Glenn Myers

My bladder.

A lot of the quirky British humorists over the years (I am British myself though I have had a home address on four continents). So Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett with their wonderful, dry re-interpretation of SF and fantasy tropes. P G Wodehouse, that brilliant stylist.

Anthony Trollope belongs to a different era of course but his books too were playful, poking fun at power and pomposity. And they had a kind of innocence, at least compared to much satire today. (Though some were probably quite pointed for their time like his late 'The Way We Live Now.')

I particularly admire two writers who straddled both fiction and non-fiction and were leaders in their field -- Arthur C Clarke in science and technology and C S Lewis the Christian apologist. Both are an inspiration. They met once in a pub, the atheist and the shabby Anglican academic. Lewis took J R R Tolkein with him, and they shared a drink, disagreed with each other, went their separate ways. Clarke was inventing the geostationary satellite and thought Christianity was gobbledegook. Lewis thought a fridge was a technological step too far and that fairy stories could unveil truth. Both were about the most brilliant men in their field. They agreed to disagree.

Finally, Neal Stephenson combines boundless intellectual questioning with fantastically detailed backgrounds. He's just a delight, utterly brilliant.