I would like to say up front that I think this is an excellent web site, and I am sorry to see that it has become somewhat moribund. The links to Amazon and ABEBooks no longer seem to work, so I am concerned that the creator of the site is deriving no revenue from it. I have enjoyed this site for a while and there are authors such as Charles G. Finney, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Mervyn Peake that I would probably never have read had I not seen them recommended on this site.
The creator (Owlcroft) clearly has a definite point of view and a sense of style, and the authors he recommends are all highly enjoyable. His point of view does, I think, lead him to overlook a type of literary quality which many more 'orthodox' readers of science fiction do recognize. In the spirit of being a devil's advocate, and in the hope of perhaps kicking off some worthwhile discussion, I wondered if I could assemble twelve five star masters from names that are not in this site, without lowering the level of literary quality: twelve names with the same sort of literary sweep as Owlcroft's. That would be a bit of a task, since to assemble my own personal list of twelve star masters I would have liked to poach some of Owlcroft's, but in the spirit of the game, I came up with a list of twelve who are excluded from this site and who, in my more 'orthodox' eyes, are worthy of recognition. So I am now proposing a 'dark twin' twelve five star masters:
Isaac Asimov
Arthur C. Clarke
Philip K. Dick
Frank Herbert
Aldous Huxley
Madeleine L'Engle
George Orwell
Mary Shelley
Jules Verne
Kurt Vonnegut
H. G. Wells
Yevgeny Zamyatin
And I still have William Gibson in my back pocket.