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[Silver Night]

Casiella, what of Philip K. Dick's would you recommend?

I'd like to know too. I've only read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and feel like I'm missing out, but I don't know where to go next.

[Lillith Blackheart]

Do Androids. . . was really good though.

[Casiella]

Heinlein did get weird in late life. Time Enough For Love was, um, about the oddest damn thing he ever wrote.

As for Dick: A Scanner Darkly and The Man in the High Castle. If you like alt-history, the latter of those two generally makes most people's "essentials" list.

Finally, for steampunk + zombies + kick-ass realistic females, be sure to pick up Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. It was nominated for just about all the recent SF novel awards, though The Windup Girl (already cited) won, and deservedly so.

[Silver Night]

Heinlein did get weird in late life. Time Enough For Love was, um, about the oddest damn thing he ever wrote.

As for Dick: A Scanner Darkly and The Man in the High Castle. If you like alt-history, the latter of those two generally makes most people's "essentials" list.

Finally, for steampunk + zombies + kick-ass realistic females, be sure to pick up Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. It was nominated for just about all the recent SF novel awards, though The Windup Girl (already cited) won, and deservedly so.

Yeah, Boneshaker was really good. More steampunk, does that fall into SciFi too?

[Casiella]

I think it does, and I think I'm not alone in that. Some purists might not approve, just like not everybody likes alt-history. I figure the borders are fuzzy.

[Vieve]

I haven't read The Windup Girl yet, but I started following Paolo Bacigalupi around like a puppy on Twitter after reading his "Small Offerings" on Tor.com.  From my perspective, it was a heartwrenching near-future piece, and I'd almost pay money to figure out how he figured out how to write like a woman who's flooded with hormone-smothered panic.

Jude's player has been recommending Altered Carbon and the associated novels to me for almost two years now, with the same suggestion that they're Eve-like.  One of these days, I'll get around to reading them.

Ken, if you're looking to kick more Old School Sci-Fi/Fantasy, may I recommend Cordwainer Smith?  If you liked Perdido Street Station, you may like his work (I found it a more accessible flavor of weird, especially if you're familiar with 1940's-1950's American cultural tropes).   He wrote only one novel (Norstrilia), but his short fiction was crammed together in a compendium by NESFA (The Rediscovery of Man) some years ago.

I'd recommend Alfred Bester's short stories (they're compiled in a book called Virtual Unrealities), too, but I've taken some of my Gallente crayons from that box.  Heck, I'll recommend them anyway.  His novels, too.

Annnnd ... if you decide your brain's melting out of your ears and you need some old-fashioned tasty mind candy, try Leigh Brackett's Skaith series (The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith and The Reavers of Skaith).

[Gottii]

My own humble suggestions...

Anything by Dan Simmons...Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Illium, etc

And The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Edit: Oh The Berserker series, by Fred Saberhagen

[Casiella]

OMG! The Forever War and Berserker! YES!

[Graanvlokkie]

Brave New World.

Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society.

Exelent Iron Maiden song too.

[Yoshito Sanders]

Anything by Gene Wolfe is awesome and makes everyone else's fiction look like chump change in comparison. Even his weak stuff (An Evil Guest) is pretty good. He has been called by more than one critic the best living American author in any genre and is acknowledged by many great speculative fiction authors as the best living sci-fi writer alive.

My specific recommendation is his Solar Cycle, a series of books that are all awesome and filled with unreliable first person narrators and a crazy blend of sci-fi and fantasy that is very much unlike anything else. The Book of the New Sun (a tetralogy of four books, though it can be bought in one omnibus edition) about a disgraced torturer named Severian who is outcast from his order after giving one of his charges a painless death and his journey across a decaying planet with a dying sun. It also has a sequel called The Urth of the New Sun.

Loosely connected to the Book of the New Sun is the Book of the Long Sun (another tetralogy), about an augur named Silk who receives enlightenment from a god and attempts to save his church from being sold to a criminal named Blood. That is followed by the Book of the Short Sun (a trilogy this time), which is a direct sequel to the Book of the Long Sun and also serves as a very very tangential sequel to the Book of the New Sun, about a man named Horn, one of the former students of Silk, who goes on a journey to find Silk and bring him back.

Less science fictiony, but what I feel are Gene Wolfe's best work, are the Wizard Knight books. It's two books (the Wizard and the Knight) about a boy named Abel who is transported to a fantasy world, given the body of an adult, and his quest to earn the love of a nature spirit. In a similar vein is Pirate Freedom, about a boy living in a near-future Cuba who is transported back in time to the Golden Age of Piracy and ends up becoming a pirate himself.

And then there's the Soldier series, consisting of Solder of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, and Soldier of Sidon, about a Greek mercenary called Latro fighting in Rome who suffers a head wound in battle, suffers amnesia, and can no longer form long term memories. However, he becomes able to see the various gods of the ancient world. The novels are presented as scrolls that Latro records almost daily so that he has some record of his life as he tries to recover his memory and return home.

Then there's a dozen other great pieces from Wolfe, such as the Fifth Head of Cerberus (essentially three novellas about a planet being colonized in the far future), There Are Doors (about a man who travels between two dimensions to track down a woman he's in love with), and a bunch of collections of short stories.

[Boma Airaken]

Gonna break out left field here.

The Lieutenant Leary series by David Drake

The Vatta's War series by Elizabeth Moon

Warning. These novels are know to the State of Kalifornistan to be somewhat cheesy space operas. Read at your own risk (I however, adore them).

[Ken]

Another big thank you to everyone for the recommendations.  I've got a nice collection of twenty novels (plus six more from the Foundation series for re-reading), most from said recommendations, to keep my imagination alive in the wasteland.  I may even take the time to write out some thoughts on them, situation permitting.  o7

[Ken]

For a series to keep me occupied on a desert island, I would probably go into fantasy instead and pick the 'Malazan Book of the Fallen'

You were not kidding about this one. 

For some reason, I've started my reading with Gardens of the Moon.  I know... I asked everyone for sci-fi recommendations and then started with the only fantasy novel on my list... 

Halfway through it at this point and I'm struck by the depth and grit of the setting.  I also appreciate being dropped right into the story with what seems like much less of the hand-holding introductory exposition that IMO typifies the opening segments of so many fantasy series.  By that I mean the scope of the story is immediately broad and the action quickly ramped up.  No lingering in the Shire before things get rolling, so to speak.  I'm also enjoying how each new narrative thread and the characters involved (it has a truly ensemble cast) has something engaging about it.  None of them have yet been flatly uninteresting.

Erikson's world also seems profoundly appealing as a potential setting for gaming. 

How far have you read into the series, Silver?

[Silver Night]

You were not kidding about this one. 

For some reason, I've started my reading with Gardens of the Moon.  I know... I asked everyone for sci-fi recommendations and then started with the only fantasy novel on my list... 

Halfway through it at this point and I'm struck by the depth and grit of the setting.  I also appreciate being dropped right into the story with what seems like much less of the hand-holding introductory exposition that IMO typifies the opening segments of so many fantasy series.  By that I mean the scope of the story is immediately broad and the action quickly ramped up.  No lingering in the Shire before things get rolling, so to speak.  I'm also enjoying how each new narrative thread and the characters involved (it has a truly ensemble cast) has something engaging about it.  None of them have yet been flatly uninteresting.

And he just keeps on introducing characters, too, later. It gets bigger and more complex. The lack of exposition was nice, I thought, too. Even if I spent some time at first wondering, for example, wtf a warren was, exactly.

Erikson's world also seems profoundly appealing as a potential setting for gaming. 

I think that is actually how it started. I seem to recall reading somewhere - a foreword or something - that mentioned it started out as a gaming universe that he ended up creating the books from. I think the universe was created by him and another guy who has published a couple of books in the same universe - Ian Esslemont. You get hints of that when you see casual mention of stuff that sounds like it is well developed in its own right (which all adds the the feel of a 'real' world). Like there's already this big history that backs up the whole thing.

How far have you read into the series, Silver?

I've read all of them, so far, I believe. Through the ninth book, Dust of Dreams. They stay complex, gritty, unpleasant, and often funny.

I was really pleasantly surprised by the series. I grabbed Gardens of the Moon one day cause I was bored, looked at the cover, and figured, 'Oh, more generic fantasy.'

Not so much.

[IzzyChan]

This thread needs moar animu/manga.

Manga:
Anything made by Nihei Tsutomu, specifically Blame!, NOiSE, and Biomega.

Manga/Anime:
Battle Angel Alita
Ghost in the Shell
Appleseed

You can get all of this translated to english, the Blame/NOiSE series might be hard to find tho (in bookstores).