Alfred Bester

Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man won science fiction's first-ever Hugo Award, and along with The Stars My Destination it helped establish the genre's modern voice — dense, psychologically driven, formally inventive in ways earlier pulp writers hadn't attempted. Fellow author Harry Harrison credited him as one of the small handful of writers who essentially invented modern science fiction. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him a Grand Master shortly before his death in 1987, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001.