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One of the "real world" book clubs I sometimes join is the great Science Fiction / Fantasy / Horror bookstore here in San Francisco, (definitely a plug: check it out if you ever visit San Francisco; they also sell books internationally over the 'net).

They just issued the list of books we're voting on for the next six months or so, and I'm curious if anyone has any strong recommendations, or dis-recommendations. (I'm also curious which might be categorized as "hard" scifi).

Please, have at it: (I've bolded the ones I'm especially curious about; the number at the end is the current overall GR rating)
1. Matter, Iain Banks (3.77)
2. Thomas the Rhymer , Ellen Kushner (3.69)
3. The Difference Engine, Gibson and Sterling (3.32)
4. Spook Country , William Gibson (3.47)
5. The City and the City , China Mieville (3.76)
6. Green , Jay Lake (3.15)
7. Empress of Mars , Kage Baker (3.72)
8. Mistborn: The Final Empire , Brandon Sanderson (4.37)
9. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (3.72)
10. The Very Best of Asimov's (I don't know which book this refers to)
11. The New Weird , ed. by the VanderMeers (3.55)
12. Protector, Larry Niven (3.88)
13. The Etched City , by KJ Bishop (3.73)
14. Marooned in Realtime, by Vernor Vinge (3.93)
15. Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (3.90)
16. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (4.04)
17. Cybernetica , by Michael Cavallaro (3.50)
18. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter , by Seth Grahame-Smith (3.74)
19. The Eyes of the Dragon , by Stephen King (3.81)
20. The Fetch (The Runestone Saga, Book 1), by Chris Humphreys (3.45)
21. Here, There be Dragons (The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, Book 1), by James A. Owen (3.88)
22. How to Train Your Dragon , by Cressida Cowell (3.85)
23. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (3.67)
24. The Princess and Curdie , by George MacDonald (4.02)
25. Skellig by David Almond (3.74)

Wow, you went to a lot of work compiling that list. I think you'd get the most conversation going with "The Windup Girl", "The City and the City" (both Hugo nominees this year) or "Oryx & Crake". There are several others that I think are good reads, but I think you'd get the best discussion with those three.

Well. . . of those 25, I've read two and have read other books by the authors of three more. The two I've read are Matter, which is one of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels and which I recommend highly for strongly imaginative space opera bordering on hard SF with great prose; and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which I found overhyped and not as funny as I expected, but I'm glad I read it because now I get everybody else's references to it.

The authors I have opinions about are Ellen Kushner, who writes really beautiful prose and does some of the best character-building I've seen; Kage Baker, who has a wonderfully sardonic sense of humor and whose Company novels (a series which The Empress of Mars is a standalone in) are sadly under-read; and Brandon Sanderson, who writes perfectly serviceable epic fantasy -- everything about his books is good, but nothing particularly stands out to me.

As to which are hard SF. . . well I already mentioned the Banks; none of the others I'm familiar with seems hard SF to me (well, unless you count steampunk as hard?) and at least half the titles are fantasy.

So that's my two cents. . . hopefully it was a little helpful! :)

The thing is we'll be narrowing that list down to six for the next six months (we're reading Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids now); maybe we'll recycle some of 'em for the next six month period.

Some of the classics I'd be interested in re-reading, but I'm also curious about the many I've not heard of previously.

(I've read two by Iain M. Banks now, one Culture and one not, and I was disappointed by both).

Sanderson is interesting 'cause rating easily tops the list; the Kage Baker Mars novel also caught my eye because it seems like it is a throwback to old-school scifi. I mean, how many sixties and seventies novelists used bars as a setting for their adventures?

I don't know that I'd call Kage Baker a throwback. . . though looking at the description it does kind of sound like that, doesn't it? In my experience with her, she occupies some of the same mental space as Lois McMaster Bujold and Connie Willis -- she definitely has elements of screwball comedy in her repertoire, and a strong core of humanism.

Sad you haven't liked Iain Banks so far! Which did you read?

I read his The Algebraist first, and gave it three stars (review here), and then hit up the Culture series with Consider Phlebas, which only garnered two stars in my review (here). He's very exciting, but lacks focus and loves gratuitous nastiness (which is only bad 'cause it is gratuitous, of course).

I loved The City & The City. If you like fairly gritty police procedurals and having your brain bent a bit, you should be all over that.

The Empress of Mars was all right, but I don't think it was Baker's strongest work.

The Windup Girl was one of those books that made me think I must be a Philistine. I couldn't get into it enough to keep reading it.

I've tried to read a Sanderson book or two, but ... not happening for me.

The compliment I have for The City and The City, is that I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards. I would have loved to have had a group of friends to discuss it with, shortly after reading it. In my opinion it's overall rating score does not do it justice. Having said that, I recently read some of Kage Baker's work and was thoroughly impressed.

I'd vote Protector, Spook Country, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in that order, although if you're not already a big science fiction reader, Hitchhiker's guide might go down easiest of those three.

Protector is one of the earlier "Known Space" stories by Larry Niven and leads nicely into the rest of the series. And you get to have fun deciding how the main character's name get's pronounced.