Between KSR's Hopes and Ballard's Nightmares

It's J.G. Ballard's future. We're just living in it.:

That's why my favourite SF writer over the last decade or so is Kim Stanley Robinson. His best books, notably his Mars Trilogy, bring together everything I have loved in SF over the years: there's the hard-SF world-building, the fascination with the interaction of characters adapting to a new environment, the politics of inhabiting and organizing a new world, and under it all an enduring sense of wonder at the strangeness and beauty of the universe. That's the sort of SF I like to read, and the sort of SF that, when I can, I like to write.