Two of my favorite SF authors--for completely different reasons--are the later A E Van Vogt and Larry Niven. Niven is the acknowledged dean of hard SF, while van Vogt was famous for the often dream-like quality of his stories. Both writers have dealt with the interesting question of whether society could survive in a state of anarchy: Van Vogt with his 1977 novel The Anachronistic Colossus and Niven with the short story "Cloak of Anarchy" (which you can read in its entirety here ). Curiously, both arrived at the same conclusion: for anarchy to work, there has to exist an impartial authority with the power to prevent or punish transgressions. Both use ubiquitous monitoring systems that are in virtually every public space, with the power to zap the perpetrators of force or fraud before--or immediately after--they commit an act of aggression. Both systems are designed to run normally without human intervention. Both systems are designed to allow you to do pretty much what...

Nothing in today's world is as out of date as a dead science fiction writer who stopped publishing in the late 1980s when Alzheimer's struck him. The technology in his stories is out of date, his futures have been superseded, and unless someone picks him up for a classic reprint, he's relegated to eBay and the second-hand bookstores. I mean, look at him--even the suit is cheesy. But I want to make the case that you should go out and find, and then read reverently, some of the best (and even some of the worst) of A. E. van Vogt's work. The beginning of modern science fiction is generally traced not to the appearance of the first story by Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, but to the appearance of Van Vogt's Black Destroyer in John W. Campbell's Astounding during the summer of 1939. This story would later become a major inspiration for Ridley Scott's Alien movies. Within a few years Van Vogt would establish himself as one of the titans of science fiction, ...