to Machen.
I’ve never read anything by Burrows, but you’ve pricked my curiosity.
I have one of those Miskatonic diplomas, too, and an oversized T-shirt (for use as a nightgown) that says “Property of Miskatonic U Athletic Department”. 🙂
Love your top 10! Huge overlap with mine. I would also include Stephen King (the Stand) and John Steinbeck. Anyway, always available to share book thoughts.
I’ve never cared much for King, but if you read yesterday’s column that shouldn’t surprise you because my preference is for much more compact works. 😉
Of course … Poe – I read in High School, several of his works which were assigned. Tolkien, I had to read after seeing the old cartoon movie of “Lord of the Rings”. Asimov – I read something – maybe several of his works – they were pretty deep if I recall correctly.
Heinlein – well it was my “kinked out” girlfriend, “Cat” who introduced me to him. Everytime I got a gift from her – it was one of his books. I remember the first one she gave me that I read was “Time Enough For Love”. She was all into Heinlein.
Have you ever read the “Saga of the Exiles” and ” Galactic Milieu” series by Julian May? There are not many female writers I like, but she is one of them.
I don’t like all of Fred Saberhagen’s work, but I love his “Dracula” series. “The Dracula Tapes” which is a re-telling of the classic “Dracula” from the vampire’s point of view is hilarious.
I’ve never read any of those. One of my peculiarities is that I read very little that was written after I was born, and almost nothing that was written after I graduated high school. The exceptions (like Tanith Lee) really have to capture my eye and imagination somehow; for her it was the 4th of the Paradys books crossing my desk at the library.
My only familiarity with Tanith Lee are a couple of episodes she did for Blake’s 7. They were definitely different from your standard sci-fi.
Heinlein is always an interesting discussion. He was proclaimed a fascist after Starship Troopers by people who, apparently, had not read the book (his response to them in Expanded Universe is awesome). Then they proclaimed him a guru after Stranger. The women I know either proclaim his female characters “unrealistic” or talk about how much they identify with them. Ironically, or maybe not, the ones who seem to have the most problems with his strong, smart, feminine women were … feminists.
Not ironic at all. Many soi-disant feminists oppose femininity, so “strong, smart androgynous person who happens to have a vagina” is OK with them, but “strong, smart, feminine woman” is not. Fortunately, as Heinlein himself pointed out, they’re on the losing side of history and will soon be nothing but an historical footnote, no more familiar to the average person than the Butlerites are to most people now.
So who were the Butlerites? I tried doing a search, but all I got was the mineral.
The first organized feminists, followers of Josephine Butler until they left her behind due to her opposition to their desire to force white middle-class Christian morality on all of society. I wrote about them in one of my earliest columns.
So the xtian enforcers went on an “anti-butlerian jihad?”
Oh, man, that was excruciating!
My specialty: painful puns.
The only Heinlein book of read so far is “Stranger in a Strange Land.” I thought it started pretty well, but towards the end it really did start to read like some fourteen year old boy’s wet dream. All the women ‘magic’ themselves into ageless physically perfect sex goddesses who sleep with anyone who asks while the men remain old an comparatively ugly. It didn’t quite seem fair. That said I’ve been meaning to look at some of his other books.
Have you read anything by Dan Simmons? In my opinion “Hyperion” is perhaps the best science fiction story I’ve ever read.
May I respectfully suggest Neal Stephenson, if you have not read his work before. Based on your list, I suspect that you would become a fan.
Stephenson has written some great works, but also some real dogs. Good starting points: The Diamond Age; Snow Crash; and especially for guys, Cryptonomicon.
And of course, one of Maggie’s bent (and history) should definitely read Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza.
Yes, The Rainbow Cadenza is definitely worth a read. It should drive the conservative statists crazy if they had but the wit to comprehend it.
The Alice books are the perfect example of books apparently written for children but which need an adult’s understanding to appreciate them fully. Queen Victoria was so impressed by Wonderland that she asked Lewis Carroll to send her a copy of his next book. She got a book on mathematics.
I wonder though whether his other interests would stand up to scrutiny today. One hobby was photographing pre-pubescent girls in the nude; would he be thought of now as a paedophile?
Incidentally, there’s also a parody of Hiawatha by him about photography.
Ignorant moderns do label him thus, despite the fact that such photography was fairly common in his time. Have you ever seen this picture he took of the original Alice dressed as a waif? She certainly was an uncommonly beautiful child.
I do remember that parody; Jack gave me a complete works of Carroll in the early ’90s. 🙂
Yes, a beautiful little girl. And not at all the ultrablonde Alice we’re all familiar with. I think I’ll leave my description of another Alice Liddel unchanged in my Anzu story, though. It’s the innocent look contrasted with her personality that I’m going for, and she needs to look more like the Alice people have in their minds than she needs to look like the real Alice.
As for photographing nude not-yet-women: David Hamilton has been getting away with it for a long time. I’m sure that a lot of people call him a pedophile, but he’s managed to stay out of the Big House.
I don’t think Hamilton lives in the United States – otherwise he might be behind bars. I don’t know how his stuff sells here legally.
I did wedding and portrait photography for a professional studio in high school. When I started college – some girls I knew asked me to shoot some modelling portfolios for them – they knew I was good with a camera – and was cheap enough, and horny enough to do it. I had never done this so I went to a bookstore to look at some examples.
I came across one of Hamilton’s books and was not impressed. It’s not my thing, man.
The modelling portfolios turned out great and I loved them so much I kept them for over 20 years until they were destroyed in Katrina. I had opted to go for a modern “pin-up” look on the more suggestive photos and they turned out awesome. Pin-ups were easy inspiration for me because I’ve been obsessed with them for my entire life. All my guitars have my favorite pinup, Rose – on them. 🙂
Link to pic of Rose, please.
Hey man, sorry for being greedy. I’d still like to see Rose, of course, but I should have at least expressed a bit of sympathy for the loss of the photos. Sometimes we say, “It’s just things.” But sometimes those things can’t be replaced.
Dear Sailor B, the fact that you have the caring and decency to NOT go with the WONDERFUL (being sarcastic) world system that doesn’t care about giving condolences, says “get over it”, “move on”, “it’s not a big deal”, etc., about any kind of loss is very wonderful. It was 1 of the main things that made me want to have a full relationship with you. You also don’t just care about the losses of people who you like. You make the effort for ALL to acknowledge with kind words any kind of loss. Thank God for this and the others like you who do it also. Thank you for not going along with the world system that prides itself on favoritism (if there is ANY caring shown it’s ONLY for people you like), hard-heartedness, wanting INSTANT recovery (“move on”, etc.) and thinks things like condolences are “weak” and “old-fashioned”. Thank you for not being part of this since I met you and for keeping your standards the opposite of these.
Well, thanks. I don’t dislike Krulak, so I didn’t have to be that wonderful a guy to say what I did.
The fact that you don’t want to be part of the WONDERFUL “rudeness, verbal abuse, etc. is tough and hip” ###*** that the world system pushes is great. You also don’t want to be part of the rudeness and hard-heartedness of not bothering to give any words of condolence at all when anyone tells you of any kind of loss OR only bothering to do that when it’s someone who’s part of your group, your type, etc. These things you do ARE a big deal and very needed.
You’re a bit of a sweetie, you know.
{hugs}
{more than that} 😉
Yes, “The Beggar Maid” (ca. 1859, hand coloured albumen print) is reproduced in Mary Warner Marien’s “Photography: a cultural history”. Somewhere I’ve seen another rather complementary study of Alice, but I can’t find it.
I might just have be unique in having read Carrol’s book on symbolic logic, but none of his other work. Strange when I think about it.
Your list overlaps somewhat with my own, particularly Burroughs and Asimov. Some of these are new to me, but most of them I’ve read at least a little. Man, if there is one guy whose books have been adapted to movies less faithfully than Burroughs, it’s Asimov. Kind of makes me nervous about The End of Eternity.
Speaking of abominations, how about the “adaptation” of Asimov’s “Nightfall?” Surely vomit-inducing…
Yeah, it wasn’t the best, was it?
I wasn’t sure Richard Matheson was still alive. I’m glad to know that he is.
Have you read any of A A Milne’s plays? I read The Ugly Duckling in high school. It wasn’t great, but it was all right.
“…some feminists have moronically insisted that [Heinlein] is a “sexist” for denying “social construction of gender”, he in fact repeatedly stated throughout his body of work that women were superior to men in nearly every important way.”
From about 5th grade through college I thought Heinlein was the bee’s knees, reading pretty much all the age-appropriate stuff he wrote in the 1940s through the mid-1960s, and then all the age-inappropriate stuff as it came out. A lot of it changed not only my outlook on life but my actual life!
I admit I did eventually stop reading him. Friday was probably the point where I ran out of patience. And it’s possible that he didn’t start knocking social construction of gender till after I stopped.
But at least early on, and certainly through his middle career, he seemed acutely aware of just how much gender is constructed. For instance he’d repeatedly emphasize how, basically, women are smarter, stronger, tougher, more ribald, even smellier (“whiff”) than society repeatedly insists. So…. if he’s saying there’s a difference between actual women capabilities and what society constantly both demands and enforces women are and should be capable of should be called… what? Peanut-flavored dental floss? I’ve always thought of it as “social construction of gender.” But if that makes you uncomfortable you can call it something else. But I first learned it from Heinlein.
So… I don’t get why you keep saying there’s no such thing.
That said, his allegations that women are invariably superior to men… or more specifically, that women were invariably more valuable to his ubermensch protagonists (eg Lazarus Long, Michael Smith) and all-knowing father-figures (eg Jubal Harshaw, “the old man” in Puppet Masters) than the men surrounding him… still smells like pedestal perching to me.
I mean, not to get picky here or anything but idealizing women as “sugar and spice and everything nice” while deprecating men as “snakes and snails and puppydog tails” is just as sexist (or, that phrase again, as “socially constructed”) as the words to “Why can’t a woman / be more like a man?”
Memory’s a bit dim but the only novel I remember women being on a really equal footing with men (with biological differences but not much artificial “gender” difference) was Starship Troopers. Which with its judgment-free mention of hetero men using makeup and hetero women in the military (if I remember correctly and it’s not just from the movie), first introduced me to the idea that what we’re all supposed to “know” about (idealized e.g. socially constructed) “masculinity” and “femininity” might be utter bullshit compared to we’re repeatedly unwilling to acknowledge is true about flesh-and-blood women and men. (And, again, Heinlein wouldn’t have kept bringing it up as if it were obvious if it didn’t bug him that it wasn’t obvious to everyone else.)
figleaf
And then there was the possible challenging of the universality of beauty standards when the alien guy in “Stranger in a strang land” insists that some older women or otherwise different from standard beauty types are beautiful because “they have their own face”, whilst dismissing the young standard beauties as being all the same.
BTW, I think all that is BS by the way, but Heinlien did put the idea into his author’s philosophical mouthpiece.
Regarding Asimov, it always intrigued me that Asimov said that he got a huge amount of female fan male directed at he completely unflappable and supreme capable robot character R. Daneel Olivaw. I always thought of this as being like the male response to pornographic imagery….getting aroused by a mere 2D image on a page or screen, even by cartoons for that matter. This robot character is again inhuman and a cardboard cutout, but he takes several sexually desirable male characteristics to the nth degree, and so triggers a response in many women it seems. Thoughts?
Whenever Leonard Nimoy was on the set of the original Star Trek in full Vulcan make-up, women were drawn to him like flies to honey. There was something about the actor, sure, but there was also something about the character that turned them on.
PS. apologies for the typos…I don’t proofread comments before hitting the submit button.
[…] Sid Stebel Blogs: Ray Bradbury & SBWC BeginningsRay Bradbury on Writing: Essential Advice for Aspiring AuthorsBook Beginnings and Friday 56 – The Martian Chronicles (April 20)The Martian Chronicles: Usher IIThe Martian Chronicles: The MartianFahrenheit 451Fantasy and Science FictionWorld Book Day 2012: Matthew Wayne Selznick — The Dragon PageRay Bradbury on how Disneyland humanized robots [Afternoon Reading]My Favorite Authors […]
Have you read any of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels? I think you would really enjoy them, especially his discussions of how the city tyrant came to regulate crimes like prostitution. If you’re interested, I recommend starting with ‘Guards! Guards!’, the first book of the City Watch storyline. There are eight books in that storyline, out of the 35+ long series.
One I just found that knocks most of my previous ones down a peg. Alfred Bester. He wrote the demolished man in 1953 and it is an AMAZING and even prescient work. If you have not read it, get it. You will love it!!
I’ve read The Demolished Man and liked it very much. Were you aware that the way the Babylon 5 TV show handles psychic powers is derived from Bester’s work? They even named a villain after Bester and had an episode based on The Demolished Man.
Bab 5!! You also know Bab 5!!
Awesome!! 😀
I have two authors that stand out for me that havent had a mention thusfar: Anne McCaffrey and CJ Cherryh. “The Paladin” and “The Chronicles of Morgaine” are two of my favourites, both with titular, forceful, and determined central female characters.