Continuing the Book Meme, the bottom third of the list.
100. James Herbert
Oh dear. Juvenile hack horror I read back when I was young and stupid. I suppose he’s not quite as bad as the awful Guy N Smith.
97. Charles Stross
Definitely a current favourite. I first came into contact with Stross’s work through the world of blogging, and since then I’ve been on a major Stross binge over the past 18 months. First one I read was “Accellerando” a couple of years back, and his imagination was so overwhelmingly powerful it gave me a sort of mental vertigo. He’s far more than a one-trick pony; he’s done near-future conspiracy (Halting State), parallel-worlds fantasy (The Merchant Princes series), so-called “New Space Opera” (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise) and surreal black comedy (The Atrocity Archives).
95. Brian W. Aldiss
I’ve found his 60s “new wave” work rather uneven, but his later “Helliconia” trilogy remains one of the best examples of SF worldbuilding I’ve read.
94. Ken MacLeod
I think I’ve read most of what he’s published. I loved his first couple of books, but felt he’d got into a bit of a rut, writing books that were entertaining at the time, but tended repeat the same tropes book after book. And he tends to wear his libertarian-socialist politics on his sleeve at times. But his last two, the first-contact story “Learning the World”, and the very dark near future “Execution Channel”, seem to show him breaking out of that rut.
93. Olaf Stapledon
Only read his two best-known books, “First and Last Men” and “Star Maker”. Chilly, and rather dated. I can’t imagine anyone writing a novel today with no real characters and no dialogue whatsoever.
91. Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Read his Arabesque trilogy plus “Stamping Butterflies”. Intriguing cyberpunky stuff, often quite complexly plotted.
90. Christopher Priest
“Inverted World”. One book that’s given me actual nightmares, which I put down to compellingly good writing.
86. M. John Harrison
Only read “Pastel City”, which for some reason I could never really get into.
84. Kim Stanley Robinson
Only read the Mars Trilogy; entertaining hard-SF read although I wonder how on earth some of the flakier characters managed to get past the sort of psychological tests that would be needed to get on a manned Mars mission.
80. Joe Haldeman
“The Forever War” is the necessary counter to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”
78. George Orwell
“And they looked from man to pig, and from pig to man….”
75. Julian May
I loved her Pliocene Exiles saga, felt the ‘prequel’ Intervention series was a bit forced, and found her next one (for which I can’t even remember the name) very disappointing. I’m forced to conclude this is a writer who peaked early.
73. Robert Silverberg
I’ve only read a couple of his later works, which I get the impression are a bit more lightweight than his earlier books.
70. Larry Niven
I read a lot of his ‘known space’ novels at an impressionable age. Good scientific and engineering ideas but flawed by embarrasingly wooden characterisation and poor plotting. Good at ideas, not so good at telling stories.
69. Alfred Bester
Read his 50s classics, “Tiger! Tiger!” and “The Demolished Man”, and they’re both good.
67. Jack Vance
Quite possibly my favourite author. I love his mannered prose style, and the way he seems to paint pictures with words. The epitome of ‘soft SF’, concerned with cultures and societies rather than mechanics of how spaceships work; his starships are plot devices to transports the characters to exotic worlds and the baroque cultures that exist there.