Another classic! How could I forget that?

I've not read any Baxter, though I keep hearing good things. Which would be a good one to start with?

Just finished reading Charles Stross' Glasshouse; I've now read all five contenders for this year's Hugo award, and, although all five are good, I think Stross deserves the prize. It's a very good read.

Must have read about a thousand Sci-Fi books in my mis-spent youth. Here's one that has resonance today and seems to have been over-looked by this thread:

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"The Dosadi Experiment" (Herbert) shaped my nascent attitudes about society almost as much as "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Dune."

Oddly, while I like Trek (mostly TOS), the books I have read in that genre failed to have the same impact.

I've always been more about the concepts presented in Sci Fi than the actual writing. Since reading Dosadi, I have held the notion that we should not make things easy as a society, if we want smart, capable people. Quite the contrary, making things as difficult as possible "weeds out" incompetence - in the case of Dosadi, by starvation. This is the 180 deg opposite of the Socialist way of thought. Dosadi is kind of like the ultimate Capitalist extreme, just as ugly as Communism, just in another way.

This work parallels some of the concepts in Dune, but without the mysticism. I found it a more "hard" Sci Fi story in that regard. It lacks the space battle nature of most hard Sci Fi, something that I enjoyed at the time I read it.

All of this is colored by the fact that I was in my late teens, and it was the 70's. The context of my age and the times (post Vietnam) made the book important to me, personally. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it today. Something about having your relatives come home in a box ...

Steven Baxter: If you want an example of just how mind-bending his books can get, check out the Manifold Trilogy: "Manifold: Time," "Manifold: Space," and "Manifold: Origin." It's basically Baxter exploring the Fermi Paradox: that is to say, "If there is intelligent life out there, why don't we see it?" and coming up with three different, equally mind-bending answers.

For more down-to-earth science fiction, Coalescent and Evolution are good: the prior talks about hive behavior, the latter is essentially a tragi-heroic epic about natural selection (as odd as that sounds).

I haven't read much of his Xellee War stories aside from Exultant, which was excellent.

Finally, much of C.J. Cherryh's books are fairly enjoyable: she tends to focus on alien cultures instead of the tech aspect (one favorite: her Foreigner series focuses on a human ambassador to a species whose culture, based around assassination and intrigue, finds humans incredibly creepy because their eyes don't glow in the dark and they can move around at night without being seen.) Another (Fading Sun) details the last survivors of a race called the M'ri, who despite being fine warriors, got thrashed by humanity in our last war because we fought like bastards while they fought with honor.

I also remember reading a book at one point about an alien race who kidnapped a group of Roman legionaries as mercenaries, used them to kick the crap out of every other alien race in the galaxy, and then another bunch of aliens came back to Earth a couple hundred years later (due to time dilation) and grabbed a bunch of English longbowmen on their way to the battle of Crecy. . .

Keith Laumer's Bolo books are also excellent, as is almost anything with Jame Retief.

Finally, for a major change of pace: the Lord Darcy books are hard to find, but they're excellent Etherpunk mysteries: imagine Sherlock Holmes and Watson if Watson were a sorcerer.