Some outstanding SF books.

"Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon (1938). I initially read this book when I was 17. It was a difficult read but worth it. What's in it? Everything. Life on black holes at the heat death of the universe, intelligent stars, other universes composed of music. In the 1800s and early 1900s astronomers discovered that creation was a much bigger place than we had thought. Stapledon filled it up with his imagination.

"Dune" by Frank Herbert (1965). I think of spice as a metaphor for oil. Great political intrique, and I was really impressed by the ecology of the sandworms.

"Neuromancer" by William Gibson (1984). Gibson was the first person to treat the computer as an interactive environment. Thus wrote Gibson, and so did it come to be. (sorta)

"Blood Music" by Greg Bear (1985) A lot of the reason I chose Biology as my major in college. Not too a good a reason I guess, since I ended up a lawyer.

"The Garments of Caean" (1976) by Barrington J. Bayley. The most laughable concept for an science fiction novel ever, and the worst cover art of all time. A book about alien mind control clothing? And isn't that a drawing of Fred Astaire wearing a suit with a ruffled shirt and a hat with a long feather? A hidden gem from the 1970s that raises some interesting questions about about personal identity.

"The Cyberiad" (1967) by Stansilaw Lem. Collection of short stories about two robots who travel across the universe and compete with each other to build the most fabulous inventions. Funny as all heck and made some interesting points at the same time. I never enjoyed Lem's more serious stuff, although "Solaris" and "Imaginary Magnitude" were ok.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (novelization of radio script- 1983?) by Douglas Adams. The Earth gets destroyed in order to make way for an intergalactic construction project and Arthur Dent is the sole survivor. Yes Virginia, they can make a funny book in which all human life is destroyed in the first chapter. "42" will never be just another number.

"We" (1921) Yevgeny Zamiatin. A dystopic story which took communism to it's ultimate extreme, and used a discussion of the inherent limitations of human knowledge to explain why any totalitarian regime must ultimately fail. First Russian book banned in the Soviet Union. Read it and you too may secretly long for a "square root of negative one" T-shirt as a birthday gift.