The best SF ever

[expat]

Stranger in a Strange Land
Ringworld
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Time Machine
Childhood's End
The Reality Dysfunction
From a Dark Background
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Eon
1984

[cojak]

Gosh, that would almost be my list too...

I'd add:

Neuromancer
Brave New World
I, Robot
anything by Anne McCaffery

[OwlHoot]

Stranger in a Strange Land
Ringworld
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Time Machine
Childhood's End
The Reality Dysfunction
From a Dark Background
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Eon
1984

Anything by Dr Robert Forward (formerly a rocket scientist at JPL or somewhere, now dead alas)

A Wikipedia potted biography etc can be found here

Gotta say his characterisations were apt to be a bit wooden at times, and rose-tinted, but the science and his soaring imagination was outstanding. I'd especially recommend Dragon's Egg, an account of an expedition to a neutron star.

[Addanc]

Dune series - Frank Herbert
Larry Niven's book that form known space collect, Ringworld books, Protector, World of Ptavs ... through to Gil The ARM,
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man, this where Babylon 5 creator got some ideas for the psi cops, good book probably older than the green lizard.

[WageSlave]

Anything by the Strugatsky brothers.
Victor Pelevin has knocked out some cracking SF...

[wendigo100]

Space Patrol



“Gamma rays on.”
“Check”
“Yobba rays on.”
“Check”
“Ready for lift-off captain.”

[DaveB]

Stephen Baxter - Time, Space, Flux etc... Hard Sci-Fi at it's best.

Ian M. Banks - Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons etc. For those who like to think about the story rather than the technology.

Anything by Michael Moorcock. Not all strictly Sci-Fi but he mixes things up so much it hardly matters.

Mick Farren - The Song of Phaid the Gambler, the DNA Cowboys Trilogy. Some of the weirder, but still very readable stuff I've come accross. Hard to find nowadays but you might get lucky in a 2nd hand book shop.

Oh, and Stanislav Lem. Go look him up if you dont recognise the name. He wrote Solaris ( the book not the OS ) that was turned into a George Clooney vehicle. Among an awfull lot of other very good things.

[expat]

Colin Kapp's series of stories about the Unconventional(?) Engineers, particularly the one about the Subways of Tazoo. (This describes a planet where all intelligent life has died. Mostly because they passed the equivalent of the Windmill Event Horizon in an effort to extract as much power from the wind as possible. Sound anything like here?).

Unorthodox Engineering. Little classics, esp. Subways of Tazoo.

[Spacecadet]

Greg Egan - written some fantastic short storys and a couple of brilliant SF novels. He does love puching the boundarys

Frank Herbert - The Dune books (all of them without exception)

Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars Trilogy

If you like SF then look up Interzone magazine. They've chanegd publishers and editors since I used to read it but from what I know the quality of writing is still top notch

[OrangeHopper]

I have very nearly given up reading Science Fiction because, in my opinion, there has rarely been any hard core science based stuff since Donaldson got in on the act.

Gibson was one breath of fresh air. He probably heads my list along with Asimov.

Enjoyed the works of Robert Sawyer a few years ago.

Thought Richard Morgan had the right ideas but his books are too long.

Most modern science fiction books are far too long and would be greatly improved if they were edited down to the length of the classics.