The term "grand master of science fiction" summons up, for me at least, the image of a venerable, white-haired author who was speculating upon mankind's future when the idea of putting a human on the moon was still a pipe dream.

But the appellation is a distinct honour, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to a living author who is announced, towards the end of the year, to be the recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award.

The honour is actually presented with the Nebula Awards in May, voting for which has just opened, though it is not strictly a Nebula category in itself. Sometime over the next few weeks, the recipient of the 2013 award will be announced – if there is one. The award – renamed in 2002 in honour of the SFWA's founder – has been presented 29 times in the 38 years since 1975.

It feels like we hear about SF's Grand Masters a lot recently, because sadly many of the recipients are now dying off. In the last couple of years we've lost Frederik Pohl, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Harry Harrison and Anne McCaffrey. Of the 29 people awarded the honour, there are nine surviving – Brian W Aldiss, Ursula K Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, James Gunn, Michael Moorcock, Joe Haldeman, Connie Willis, and the latest incumbent, Gene Wolfe.

This is perhaps unsurprising – the Grand Master is essentially a "lifetime achievement award", and as such goes to a writer who has made a huge impression on the science fiction and fantasy world. The average age upon receipt of the award is 74. The oldest people to receive the honour were all 84 at the time – AE van Vogt in 1996, James Gunn in 2007 and Harry Harrison in 2009. The youngest writer to have been named Grand Master is Connie Willis, who was 66 when she became one in 2011.

The grand masters of SF are a breed apart, it feels, and – inevitably – a dying one at that. The very words evoke a time long gone, when science fiction was about shiny rockets, shiny robots and shiny futures, printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, banged out on clattering typewriters by starving postwar writers in cold-water apartments, dreaming of a better world than the global horrors that had gone just before.

The very names on that list are a roll-call of science fiction's finest … first-ever recipient Robert Heinlein, Clifford D Simak, Andre Norton, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov. Giants in the field. And it makes you wonder … who is left from that generation that is truly a grand master?

We should open a book (for science fictional money only) on who will be named the next one. Unless the SFWA choose to have one of their fallow years, of course, they'll have already chosen the next recipient. Here are a couple of names I'd like to see honoured. It's surely time that Samuel R Delany – "Chip" to his friends – is on that list. If he'd never written a book other than Dhalgren – a dreamlike tale of a mysterious city in the American midwest – he should still be recognised, yet his oeuvre is much wider than that.

The father of Cyberpunk, William Gibson, wrote that at the heart of Dhalgren was a riddle that was "never meant to be solved". And the Neuromancer author is a grand master contender himself – not many writers launch a whole sub-genre, even fewer are responsible for one that enmeshes itself so readily into the wider world.

Had we not lost Doris Lessing at the weekend, I'd have hoped she'd been a shoo-in at some point. Like Lessing, Margaret Atwood has had that career of much broader appeal. Perhaps the science fiction community has now forgiven her sufficiently for that remark about SF and "talking squids in outer space" to finally honour her.

Who else? Terry Pratchett, surely. Eleanor Arnason for her politically-charged SF. CJ Cherryh, whose awards cabinet is groaning with all the biggies, the Hugos and the Locuses, and has written more than 60 novels.

All of those I mentioned have one thing in common – they are "of an age" to be named grand master, if we consider age (on top of talent and a prodigious output) to be a criterion of eligibility.

But let's pause there for a moment. As worthy as all the past winners of the Grand Master award undoubtedly are … what of the next generation? Is it feasible to now cast the grand master net wider, perhaps consider those writers born in the 1950s, or the 1960s? Even someone born as relatively recently as the 1970s could now be in their 40s. Who from that crop would be worthy of the honour?

Perhaps no one … maybe it is right and proper that only an author in their twilight years, with perhaps half-a-century of writing credits behind them, is considered for this title. But what of that other great arena where grandmasters abound – chess? On the chequered board it is talent that holds sway, not age. Consider Boris Spassky, who qualified for grandmaster status at 18. Bobby Fischer – 15! India's Humpy Koneru, also 15.

Comparing chess players and authors is apples and oranges, of course. Maybe chess is something one can be almost supernaturally brilliant at, while writing has to be honed and practised over years, or decades, before the highest level can be attained. But if the title Grand Master of SF is to continue into the future, then today's practitioners are going to have to be in the running at some point.