With a nickname like "father of science fiction" there is only one author that fits the description of being the most influential of all time; H. G. Wells. This is the guy who wrote The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The First Men in the Moon. If you want even more proof, there is even a crater on Mars called "Woking", named after the place where Wells was based while he wrote War of the Worlds.

Surely it has to be Lionel Fanthorpe. The man is a legend; who else can write almost two hundred novels in just over twelve years. He also wrote most of his stories based on the cover art his publisher sent him, which is impressive in itself.

One of the greatest science fiction films of all time is Blade Runner and it is based on a novel by Philip K. Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The list goes on, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, and Next are all films that are based on Dick's work. The only reason why more people don't know about how influential he is, is because many of these films use different titles. In addition to the 44 novels he published, Dick also wrote hundreds of short stories for sci-fi magazines and he is the very first sci-fi writer to ever be included in The Library of America series. It is a crying shame that he died at such a young age (53) as he probably had plenty of other masterpieces that he could have given the world.

Science fiction is a pretty broad genre, with lots of sub categories, so it is impossible to really crown one author as "the most influential." In a sense they all copied ideas from each other or incorporated ideas that they liked in their own work. One author that can really be classified as not just influential, but truly visionary for his particular genre is William Gibson. It is one of the first books to really bring cyberpunk to the attention of mainstream readers. Gibson even came up with the term "cyberspace" which is a word everyone used as soon as the World Wide Web started to become a part of daily life. Even one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, The Matrix, is based heavily on the work of Gibson.