Science fiction

[Corvus T. Cosmonaut]

Not because I want to deter anyone from turning this thread into the great set recs and discussion it can and should be, but for some additional pointers I strongly recommend the Sci-fi/fantasy thread at Somethingawful, here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...readid=3345499

They also have one specifically for space opera novels: http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...readid=3149277

That said, I feel pretty comfortable recommending Alastair Reynolds. I've read House of Suns and loved it, and I hear Redemption Ark and Pushing Ice are both great, great books in the space opera mold.

From Wikipedia, "Setting":

The main story arc is set roughly 6 million years from now. By this point, humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which appears devoid of any other sentient life. The galaxy is dominated by civilisations of humans and various posthumans of widely varying levels of development. A civilisation of robots, known as the Machine People, has also evolved and coexists peacefully with humanity. Technologies that are available include anti-gravity, inertial dampening, force fields, and stasis fields. Also of note is the "Absence"- the mysterious disappearance of the Andromeda Galaxy.
Large-scale human civilisations almost invariably seem to fall within a few millennia (referred to as "turnover"), the limits of sub-lightspeed travel making it too difficult to hold interstellar empires together. Consequently, the most powerful entities in the galaxy are the "Lines"- organisations made of "shatterlings". The Lines do not inhabit planets, but instead travel through space, holding reunions after they've performed a "circuit" of the galaxy; something that takes about 200,000 years.
House of Suns concerns the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers; 999 clones (or "shatterlings"), male and female, of Abigail Gentian, with Abigail being the 1,000th shatterling (exactly which of the 1,000 shatterlings is the original Abigail Gentian is unknown). The clones and Abigail travel the Milky Way Galaxy helping young civilizations, collecting knowledge and experiencing what the universe has to offer.

I don't really care to get into explaining plot detail, but one of the things that first endeared me to this is the sense of scale. Humanity hasn't acquired any form of faster-than-light travel, so while with time (lots of time) they can accelerate to speeds at a percentage approaching that of light, they're always essentially "slow-boating" around the galaxy, one of the reasons it was necessary for the shatterlings to be so long-lived. Reynolds does a great job conveying just how much nothing must be traversed to get around, how immense the distances between objects. And many of those objects are just huge, such as structures that are essentially Dyson spheres.

In some sections the pacing and characterization are a little rough, but despite this it's an awesome (in the original sense) read.

Also, if you haven't read Dune do so. The imagination and concept behind this book is incredible, and its praise is mostly well-deserved. The only thing is Herbert's prose sometimes falls short of the quality of his ideas.

However—and I know opinions are mixed on this—you'll be just fine if you read only Dune itself and ignore all the sequels.