Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
The Stars My Destination

Brunner, John
The Shockwave Rider

Evaluation: Flarking good. Plot synopsis: Hmmmm......without giving it all away, it deals with a very good hacker in the days when computers didn't really exist.....Most everything is done by telephone line. Basically, it carries the 70's idealistic tone throughout it, on the subject of freedom of information. - The Exiled

Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game

One of the best SciFi books around. The ending is so incredible, you'll realize that you knew it all along. And it sucks you in. The second and third of the Ender series are good too, but not quite as good as the first one... - eloquence

Dick, Philip K.
Ubik

Ellis, Warren
Transmetropolitan

Farmer, Philip Jose
The Riverworld Series

The first book is called  To Your Scattered Bodies Go. It is very atypical science fiction, and the plot involves roughly every person who ever lived being ressurrected at once along the banks of a huge river. Farmer includes both historical figures (Sir Richard Francis Burton, Alice Liddel-Hargreaves, Hermann Goering, Cyrano de Bergerac), as well as fictional. Lots of good action, as well as socio-political commentary. - JeanCroix

Gibson, William
Count Zero
Idoru
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Neuromancer

Heinlein, Robert
Stranger in a Strange Land

It was one of the first SF books I ever read, and it's good. It's hard SF, yet accessible to people like me who have a fuzzy grasp of technology beyond turning a computer on, word processing ,and using the net. Also, Jubal and Michael Valentine Smith are some of my favorite people of all time, and I think *everyone* should make their acquaintance. - rufus

Time Enough For Love

About a man whose natural life-span is thousands of years. Much Heinleinian wisdom here. ;)
- JeanCroix

Herbert, Frank
Dune

Lee, Tanith
The Silver Metal Lover

Simmons, Dan
Hyperion

Stephenson, Neal
Cryptonomicon
Snow Crash

A feasible portrait of the future of America, made up of franchulates and high-tech toys. Goes by really fast and is quite witty at the same time. Also has an wonderful section in the middle drawing all of these analogies between Sumerian languages and modern computer viruses. - eloquence

The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Ever fantasized about a return to Victorian modes and mores? The Neo-Victorians are but one of the close-knit "claves" in Stephenson's richly imagined 22nd century world. A Neo-Victorian nanotechnologist is commissioned to design an extremely complex interactive storybook, but a copy falls into the hands of Nell, an abused lower class child. This event will affect her, and thousands of others, to vast and intricate degrees. I enjoyed this much more than the periodic long-windedness of Snow Crash. I've read it twice, and even on the second go-round I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning poring through it--I kept noticing new details and interrelationships and couldn't put it down. - Merciful

Williams, Tad
Otherland

Gene Wolfe
The Book of the New Sun

The Shadow of the Torturer
The Claw of the Conciliator
The Sword of the Lictor
The Citadel of the Autarch

This quartet is about a young man, Severian, raised by the Guild of Torturers on an Earth so far in the future that it seems techno-medieval. When he violates one of the guild's more important rules by showing mercy to a victim, he is cast out to be the executioner of a faraway town. What happens to him and the people he meets on the way, as the planets die and old gods awake to rise from the seas, is truly extraordinary. Its retrofuturistic setting gives it the texture of heroic fantasy, but technology is there too. Considered a sci-fi classic, extremely wordy, it's an unforgettable immersion experience, and often comes up on people's top ten lists of gothy SF (or any SF, for that matter), usually in one of the top spots. - ed.