Hm, some cool dude here said he's bored because I don't write.
Gotta fix that.
I've read all sorts of books, I'll briefly share my impressions.
Scavenged ideas for what to read from here, for I am but an unintellectual scrub.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
The book's fun, the author knows his way around language, it doesn't strain the brain too much. The mythology of many nations is elegantly and gently woven into the book, you could call it "beautiful postmodernism". It's readable. Download FB2
Vernor Vinge, Fast Times at Fairmont High
Uncle Vernor, as a futurist and a sci-fi author-scientist with imagination, is indispensable and brilliant, let's be honest. You can always read all of his books. I actually read the "False Alarm" collection, and the whole thing is highly recommended. The reading isn't exactly easy because of the complexity of the invented worlds, which are not easy to describe with words, let alone translated ones, plus you have to have at least some understanding of physics.
Mike Resnick, Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge
Nothing special, cardboard and a bit boring, but readable. It's about hyper-alien extraterrestrials discussing humanity. Books like this always look unconvincing. No matter how hard you try, the aliens come out fake and human-like. Lem's Solaris isn't like that, but then again, that's Lem.
Gordon Dickson, The Lost One
You probably have to read the series from the beginning here, but I don't feel like it. It's not really sci-fi at its core, but prose masquerading as something serious. It didn't do it for me, because there are no fresh ideas, and I find reading "about life" boring. Better to go live it in real life.
Barry Longyear, Enemy Mine
. . . and the sequels
Overall - the aliens are once again way too similar to humans, evidently because the book isn't new. There are also a lot of implausible premises, specifically contradicting the theory of evolution as I understand it. But there is intrigue, the characters are lively and emotional, it's interesting to read.
Frederik Pohl, Gateway
It's one of those books that look pretty boring on the surface, but after reading it you realize everything is cleverly constructed, and you develop a certain respect for it. Whether you should read it or not is hard to say, probably yes.
Summing up, you could say that modern sci-fi authors have surpassed their predecessors in complexity by an order of magnitude. Apparently progress, at least on some plane, exists, otherwise old books would be perceived on par with new ones. And that doesn't work out. Vernor Vinge paints a gigantic world of the future plausibly and in detail. His aliens as civilizations have thousands of years of development and history behind them, and behave accordingly. But the aliens in older books don't bother with such trifles as the integrity of the concept and image , because back then they could get away with it anyway. It's kind of like in old movies - nowadays you can see it's people in masks, but back then people wanted the miraculous and eagerly watched whatever was given to them.
This shouldn't be taken as an attack on old books. They have quite a few of their own good sides - say, the humanism and normalcy of what's happening. You can see this very clearly in Simak's books. Even in Joe Haldeman's book "The Forever War", for all the nightmare and pointlessness of the war, what's going on is understandable and relatable to a twentieth-century person. Try saying the same about "A Fire Upon the Deep" or "Hyperion", where the scale and intensity of events force the reader into a trance.
Why this is happening is obvious. It's not for me to tell you about globalization, modern man's uncertainty in reality and tomorrow, and the increasing complexity of everything that exists and life in general.