I’ve been desiring of late some good, crunchy epic science fiction to read. A large, detailed world (or universe) with a lot of characters and plots. Anyone have any good suggestions? Here’s some of what I like:

*Alastair Reynolds is the latest I’ve enjoyed in the space opera subgenre
*William Gibson and other cyberpunk
*Vernor Vinge’s FIre Upon the Deep is great metahuman/post-singularity reading

While I respect that he is the father of sci-fi and many of his works were groundbreaking at the time, I haven’t consistently enjoyed the works of Asimov. As for the other fathers of sci-fi, I’ve enjoyed some of their works more, but I tend towards more recent writings in general.

I really enjoy trilogies or other series that can let me sink into the world and characters for a while. I got bored a while back with the formulaic cliche fantasy novel epics. They were all good, but all the same. Sci-fi epics tend to have a broader range of possible topics that keep them unique. While Tolkien’s world is the subconscious blueprint of nearly every fantasy author, science fictions writers don’t have the one setting to bind them all.