This thread is kinda familiar...
A few I've found in the last few months:
The Stars My Destination, also published as
Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester. Alfred Bester has not written anything that isn't marvelous; I like all of his stories too, but especially "Fondly Fahrenheit," "The Flowered Thundermug," "Adam and No Eve," "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" ... these stories, I don't know how to describe them, they are funny, and clever. Their structure is akin to Euclidian triangles compared to the shapeless mush of most fiction. I read one reviewer who said that an entire book could be written about literary technique in "Fondly Fahrenheit." Well, I think it'd be an awfully long-winded book; knowing academia, though, it's certainly possible
But it is a masterpiece, no kidding, anyone who hasn't heard of Alfred Bester is MISSING OUT in an unbelievable big-time way.
Well, and these are not novels.
THE GLASS TEAT and
THE OTHER GLASS TEAT by Harlan Ellison, columns on television published in the
LA Free Press (the
Freep) in the early seventies. Harlan Ellison is
also amazing. I think though that he may not translate well to other countries; he's an American writer, and his American-ness permeates his world-view, the things he writes about, the way he writes about them. His essays are some of the best essays I've ever read, especially "Poisoned by the Fangs of Spiro," "Xenogenesis," "The Tombs," "The Common Man." The first and last are columns in THE GLASS TEAT, actually. "Xenogenesis" is about fandom and the psychological and psychotic natures of fandom in science fiction in particular. "The Tombs" is about the US legal system.
Oh yeah, and I like Arthur C. Clarke
I like Asimov and Heinlein sometimes ( not often).