the fuck?

I can pay my bill online, adjust, add or remove any services, but I have to call a number and wait on hold to cancel the goddamn phone service?

Edit: 40 minutes on hold before I could cancel my service. And yes, I already have the new cell phone.

So where are the good currently writing science fiction authors?

I'm serious here. I grew up reading Heinlein and some Asimov (I have trouble getting into some of his stories), and a few other good science-fiction authors.

But the majority of it was from the 50s, 60s and early 70s.

For the life of me, I cannot think of the last "recently published" science fiction I could get into other then David Gerrold's "War Against the Chtorr" books, and even that's pushing the boundaries of "recently published", as the fourth (aka the most recent) book came out in 1993.

Is it because we actually have computers and cell phones and video phones and shit like that? I mean, hell, they just did the first test of an actual flying car the other day. But is that the big reason? Because a lot of the tech that Heinlein and others talked about is here? I mean, sure, we don't have commercial rocket ships flying tourists on intergalactic cruises, or humanoid robots serving us coffee at Starbucks (yet), but we do have what amounts to near instantaneous communication around the world, and practically a day doesn't go by without some new weird toy, tool, or device coming out of Japan. (And amazingly only about 30% of them seem to show what remarkable perverts the Japanese are.)

Or it just that I'm looking in the wrong bookstores? I don't want more J. Random Author's take on insignificant character from Star Wars. I don't want another Star Trek book. Where's the good science fiction? I can't fucking swing a dead rat without hitting a halfway decent sword-and-sorcery book (or a dead flea without hitting some crap trying to foist itself off on a post-Harry Potter society), but that's not what I'm looking for.

Suggestions as to authors I should look at? Anyone?