anatoly

All great novels, but start from A Fire Upon the Deep

start from A Fire Upon the Deep (I read that in 2008) if you haven't read Vinge before, it's the best introduction.

It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Superb political SF about an imagined anarchist [anti-]utopia. A serious attempt to describe a human society with no central power structures and no ownership. The hero is a physicist born and raised in that society who escapes to a sibling planet with the more typical modern states. This novel took all the awards in the 1970s when it was published, and deservedly so.

Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago.

A fantastic collection of interview with great programmers. The one 2009 book no hacker should be without.

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

_Diaspora_ is a fascinating take on shared simulated reality that's very different from the usual fare.

the Aubrey-Maturin books among the very best books I read in the last decade.

P.K.Dick, The Man in the High Castle. (reread) Very inventive and weird in a good way, but I wish the characters would be a little different (everyone is the same highly neurotic mouthpiece for the author), and the obsession with I Ching does nothing for me. Still worth reading.

Gaiman's unsurpassed masterpiece, to me, is still The Sandman.

All great novels, but start from A Fire Upon the Deep