It’s the birthday of science fiction and fantasy author Connie Willis (b. 1945), known as one of SF’s premier humorists and also known for winning more major SF awards than anyone else, including 11 Hugos and seven Nebulas. (For the record: Robert Heinlein won the most Hugos for Best Novel with six wins out of [...]
It’s the birthday of two hugely influential science fiction authors who were both fond of their middle initials: Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008, #nicelonglife), best known for the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Philip K. Dick (1928-1982, #diedtooyoung), best known for the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), adapted into [...]
It’s the birthday of Frederik Pohl (1919-2013, #nicelonglife), award-winning science fiction author whose work was often highly political and anti-utopian. One of his novels alone, Gateway (1977), won Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and his 1979 novel Jem: The Making of a Utopia won the only National Book Award for Science [...]
It’s the birthday of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), whose speculative fiction had both vast commercial success and strong literary cred and who is perhaps best known for her 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, set in a world of androgynous people who shift between male and female. Le Guin (originally Kroeber) was born [...]
It’s the birthday of hard science fiction author Larry Niven (b. 1938), known for his big buttery handfuls of fascinating ideas and especially for his novel Ringworld (1970), now considered a classic of the genre. (NB: Hard science fiction refers to science fiction that explores actual scientific ideas with accuracy and logic. As the physicist [...]
It’s the birthday of science-fiction author Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011, #nicelonglife), the first woman to win a Hugo Award (1968) and the first woman to win a Nebula Award (1969). McCaffrey is best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series which features, you know, dragons. And the people who ride them. McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, [...]