Charles Stross has a couple.
Glasshouse is easily the best. Hard to describe much without giving a lot away, but he builds a universe almost matching Bank's Culture and uses it to run a pocket experiment looking at our own. He also has the near future
Halting State, with a sequel
Rule 34 due out relatively soon. He has some free samplers
here, including a short story collection and a complete (looooong) novel called Accelerando.
Richard Morgan is utterly brutal, but writes a fantastic noir style high concept future. The Kovacs novels (starting with
Altered Carbon) are a great trilogy. The central technology is the cortical stack; a hardened implant that effectively stores your memories and self digitally, to be transferred between bodies, transmitted between stars, backed up and even cloned to a new stack. This puts a relatively low value on human flesh, resulting in some really nasty sex and violence, although the cost of a new body is still out of reach for the majority of people. He gets to play a lot with race, sex and social factors.
Doctorow does some really nice stories, especially his near future and social commentary. All of his are
free online so definitely worth a peak. His two young adult books,
Little Brother and
For The Win are music to the ears of anyone who agrees with him socially (and technologically) while his first two full length novels,
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and
Standard Eastern Tribe cover a lot of concepts that are becoming more and more common today. I would strongly recommend downloading the audio version of
With a Little Help; a short story collection read by various geeks. The Spider Robinson reading in particular is fantastic. It also has a reading by Mary Robinette Kowal who also read his
After the Siege, a pretty worthwhile listen in itself.
And unrelated to the topic other than through Kowal, she also read
Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, pretty far from realistic but a lot of fun. A semi-time-travel romp about two cyborgs in 1930's Hollywood, mostly based around the set of Max Reinhardt stunning production of
A Midsummers Night's Dream. Damned good fun.
Scalzi's
Old Man's War series (a trilogy plus one effectively) is good, in the same military-plus-social commentary way as
The Forever War. The fourth books is pretty damned good considering it's Scalzi writing from the POV of a teenage girl. He also headed the
Metatropolis project, originally an audiobook (mostly read by
BSG alumni; the first story is a good two hours of Tigh reading to you) and now also published as as short story collection.
I have to repeat Reynolds (definitely
Chasm City and
Pushing Ice, although the new
Terminal World is a nice take on Steampunk) and Banks, definitely. And for Banks, even if you skip his non-SF fiction you might want to look up
Raw Spirit. It's him cruising around Scotland in a variety of cool vehicles sampling every Scotch he can get his hands on and getting paid for it. With occasional digressions about the war (it was written in 2003) and Drunken Urban Climbing.
If you need something more intellectually challenging then try
Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. Wiki describes it as involving 'non-trivial' mathematics and theoretical physics. I read it while taking graduate level quantum mechanics courses and didn't feel it was talking down or over-simplifying things. And the story remains engaging.
Neal Stevenson's
Anathem tries to do something similar but (IMO) doesn't pull the science off quite right.
This (some spoilers) explains how I feel about it. That said, the writing and story for the majority of the book is fantastic. It just loses the plot at some point and things literally unravel. Given that this includes what should be the climax of the novel, it kinda takes the wind out of it.
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Topic: Wanted: Good ("realistic") SciFi novel (Read 3389 times)