Who is your favorite author?

Charles Dickens. That was easy, but many of the subjects I am interested in are not covered by Charles Dickens and perhaps even more important, had not been thought of or invented in his time. We therefore need to qualify the question. Who is your favourite fiction writer? Answer; Charles Dickens. Lets try again, who is your favourite 'Modern' fiction writer?

We now have a problem of what is 'Modern'.My dictionary states that it means, 1. of the present or a recent time; contemporary. 2. of contemporary styles or schools of art, literature and music, esp. those of an experimental kind. 3. a contemporary person. In the dictionary 'Modern' is followed by 'Modern English', defined as 'the English language since about 1450'. Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870. I have looked up the word 'contemporary' which I suggest means Yes, or No.  So my answer to your question 'who is your favourite 'Modern' fiction writer' is Charles Dickens.

If you are at the point of literary development of saying Charles...who? or yes I have heard of Charles Dickens, wasn't he the chap that used to write those articles in the 'News of the World', then we need to press on. In his fifty-eight years and four months of life Charles Dickens wrote:-
Fourteen novels, five 'Christmas Books', fifty short stories, six plays, A Child's History of England' the 'Life of Our Lord ' two travel  books, two hundred and fifty essays and articles on virtually every subject under the sun with countless editorial contributions to articles published in 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round'.

I  like the work of Neville Shute, he writes good fiction which is nice to read, but in all his books there is a true, historical or geographical fact  on which truth  or fiction is established. He has written some twenty books but the two I like best are 'A Town Like Alice'  and 'On The Beach'. Both became successful films and from time to time reappear on television.
It is not my intention to tell you the whole story of  'On The Beach'  just the fact on which the story hinges. Two or three years before the book begins there has been a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere and the populations of even the countries not involved in the war have been wiped by radio-active fall-out.  The radio-active contamination has circled the globe and is steadily moving south, killing as it goes.The story is based in Australia and there is evidence to show that towns in the Northern Territories are being wiped out, this cannot be correct!

We can all remember that when we were at school, doing history and geography, when  exploration communications and trade was done using sailing ships. Ships sailing from South America would often be caught in the 'doldrums'  A place between the northern and southern hemispheres that was almost a dead calm and sometimes several weeks would pass before the ship could make headway. Therefore the winds between the north and south never met.

In his book Neville Shute established that although the north and southern winds did not intermingle the north wind could push the 'doldrums'six hundred miles south, and in its turn the southern wind would push the 'doldrums' six hundred miles north. On their return journeys the north wind would carry radio-active fallout south and the southern wind would collect the fallout and transport it south. Hence, the whole world was slowly becoming radio-active, beyond a level at which people could survive.