FutureTense

Trent Walters, who reviews for SFSite offers this list:

Trent’s list so far (and growing and no doubt forgetting way too many–apologies to all the great writers out there! I’m working my way through or to your work at this very moment):
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Brian Aldiss — one of the genre eldergods — the gamut (although I was disappointed by a poem I read–I’ll need to read more of his poetry to decide for certain)

Martin Amis — short fiction (only read one or two novels but was disappointed)

Margaret Atwood — incredible voice and dialogue — analogue to Willis

Nicholson Baker — vastly underrated by the genre. Mind blowing.

J.G. Ballard — I love his regular genre stuff. Some of his experiments are cool (i.e. The Atrocity Exhibition) taken as a whole.

Donald Barthelme — eldergod — short fiction

Greg Bear — always a helluvan imagination and sometimes a fine stylist (he’s impressed real-live, working PhD.s with his knowledge of their fields!)

T.C. Boyle — any short fiction

Orson Scott Card — helluvan imagination

Jonathon Carroll

Raymond Carver — the bastard who reinvented Hemingway!

Roald Dahl — his adult-short-story method of unpacking surprises in the middle always impressed the hell out of me.

Harlan Ellison — what a voice! — any collection

Carol Emshwiller — like Wolfe, her short fiction is not always on, but when it’s on–watch out!

Ernest Hemingway — what modern writer is complete without him?

Milan Kundera — I’ve never seen politics and scope [large and small] handled so well as The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

R.A. Lafferty — the similarity to Barthelme is uncanny although not quite as often as literary. Read him.

Ian McDonald — maybe he overdoes the lyric prose, but it’s still nice if you’re in the mood.

Joyce Carol Oates — With Black Water she beat Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s game of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Her early and her dark collections are also well worth reading–Martyr is one of the most poignant and horrifying grotesques.

Flannery O’Connor — Everyone must painstakingly dissect a collection of her stories.

Annie Proulx — her Wyoming stories — these actually have a strong genre feel

Robert Reed — helluvan imagination

Kim Stanley Robinson — short fiction, especially “The Blind Geometer”

Robert Sheckley — read one of his early collections and “Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?”

Lucius Shepard — his first collections and the masterpiece “The

John Steinbeck — the only writer to my knowledge to match Shakespeare’s best with Of Mice and Men.

Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace (still working through, slowly) & The Death of Ivan Illych.

Connie Willis — incredible voice and dialogue — analogue to Atwood

Gene Wolfe — The Fifth Head of Cerberus — like Emshwiller, his short fiction is not always on, but when it’s on–stand back!

Roger Zelazny — the man whose work let me know I loved genre fiction. Everything and anything. The Amber series begins with a bang but trails off. Avoid at all costs Damnation Alley. The movie was bad, too. This should actually uplift hopeful writers: every god drops one.

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