This week I asked the following question on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Mastodon: Who are your favorite science fiction novelists under the age of 40 who have had at least two novels published? For future reference, this would be as of July 2, 2025.
As a kid I naturally read mostly people who were considerably older than myself. However, many of their best books were published when they were under 40. Isaac Asimov had numerous novels out before he turned 40, including The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and Foundation. Ursula K. Le Guin, born 1929, saw A Wizard of Earthsea published the year before she turned 40. Robert Heinlein would not have made it onto a list such as this at any point, or maybe just for a few months, because his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, came out the year he turned 40, 1947. (I had forgotten how much older he was than Asimov. When I was a kid, they seemed like peers.)
In the years after I graduated from college, I was reading novelists who were closer to me in age. Many remain favorites to this day who were well under 40 when I was getting into them (Neal Stephenson: Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age; William Gibson: Neuromancer, Count Zero; Jonathan Lethem: Gun, with Occasional Music; Amnesia Moon; As She Climbed Across the Table; Girl in Landscape; Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude — jeepers).
Earlier this year, I re-read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which was published in 1999, the year he turned 40. For dessert, as it were, I re-read “Mother Earth Mother Board,” the fantastic non-fiction article he wrote for the magazine Wired in 1996. That got me wondering: if Wired were to assign an author under 40 years of age an article like that — a globe-trotting endeavor in hacker journalism amounting to well over 40,000 words — who would write it, and what would the topic be?
And that thinking helped me recognize that while I’ve read many science fiction authors while they were under 40 but no longer are under 40, as well as many science fiction novels, albeit after the fact, written by authors when they were under 40, I’m not at this moment reading a lot of science fiction authors who are currently under 40 (excluding comics, manga, graphic novels, etc.).
Which is why I asked. And various people helpfully responded with the following:
Marie-Helene Bertino*
Gautam Bhatia
Pierce Brown
S. A. Chakraborty
Alix E. Harrow
C. A. Higgins
S. L. Huang**
R. F. Kuang***
Masande Ntshanga
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Tochi Onyebuchi****
Eliot Peper*****
Grant Price
V. E. Schwab
Emily Tesh
*I’ve started Beautyland, and I’m digging it.
**I’ve read Zero Sum Game.
***I’ve read Babel.
****I read a third of Goliath and should get back to it.
*****I’ve got a copy of Breach waiting for me.
