Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS, Sri Lankabhimanya, (16
December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author,
inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among
them 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the
British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A.
Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of
science fiction.
Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor and
technician from 1941–1946. He proposed a satellite communication system
in 1945 which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold
Medal in 1963. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society
from 1947–1950 and again in 1953.
Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 largely to pursue his interest in
scuba diving; that year, he discovered the underwater ruins of the
ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. He lived in Sri Lanka until
his death. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998, and was
awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.
Then from using another of my reviews:
Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British
blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor
of the weblog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising
copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization,
using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his
work include digital rights management, file sharing, and
"post-scarcity" economics.
and lastly from a third review:
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was
an award-winning American author of novels, essays, and short stories,
and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was
widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most
influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years". Wallace's
unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.