But I'm afraid he's not one of my favourites. My criterion for a favourite author is that there should be at most two books that I did not like, which cuts down the numbers a lot. Top of my list is James H. Schmitz, closely followed by Jack Vance, Eric Frank Russell, and J. T. McIntosh. The more prolific and better-known authors IMHO all suffered a fall in quality in their later days. Heinlein, Clarke, etc.; all their later books didn't stand up to the ones they wrote in their early and middle careers.