Recommend Me Some Fiction Authors

[Grahamm]

At the moment, I'm reading 2 authors: Terry Pratchett for light-hearted silliness with a cynical sense of humour, or Clive Cussler for the penny thriller style. Writing is crap, storylines are all similar, but it whiles away an hour or three.

If you like well written action / thriller, I can recommend Alistair MacLean or Hammon Innes.

I'm a bit late to this, so a few comments:

Pratchett is always good, although his later work suffered a bit due to his Alzheimers IMO (The Long Earth books aren't that great). Also the first two Discworld books, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are really just spoofs of other stories in the Fantasy genre (eg Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and McCaffrey's Pern books), it's not until Mort that he gets into his stride.

Cussler is rubbish, Dirk Pitt is just Cussler's Mary-Sue style wank fantasy. It might have been good when I was a teenager, but much better to read Tom Clancy (but only the books that he wrote himself, avoid the stuff where he franchised out his name!)

MacLean and Innes are good too, although a bit dated.

Joe Haldeman (Sci Fi) - The Forever War, 3 books (I think) easy reading and good action, believable portrayal of long term space travel and the effects of relativity.

Worth a read, but a bit of a post-Vietnam American guilt trip. Compare and contrast with Heinlein's Starship Troopers...

Harry Harrison (Sci Fi) - The Stainless Steel Rat series, very good Thief turned Investigator type stuff.

Yes, but only the first three (TSSR, TSSR's Revenge and TSSR Saves the World) are really good. The next couple are ok, but after that they went downhill with TSSR is Born and then he started churning them out and ended up as rubbish.

Issac Asimov (Sci Fi) - Foundation series.

Might have been great once, but now I think they're over-rated and he ended up painting himself into a corner for 20 years after the third book.

Arthur C Clarke (Sci Fi) - Rama series. Also, get the Collected Short Stories, they are all in one (big) book, some really good stuff in there.

Excellent hard SF, but avoid the later stuff where he started co-writing with other authors because it's just not the same.

Julian May (Sci Fi/Fantasy) - The Many Coloured Land, 3 books (I think). People who chose not to fit in with society choose to be sent back to the Pliocene epoch on a one way trip. Good stuff! 

I read this series once and thought it was ok, then came back to it a couple of years later and thought "gods, what a bunch of *losers*!" and dumped the books off to a friend.

Have Read a lot of Ian Banks (AKA Ian M Banks), both Sci-Fi and general fiction only one book of his that I couldn't get to grips with called 'The Bridge'

I like Banks' Sci-Fi stuff, especially the Culture stories, but I could never get into his general fiction for some reason.

Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

Inconceivable!

A few more recommendations:

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, but then read Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant which really continue that story.

For totally epic Sci-Fi, Frank Herbert's Dune books are very good (although long!). His son, Brian's prequels about the Butlerian Jihad and House Atreides, House Harkonnen and House Corrinno etc are quite good too.

Finally Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny (especially his Amber series) are definitely worth a look IMO.