I’m bouncing between the classics and newer less familiar books. Re-read a few Dick books. Likewise with some Bester. I never read any Clifford Simak until recently and like it.
Newer writers:
Three Body Problem is an amazing saga of what becomes of humanity long, long. looooonnnnnggg time from now. It has the scope and philosophical meanderings of Neil Stevenson’s Seveneves and Asimov’s Foundation books.
Leckies’s first Ancillary books was great. Others disagree but I think the other two books were far inferior. I still recommend that anyone looking for a fresh take on a typical space opera.
Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit / Machineries of Empires books are an even more imaginative take on the space marine end of the sci fi spectrum. That includes her short stories and spin offs from that universe.
Charlie Jane Anders is on my read-em-all list. The City In The Middle Of Night is set on a planet whose spin keeps one side permanently in the day and one permanently at night. All life, including the descendents of a generation ship whose lives really suck, are trapped in the permanent equatorial twilight. It starts with a group of revolutionaries and students pushing back on a despotic city state and ends with questions about humanity and how it must change to survive. It has been favorably compared to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. I would also liken Anders’ musings on transcendence and evolution with a lot of Robert Silverberg’s sci fi novels, Downward To Earth coming to mind the most.
Paolo Bacciagaluppi has written a few that I greatly recommend: The Windup Girl, his YA “Shipbreaker’s” trilogy and short story collection Pump 6 are great. They go beyond our earlier obsession with the internet and cyberpunk and dive head first into the crises caused by climate change, overuse of genetically modified plants and animals and the emergence of newer industrialized nations taking over from the US, Europe and Japan. His near-future thriller The Water Knife, about the increasing drought in the US south west is nightmare inducing, especially given the last year.