I love LeGuin!  The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite novels.  She knows how to strike a perfect balance of "genre" and "literary" style.

Jacqueline Carey, hands down. For daring, originality and sheer beauty of language.

Yes, I always recommend that people who have not read Octavia Butler start with Kindred, because of its accessibility.

Octavia Butler was an amazing writer and so nice, too. I love the Parable books especially, and I've taught Kindred many times. Such an accessible but profound book.

Anitra, Butler is one of my favorites as well. Her stories are so rich and intricate in their relationships and sociology.

The first one that comes to mind is Octavia E. Butler. I love that she writes really rich characters and that her work is like a mix of speculative fiction and sociology. All of her works seems to me to be about how beings function in community, in and out groups, etc. It's awesome.

There's no way I could ever choose... but I will say that the book I think had the most impact on me and my love for spec fiction was called 'Shadow Castle' by Marion Cockrell. I don't think she ever wrote another book... I found a copy at my grandmother's house as a child, and my mother's name was inside... I remember reading it, loving it, and finding out afterward that it had been one of my mother's favorite books when she was young. I loaned it to my cousin and for years afterward, we'd switch the book back and forth whenever we saw each other. A few years ago, a publisher re-issued the book with some extra material in it, and I learned that many people from my mother's generation grew up loving the book and hadn't been able to find a copy for years and years until that re-issue. Anyway, the story isn't the best, and the writing isn't the greatest, but as a child, I remember loving the book so much that I sought out other stories like it... and the rest is history.

Hi Ripley, You have two of my four favorite speculative authors on your list. I love Lois McMaster Bujold's Palidan of Souls and The Curse of Chalion. I also love Ursula K. LeGuin, Juliet Marillier, and Patricia McKillip. Like you said, Ursula K. LeGuin has written several valuable essay collections on both writing, and writing fantasy fiction. Her novels for both adults and young adults are written lyrically and with honesty. Juliet Marillier is a master at characterization and description. Patricia McKillip writes poetically, with a dreamlike narrative. When I was a child, I read mysteries, some of them with magical elements. Ursula K. LeGuin's The Wizard of Earthsea was my first fantasy, read when I was twenty for a children's literature class, and I fell in love with the genre. Of course, I can't forget mentioning J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which I read and enjoyed as an adult, impressed by his complex sentences, unexpected warmth and humor, and compelling story structure.

I would probably have to say Ursula K. LeGuin as my all time, though I love Lois McMaster Bujold and Anne McCaffrey as well. I love Ursula's fiction, but she also has some amazing books of essays on being a woman writer, especially of Spec Fic.

Oh, man, can't choose! I can say that two of my favorite books of all time are _The Perilous Gard_ and _Crown Duel_ (the latter by Sherwood Smith, who is certainly one of my favorite spec fic writers; I think her prose is amazing). Those two have lasted the test of time from my teen years, and the female leads are so heartwrenchingly true-to-life that they've stuck with me since first reading. _Graceling_ by Kristin Cashore, _The Glassmaker's Daughter_ by V. Briceland, and _Shiver_ by Maggie Stiefvater are too new to tell, but they may end up near the top of the list as well. My other spec fic favorites are in entirely different veins -- and most of the people I'm reading are (like the last three novels I listed) still too new to me to see if they're long lasting residents on my bookshelf.