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Just want to recommend Ken MacLeods Newton's wake as post-singularity SF book.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross should also be good, but I haven't read that one yet.

I've had similar experiences with Sayer.

I started of with Frameshift (hugo finalist). Which was rather confusing and pointless (or rather it had to may points for any of them to mean anything). Thinking that I might be missing something (with Sayer getting all those awards), I tried The Terminal Experiment (Nebula winner), which was even worse.

Both books suffer badly from Sayer inablility to stick with the topic or hold a logical plot together. His characters are annoying sons-of-hippies, who thinks unlike any real people. They mostly act like politically correct robots.

I'm never going to read another Sayer novel, no matter how may awards it gets.

I'm not sure about it and frankly I'm not going to spend the time checking on it, but I've this idea that all these awards corolate with him having been
President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc..

I'm not saying that there's a direct connecting, but he must have a lot of friends and be well connected. Probably a good guy to know and brown-nose, if you what a good quote on the back of your next novel...

I've had similar experiences with Sayer.

I started of with Frameshift (hugo finalist). Which was rather confusing and pointless (or rather it had to may points for any of them to mean anything). Thinking that I might be missing something (with Sayer getting all those awards), I tried The Terminal Experiment (Nebula winner), which was even worse.

Both books suffer badly from Sayer inablility to stick with the topic or hold a logical plot together. His characters are annoying sons-of-hippies, who thinks unlike any real people. They mostly act like politically correct robots.

I'm never going to read another Sayer novel, no matter how may awards it gets.

I'm not sure about it and frankly I'm not going to spend the time checking on it, but I've this idea that all these awards corolate with him having been
President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc..

I'm not saying that there's a direct connecting, but he must have a lot of friends and be well connected. Probably a good guy to know and brown-nose, if you what a good quote on the back of your next novel...

Yes, but the amount that I've spend is nothing, compared to most hobbies. And I would be buying the books anyway.

Well, I had clean forgotten, that the book review site actually has made it possible for me to meet and interview interesting people (Peter F. Hamilton for one), and some publishers actually send me review copies of books. So maybe I'm not really loosing money on it.

But I would do it, event if I never recieved a review copy and if I never made a dime from amazon.

[shameless plug on]
I've review everything MacLeod has written:

http://sfbook.com/modules.php?authorid=30
[All done...]

John Sundman who has written this article has also written a quite interestion book called Cheap Complex Devices (he mentions is in the article).

It's kind of wierd and strange - the idea is that the novel was one of two novels written by a computer program.

I've reviewed it here.

Even though you post has some trollish elements it is, with in the narrow confides of the examples you mention, somewhat correct. Heinlein was an offbeat loony, with strange tastes (but still a wonderful read). Niven I won't comment on as I cant remember any of the Ringworld novels except the first one (my very effective "garbage in - garbage out" filter triumphs again!). But that's doesn't translate to every and all science fiction books and definitely not to much published the last ten years and the question was about "new science fiction authors". Also I have to question why you have to tell us this... are you trying to save us or are you simply trolling? Anyway, no thanks.

I would say that science fiction has done a lot of growing up the last ten years. There has been a blooming of new writers that both have their technology and their characters right. Maybe not all the time and maybe not both part to perfection, but it's a lot better than in the post war "golden age" (was that the second or third golden age? I lost count...).

As for the original question:

But as others has suggested, try diversifying a bit. Try a bit of horror, a bit of crime, some elitist literature. It's all fun if it's well written. If you are afraid take some on some authors that you already know from science fiction, like Dan Simmons for horror, Asimov for crime. For something that you can pull out of your hat if you should meet a bunch of elitist snobs I recommend Poul Auster (The New York Trilogy is probably a good place to start), sometimes he's so far out that it kind of borders on science fiction or at least fantasy (only they label it magic realism).

My top list of new authors (what was the definition again?), in random order:

Iain (M.) Banks. Both his science fiction and his mainstream fiction is wonderful. His culture novels are not to be missed. Start of with something like Against A Dark Background.

John Barnes: Funny dark and witty often with a very dark view of the future.

Linda Nagata: Most of her (all to few) books work with in the same universe and most looks at the question of what we can make of man.

Peter F. Hamilton: For epic space (soap-) spaceopera this it the guy to go to. Endless never ending pages of action.

Ken MacLeod: For a political (leftwing) look at a possible future Ken is the man. Provoking and interesting alternative the topias of the seventies (his first series is the best - The Fall Revolution).

Neal Stephenson: Cyberpunk (I hate that word) done right. What William Gibson would write if he had the talent.

Greg Egan: Edge technology all the way. Egan always takes his ideas to the limit. Either we go to the lowest level (quantum is just a stop on the way) or we go for the upperlimit (experimenting with the total of totally).

That's it - there are lot's more, but those are some of my favorites. But again, treat your self to something different once in a while, just don't over do it to quickly like when I tried to read one my wifes Karen Blixen novels :-S.

(shameless link to my own site with information all these authors)

Oh, also try picking up a magazine (my favorite is Interzone), that's a good way to find new authors.

1. Open source libs. This is not a matter of OS.
2. MFC sucks. This is not a matter of OS.
3. It's stable. I've never lost a line of code due to a NT crash.
4. Nice editors/tools. This is not a matter of OS.

I can only see three answers to this question

a) You program in and for Linux when your customers ask you to do it and pay you for it.

b) You don't need more money and want to do your bit in the fight agains The Evil Empire.

c) You need to run something on hardware that whon't run Windows.

I know that some people dont like reason a) but this is the world that most of us live in.

TC - SFBook.com
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