Very little that's been published in the last several years is worth a damn.

However if you look for names like: Ben Bova, Greg Bear, Frank Herbert, Roger Selazny, Gene Wolf, Larry Niven, Dan Simmons, Raymond Feist (Feist is sort of fantasy).

Dan Simmons has some recent work. He draws on literary classics and constructs insanely good worlds from them for his science fiction and terror novels. Illium is one he did using the Greek classics.

SF is riddled with subgenres, but I have a particular fondness for New Wave, which had its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. One of the best collections during that time was Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison. Also, take a look at Ray Bradbury's story collections. Offhand, I can't recall any short fiction by Robert Silverberg that stayed with me, though several of his novels have.

To even up the genders a bit -- I'm having a hard time remembering short fiction by these women, but among my favorites are Pamela Sargent, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Russ, and Suzette Haden Elgin. Two recent short stories by women that I highly enjoyed were Jennifer Pelland's "Captive Girl," a Nebula Award finalist that originally appeared in Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly and that may now be read here:
transcriptase.org/fiction/p...tive-girl/

and Lisa Mantchev's "Perfect Tense" in Electric Velocipede #14. EV is currently on the ballot for a Hugo Award. (As an aside, I also have a story in that issue.) Another excellent story by Mantchev, this one more in the magical realism camp, is "A Dance Across Embers" in Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld is also on the Hugo ballot), available here:
clarkesworldmagazine.com/mantchev_10_07/

To broaden the scope, there's the anthology Speculative Japan, edited by Gene Van Troyer and Grania Davis (Kurodahan Press, 2007), which includes some older work, much of it translated into English for the first time. Several stories in there blew me away, particularly Yano Tetsu's "The Legend of the Paper Spaceship."

And I would be remiss if I didn't immodestly mention one of my own, if only because it made me a 1985 John W. Campbell Award finalist for best new SF writer of the year: "Lazuli," published in the Nov. 1984 Asimov's. The Campbell Award is given at Worldcon along with the Hugos. The winner that year was Lucius Shepard for his novel Green Eyes.

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions... 'preciate it folks, and I'll start going through some of this now....

tim