I was recently recommended the sci-fi space opera "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge. That was an absolute blast to read. If you're into computer science, you'll really dig it.
I think A Deepness In The Sky is actually better, especially for people on here. The story takes place on spaceships thousands of years in the future, but the characters are still using code based on Unix timestamps, and still complaining about legacy software.
100 percent. I read deepness before fire, and was terribly disappointed by the latter, even though it was a perfectly great book - just didn't measure up.
There is a deeper story. The realistic technical details are the bones; the flesh is the relationships between two human civilizations and a less-advanced alien race that doesn't know humans exist.
His "True Names" is everything you need to know about "cyberspace", written in 1981 but still seems modern today:
> True Names is a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.
> True Names first brought Vinge to prominence as a science fiction writer. It also inspired many real-life hackers and computer scientists; a 2001 book about the novella, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, included essays by Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, Mark Pesce, Richard Stallman and others.[1] It was awarded the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2007.
The thing I found amazing when I found Verner Vinge was that there were still sci-fi authors of his calibre that I had never heard of, given I have been reading sci-fi since I was 8. There are more things in this world etc etc.
A Fire Upon The Deep belongs on any sci-fi cannon and is probably top 10.
I’m still looking for the next such author. Sadly I think I have expired the list since I haven’t found any new great ones in the past six years. I’ve read pretty much all the classics though.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy is in that window, and it's fantastic. They might have been a one-off; his Shards of Earth book is not on its level.
There is a summary with no spoilers at the start of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5jTNUSIR18