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Ernest Cline

Born March 29, 1972, is an American novelist, slam poet, and screenwriter. He is known for his novels Ready Player One and Armada; he also co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg.

In June 2010, Cline sold his first novel, Ready Player One, a book that takes place in a dystopian vision of the 2040s. The book is about a kid who tries to solve the keys to find a billionaire's wealth in a sort of competition. The book was sold in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The film rights to the novel were sold the following day, to Warner Bros., with Cline co-writing the screenplay. Ten months later, with the hardcover release coinciding with the paperback release, Cline revealed on his blog that both the paperback and hardcover editions of Ready Player One contain an elaborately hidden Easter egg. This clue formed the first part of a series of staged video gaming tests, similar to the plot of the novel. Cline also revealed that the competition's grand prize would be a 1981 DeLorean. The prize was awarded in 2012. The paperback is currently in its 17th printing.

Cline's second novel, Armada, was released on July 14, 2015, by Crown Publishing Group. On December 7, 2015, Cline announced the sale of the film rights to Armada to Universal Pictures for a reported seven-figure sum.

A third novel was announced in August 2015. It has been confirmed that this novel is to be a sequel to Ready Player One.

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2020s SciFi to Sci Fact

Does science fiction imitate reality or does reality mirror science fiction? Police uniform of 2019 in Blade Runner (1982) and the Portuguese police today use visors safe against COVID-19.

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Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Isaac Asimov

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Cixin Liu

Is a Chinese science fiction writer. He is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award (China's most prestigious literary science fiction award), winner of the 2015 Hugo Award (for The Three-Body Problem) and the 2017 Locus Award (for Death's End).

Liu (born 23 June 1963) cites British authors George Orwell and Arthur C. Clarke as important literary influences. He was labeled the first cyberpunk Chinese author after his novel, China 2185, was published in 1989. In English translations of his works, his name is given in the form Cixin Liu.

Liu's most famous work, The Three-Body Problem, was published in 2007 (it is the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy) and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the third volume of the Remembrance of Earth's Past series, Death's End, was published in 2016. Death's End was a 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist and won a 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

The cinematic adaptation of his short story The Wandering Earth was released in China on February 5, 2019, which became the second highest-grossing film in the Chinese box office within 2 weeks. 

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Andrew Taylor "Andy" Weir

Born June 16, 1972, is an American novelist whose debut novel in 2011, The Martian, was later adapted into a film of the same name directed by Ridley Scott in 2015. He received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016.

Weir began writing science fiction in his twenties and published work on his website for years. He also authored a humour web comic called Casey and Andy featuring fictionalized "mad scientist" versions of himself and his friends (such as writer Jennifer Brozek) from 2001 to 2008; he also briefly worked on another comic called Cheshire Crossing bridging Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins. The attention these gained him has been attributed as later helping launch his writing career, following the failure to publish his first novel attempt called Theft of Pride. His first work to gain significant attention was "The Egg", a short story that has been adapted into a number of YouTube videos, a one-act play, and is the overarching concept of Everybody, the third album by American rapper Logic.

Weir is best known for his first published novel, The Martian. He wrote the book to be as scientifically accurate as possible, and his writing included extensive research into orbital mechanics, conditions on the planet Mars, the history of manned spaceflight, and botany. Originally published as a free serial on his website, some readers requested he make it available on Amazon Kindle. First sold for 99 cents, the novel made it to the Kindle bestsellers list. Weir was then approached by a literary agent and sold the rights of the book to Crown Publishing Group. The print version (slightly edited from the original) of the novel debuted at #12 on The New York Times bestseller list. The Wall Street Journal called the novel, "the best pure sci-fi novel in years". It was made into a film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, which was released October 2, 2015.

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Octavia Butler

As an African American woman, Octavia Butler broke numerous barriers with her extraordinary fiction, emerging at a time when few writers of color could be found in the field.

Butler produced two major series. The five-volume Patternist series tells of a society that is run by a specially-bred group of telepaths. Her Xenogenesis trilogy deals with the destruction of humanity by nuclear war and gene-swapping extraterrestrials. A standalone book, Kindred, relocates a present-day black woman to a pre-Civil War plantation through time travel.

Butler’s later novels Parable of the Sower (a Nebula award nominee), and Parable of the Talents (a Nebula award winner), form a diptych of a dystopian near-future America, seen through the eyes of a remarkable black woman, Lauren Olamina, and her daughter Larkin.

In 1995 Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for pushing the boundaries of science fiction. In 2000, she received the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award.

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1980s

Now imagine the summer of 1980. The United States had been defeated in a seven-year war — not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam. The nation was seen, and saw itself, as being in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam, it was then expelled from Iran as well, where the oil fields, which it no longer controlled, seemed about to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. To contain the Soviet Union, the United States had formed an alliance with Maoist China— the American president and the Chinese chairman holding an amiable meeting in Beijing. Only this alliance seemed able to contain the powerful Soviet Union, which appeared to be surging. In Iran, after a disastrous military rescue attempt, a group of American hostages are saved by a science fiction fake movie.

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Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem (1921 — 2006) was a prominent Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His work explores philosophical themes; speculation about technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair in the face of human limitations and the place of humanity in the universe. His most notable works of science fiction include Solaris (1961), The Futurological Congress (1971) and Golem XIV (1981).

“Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way.” ― Stanislaw Lem