Wisdom of the Internet, I ask for your help

[jamjar]

Throwing myself on the mercy of the internet: can you give me the names of any living and active writers you particularly like. The writers should be thinky people,* but their books don't have to be Deep Worthy Tomes- middlebrow is ideal, genre is fine. Also preferably female, but this isn't massively important.

*Thinky people is a bit vague, and is kind of "I know them when I meet them/read their work/listen to an interview.", but I mean the people that give the impression of liking to think, liking to know and learn and explore and analyse, whatever field they write in.

ETA sorry, should have mentioned that they should be fiction writers, rather than non-fiction.

Comments

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

Have you read Nation yet? Picked it, up, read it all in one sitting, staying up too late to finish it off.

(and, becasue it's one of my favourite quotes, Ken McLeod on the difference between technothrillers and science fiction: "I think there's a distinction between science fiction and techno-thriller. The sort of thing that Michael Crichton writes is different from the sort of thing that Paul McAuley writes. Even when what Paul McAuley writes looks like a techno-thriller, he's actually sneakily writing science fiction in disguise. I attempt now and again to do the same thing. The difference is that in the techno-thriller, the lab eventually gets burned down, the genie gets back in the bottle, the evil scientist is defeated and so on. That's not the spirit of science fiction at all.")

[http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/]

The difference is that in the techno-thriller, the lab eventually gets burned down, the genie gets back in the bottle, the evil scientist is defeated and so on. That's not the spirit of science fiction at all. I like that very much! Change (happening or already happened) is one of the defining characteristics of science fiction.