Books

Roadside Picnic is awesome. It inspired the film stalker. I loved it.

While nothing like Dan Simmons, The Three Body Problem is the only one that has knocked my socks off in the last 10 years. If you want to stick with Simmons I recommend Song of Kali.

You read the expanse series?

The second Hyperion book. Immediately followed by Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks. It has the same approachable writing style, doesn't overstay it's welcome, has similar deliciously out-there sci-fi, and I think may also be inspired by touchstone poetry.

• Octavia Butler
• Ursula K Le Guin

E: Markdown

Maybe Iain M. Banks' Culture series, if you're not familiar with his work already. The books are generally standalobe stories, but there are some recurring side characters and references to earlier books. Consider Phlebas is the first one I think.

Ursula K. LeGuin's Always Coming Home is an intriguing approach to novel writing. Some can't get into it because it looks more like an ethnologist's report, but there is a story there (and I don't mean the segments with Stone Telling: the entire novel has a story that rewards those who pay attention).

The Book of the New Sun (really 4 books) gave me the feeling of reading Dune, Hyperion, and Lord of the Rings kind of wrapped into one.

I would also recommend the 4th Dune book (God Emporor), as it wraps up where the first 3 books were going with the Golden Path. After that, he starts a new trilogy, which doesn't get finished, so results may vary.

Very surprised I haven't seen Red Rising mentioned.

I suggest the Commonwealth's saga by Peter F. Hamilton (Pandora's star, Judas unchained).

I fucking did not like that book. I did not like any of the characters. Grrrr to that book. That is all. I guess in saying I wouldn't go more Hyperion. Do Revelation Space Series. Much better.

If you're into a rich narrative and deep references, don't miss Cryptononicon and the whole Baroque cycle by Neal Stephenson.

Blindsight by Peter watts.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,” recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist – an informational topologist with half his mind gone – as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex, also known as the striate cortex or Brodmann Area 17. --Wikipedia

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. If you like it (and I think you will) there are more in the series.

I wouldn't recommend Anderson Dune books.

Pohl has some classics Heechee Saga Space Merchants Man Plus

Ringworld

Vernor Vinge: Fire Upon the Deep

John Scalzi: Old Mans War Series

Wraeththu Chronicles by Storm Constantine.

Simmons' books "Illum" and "Odessey" are pretty great and feel like the same universe

If you're wanting a break from the serious sci-fi, take a look at Expeditionary Force, it's hilarious.

Some of my suggestions:

• Forever War - due to time dilation this story follows combatants that spend decades at war while on earth hundreds of years pass (inspired by the Vietnam War).
• Stanger in a Strange Land - Story of a human raised by Martians coming to earth. Has similar religious notes as dune and hyperion, but also has a weird Ayn Rand vibe (in my opinion, also not necessarily in a bad way).

I didn't really like the Hyperion series much myself, but both Dune and Hyperion are sci-fi with religious elements. Maybe A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is fine, but it's not Bladerunner so yeah it might be jarring. It's also not even close to his best work imo.

Some of my favorite Dick novels: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly. I think those are his two best imo. The Man in the High Castle is pretty good, but not at all indicative of his other work.

Now Wait for Last Year, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, are also pretty good. I liked what I read of UBIK, but didn't finish it. I have a friend that swears by it though.

Some people swear by his latter stuff (e.g. VALIS), but I was never able to get into it. You can kind of see his mind starting to slip as you read his stuff (which leads to some incredibly mind bending shit in his early-mid works), and by the end, it's kind of nonsensical imo.

It's kind of tragic to read about his life at the time he was writing. The afterword of A Scanner Darkly goes into some detail, including listing the names of friends that "didn't make it" (usually due to drugs). Later, during the VALIS years, he was having full-own psychotic breaks and hallucinatory events where he thought he was Thomas from the Bible, living in ancient Rome or some shit. And his writing started to reflect all of this.

I've only read the first Hyperion book (and fucking loved it), but keep in mind, Dick wrote a different kind of sci-fi that was more about exploring consciousness, existence, the concept of self, psychedelic drugs, etc. as opposed writing space epics or whatever. Not to say that they don't sometimes take place in space, but just don't expect the kind of grand narratives you're gonna get with someone like Asimov. Completely different type of sci-fi.

That said, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is his hidden gem imo. If you know, you know.

Give Philip K Dick a chance: Start with 'Ubik'. I think we all need a little bit of Dick in our lives, to broaden our horizons.

Haven't seen these mentioned here, but the "Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi is great as are "The Expanse" books by James SA Corey. I'd highly recommend those to anyone, but especially those looking for grounded and hard-ish sci-fi that doesn't lose the reader or become overly technical.

I highly highly recommend Old Man's War to anyone looking to get into sci-fi novels for the first time, Scalzi really takes care of his reader and his writing is a delight. The Expanse books are awesome whether or not you've seen the TV series... the show runners really took care with the source material and, ask any fan of the books, it is a great adaptation. The show hits the same plot points of the books while getting there in new and interesting ways. Further, the show created a new character in Kamina Drummer who immediately became a fan favorite of both show and book lovers (she's an amalgamation of a couple of book characters and becomes her own thing that really adds SO much to the story and world building).

If you're looking for something epic but self-contained I really liked "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson. If you want something that's got a similar level of art to Hyperion I'd suggest "This is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

A lot of good recommendations already but here are some I didn't see.

The Madness Season. Follows a vampire secretly living among humans after a alien race with a hive mind conqueres Earth.

Eight Worlds series by John Varley. Aliens with reality warping powers show up and kick humanity off Earth and Jupiter. Humanity has now colonized all the other planets. People and society have evolved in strange ways.

The Final Architecture. giant aliens sometimes show up and reshape planets with life into giant sculptures.