There have been precious few good ones, since. Just Clarke left now, I believe. A damned shame.
Sorry, no. Arthur C. Clarke cashed in his chips in 2008. I’m hard pressed to think of anyone from that 1930s-1940s generation who’s still alive and writing now.
Harlan Ellison is still kicking.
Arthur C. Clarke died in 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke
Sorry.
Frederik Pohl and Jack Vance are about the only Golden Age writers left.
Still plenty ‘New Wave’ sci-fi authors from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, however, and in all fairness, many of them produced some very good stuff.
One writer said there were two flaws in the Golden Age. The first being that writers were paid for volume, not content, often from a nickel to a quarter a word, flat fee; and that content was often just “invent a gizmo and build a plot out of that”, with two dimensional characters.
The New Wave was so popular among writers because it was less about gizmos and more about sociology and cultural adaptation to futuristic change. This was because gizmos had become so common in the real world that they had lost much of their mystique, but in an odd way.
Alvin Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’ was a very accurate reflection of Clake’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; except that “magic is magic”, it is all beyond reach, so there is no way to build it yourself in your garage. It is overwhelming to all but the expert.
So science fiction really had no choice but to move to cultural and sociological reaction to technology. However, this has its own failings, because sociology is a study, not a science, and the cultural breakthrough of one person is laughably juvenile to another. For example the downright silly plot-lines of some of the Star Trek TOS episodes.
Another problem is self indulgence. For example the later writings of some of the Golden Age writers during the New Wave period are just cringe worthy, such as Asimov’s ‘The Gods Themselves’, and Heinlein’s ‘The Number of the Beast’.
(To his credit, Asimov recovered and went back to writing sequels of his Golden Age masterpiece Foundation Series, before his untimely death.)
It is no surprise that the New Wave burned itself out quickly, but since then science fiction has lost its genre labeling, mostly because the publishers were all absorbed into the giant media oligopolies.