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.

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.

• 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.

Wraeththu Chronicles by Storm Constantine.

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

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