William Gibson
Cyberpunk's defining writer and the most culturally influential SF author since the Big Three: cyberspace, the Matrix lineage, fashion, music and the entire aesthetic of the networked age trace to Neuromancer.
Steampunk
Victorian (or pseudo-Victorian) worlds of brass, steam and airships, whether played as alternate history, fantasy or both.
The authors (5)
Stephen Hunt
A significant figure in the steampunk and gaslamp revival — the Jackelian books were among the movement's defining commercial successes — and, through SFcrowsnest, one of online genre journalism's genuine pioneers: few people…
China Miéville
The central figure of the New Weird and the most formally restless major fantasist of his generation: Miéville re-opened the weird tradition for the twenty-first century and made genre hybridity itself a respectable literary…
Michael Moorcock
Twice a revolutionary: as editor he made the New Wave happen, and as writer he rewired heroic fantasy with Elric, whose shadow falls on every brooding anti-hero with a cursed weapon since.
Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials raised the ceiling of children's fantasy permanently — Carnegie Medal, Whitbread Book of the Year (the first children's book to win it), and the proof that a bestselling YA epic could carry Milton, Blake and…
Essential books, oldest first (6)
The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Hugo winner (1996); the Primer became a real-world fixation of educational technologists — the genre's most direct blueprint for AI tutoring, decades early.
Northern Lights
Carnegie Medal winner, later voted the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' — the public's favourite winner in the medal's history — and the launch of the trilogy that made children's fantasy a battleground of…
Perdido Street Station
Arthur C.
The Court of the Air
One of the defining novels of the 2000s steampunk revival: a HarperCollins Voyager lead title sold into a dozen-plus languages, launching the six-volume Jackelian sequence and establishing gaslamp…
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
The Jackelian sequence's consensus favourite: the volume that proved the world could support standalone adventures in any genre key, with Amelia Harsh as Hunt's most quoted heroine.
In Dark Service
The opening of the Far-Called trilogy and Hunt's move to Gollancz: his shift from gaslamp whimsy toward darker, continent-spanning epic, demonstrating the post-Jackelian range.