My father had the right of it. He once told me that, as I learned to read and enjoyed reading more and more, I would find that certain authors' works would catch my fancy more and more, and I would spend a lot of time reading the works by those authors. He was right about that. My science fiction reading was no exception to this rule, although I have to admit that it would have been interesting, if he had lived long enough, to see what he thought of my taste in authors within the sf and fantasy field. His encouragement to read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Asimov's Foundation and its sequels, and other works like those of Edgar Rice Burroughs started me off on the road to science fiction, but I discovered a lot of other sf and fantasy authors whose worlds, universes, characters, and cultures intrigued me.
Science fiction has changed since I first started reading it in the mid-1960's. Heck, it changed even before that...but I'm not a chronicler of the changes that occured within the field. There are likely a few places on the Web where one can see this side of things discussed in detail, but here I merely intend to discuss some of my favourite authors. Or at least, give you a short page a about each of my favourite authors. You'll find the list below to be somewhat intensive of my tastes in science fiction and fantasy, although I admit that I've changed quite a bit since I first started reading the tales written in this genre.
There are quite a few authors out there, whose works I very much appreciate and have grown fond of over the years. Below are some of my favourite authors. The pages that these links lead to are my own thoughts on these authors works, and will lead you to other web sites as well.
Please note that I'm always looking for comments on this listing of authors and am interested in finding Web sites for any of the authors above whose Web sites I am unaware of. Any changes or additions to the book lists that I've presented for these authors is also welcome, so please feel free to e-mail me at jkahane@comnet.ca about stuff.