The great science fiction series
The Hothouse Series - essay by Brian W. Aldiss
Hothouse - novelette by Brian W. Aldiss
The Nicholas van Rijn Series - essay by Poul Anderson
A Little Knowledge - novelette by Poul Anderson
The Wendell Urth Series - essay by Isaac Asimov
The Talking Stone - short story by Isaac Asimov
The Vermilion Sands Series - essay by J. G. Ballard
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D - short story by J. G. Ballard
Introduction to "Bridge" - essay by James Blish and J. A. Lawrence [as by James Blish and Judith Blish]
The Cities in Flight Series - essay by James Blish and J. A. Lawrence [as by James Blish and Judith Blish]
Bridge - novelette by James Blish
Introduction to "Surface Tension" - essay by James Blish and J. A. Lawrence [as by James Blish and Judith Blish]
The Pantropy Series - essay by James Blish and J. A. Lawrence [as by James Blish and Judith Blish]
Surface Tension - novelette by James Blish
The Feghoot Series - essay by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot - short story by Reginald Bretnor (variant of Feghoot XCVII) [as by Grendel Briarton]
The White Hart Series - essay by Arthur C. Clarke
The Reluctant Orchid - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
Introduction to "The Ancestral Amethyst" - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Tales from Gavagan's Bar Series - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
The Ancestral Amethyst - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
The People Series - essay by Zenna Henderson
Ararat - novelette by Zenna Henderson
The Retief Series - essay by Keith Laumer
Ballots and Bandits - novelette by Keith Laumer
The Change War Series - essay by Fritz Leiber
No Great Magic - novella by Fritz Leiber
The Dragon Series - essay by Anne McCaffrey
The Smallest Dragonboy - short story by Anne McCaffrey
The Helva Series - essay by Anne McCaffrey
The Ship Who Sang - novelette by Anne McCaffrey
The Known Space Series - essay by Larry Niven
A Relic of the Empire - novelette by Larry Niven
The Berserker Series - essay by Fred Saberhagen
Sign of the Wolf - short story by Fred Saberhagen
The Slow Glass Series - essay by Bob Shaw
Burden of Proof - short story by Bob Shaw
The AAA Ace Series - essay by Robert Sheckley
The Lifeboat Mutiny - short story by Robert Sheckley
The In Hiding Series - essay by Wilmar H. Shiras
Opening Doors - novelette by Wilmar H. Shiras
The City Series - essay by Clifford D. Simak
Aesop - novelette by Clifford D. Simak
The Instrumentality Series - essay by John J. Pierce
The Game of Rat and Dragon - short story by Cordwainer Smith
Introduction to "The Game of Rat and Dragon" - essay by John J. Pierce
Notes on Contributors (The Great Science Fiction Series) - essay by uncredited
American Science fiction, English Science fiction, Science fiction
Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, Brian W. Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, James Blish, Reginald Bretnor, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague De Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Zenna Henderson, Keith Laumer, Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven, Fred Saberhagen, Robert Sheckley, Wilmar H. Shiras, Clifford D. Simak, John J. Pierce
Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York.  His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven.  He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family.  As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians.  His first publication, a poem, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937, when he was 18 years old.  In 1936, he joined the Young Communist League and became President of the Brooklyn branch, but he left it in 1939 after Stalin-Hitler pact.  In 1939, at the age of 21, he was editor of both Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories, and regularly published his own stories in both of them.  He married his first wife in 1940.  In 1943 both the magazines he was editing folded, and he worked as a literary agent.  During World War II, he served with the Army Air Corps from 1945-1945.  He divorced his first wife during this period and married his second wife in 1945.  In 1948 he married his third wife, Judith Merril, who he divorced in 1953, the same year he married his fourth wife, Carol Metcal Ulf.

In the early 1950s his literary agency business failed and he returned to editing as an assistant editor at Galaxy Science Fiction and later also if Magazine.  In 1966, 1967, and 1968 his magazines won Hugo Awards for Best Professional Magazines.  In the 1970s he acquired and edited novels for the "Frederik Pohl Selections" series of Bantam Books.  He also began to emerge as a novel writer, and went on to win Nebula awards for fiction in 1976 and 1977 and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.  He married his current wife, science fiction editor and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull, PhD, in 1984.  He continues to write from his home in Palatine, Illinois. || Martin Harry Greenberg (March 1, 1941 – June 25, 2011) was an American academic and anthologist in many genres, including mysteries and horror, but especially in speculative fiction. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. He was also a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel. Greenberg was also an expert in terrorism and the Middle East. He was a longtime friend, colleague and business partner of Isaac Asimov. || Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.

Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously.

Source: Goodreads || Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers.  Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.  His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old.  He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942.  During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.  After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948.  He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards. || James Graham Ballard was born and raised in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China to a chemist. In 1943 the Japanese occupied the International Settlement and Ballard's family was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, where they were interned for two years until the end of World War II. In 1946, Ballard went to England with his mother and sister, and stayed on in England after his mother and sister returned to China to rejoin his father. In 1949 he went to King's College, Cambridge to study medicine, but he began writing fiction and abandoned medicine in 1952 to pursue writing. In 1953 he joined the Air Force and was sent to the Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan to train. There he discovered science fiction in and he began to write science fiction. He left the RAF in 1954 and returned to England. In 1956 he published his science fiction story. In 1960 he committed to writing full-time. || Blish trained as a biologist at Rutgers and Columbia University, and spent 1942–1944 as a medical technician in the U.S. Army. After the war he became the science editor for the Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company. His first published story appeared in 1940, and his writing career progressed until he gave up his job to become a professional writer. He married literary agent Virginia Kidd in 1947. He worked for the Tobacco Institute from 1962-1968.  In 1968, he emigrated to England. Between 1967 and his death in 1975, he became the first author to write short story collections based on the TV series Star Trek. In total, he wrote 11 volumes of short stories adapted from episodes of the series, as well as an original novel, Spock Must Die! in 1970. He died midway through writing Star Trek 12; his second wife, J. A. Lawrence, completed the book, and later completed the adaptations in the volume Mudd's Angels. || Reginald Bretnor is a pseudonym of Alfred Reginald Kahn.

"Reginald Bretnor was a science fiction author who flourished between the 1950s and 1980s. Most of his fiction was in short story form, and usually featured a whimsical story line or ironic plot twist." Wikipedia || Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE FRAS was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.

He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, which appeared in various popular magazines. In 1961 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize, an award which is given by UNESCO for popularising science. These along with his science fiction writings eventually earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership made him one of the towering figures of science fiction. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.

Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system using geostationary orbits. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946–1947 and again in 1951–1953.

Clarke emigrated from England to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1956, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. Clarke augmented his fame later on in the 1980s, from being the host of several television shows such as Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death.

Clarke was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka". He was knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

---From Wikipedia || Lyon Sprague de Camp — known as L. Sprague de Camp — was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction and biography. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and works of non-fiction, including biographies of other fantasy authors. - Wikipedia || Murray Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and history. He is best known for his works on naval history and on the American Civil War and for fiction written with L. Sprague de Camp. || Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having coined the term. 

**Source**: [Fritz Leiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Leiber) on Wikipedia. || Laurence van Cott Niven — known as Larry Niven — is an American science fiction writer. His best-known work is Ringworld (1970), which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him the 2015 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. It also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes the series The Magic Goes Away, rational fantasy dealing with magic as a non-renewable resource.

Niven was born in Los Angeles. He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. On September 6, 1969, he married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, a science fiction and Regency literature fan. He is an agnostic.

Source: Wikipedia || Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was an American writer. First published in the science-fiction magazines of the 1950s, his many quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical.

Nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards, Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. || Clifford Donald Simak (August 3, 1904 – April 25, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award.The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master,[4] and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.[5] He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.