[knivesout]

I think I probably read much more SF than you - fantasy is more my second love - but we seem to have settled on rather similar authors. While there are specific novels by hard SF writers like Greg Bear or Stephen Baxter that I like, I find myself drawn to the sort of SF that plays around more with human possibilities - and impossibilities - than technological speculations. That's probably why Robert Heinlein is an author I enjoy so much , even if I disagree with many of his characters' viewpoints a lot of the time. His books are basically about people, and his different theories about how they should organise themselves or not.

Theodore Sturgeon has written some fine stuff in the human-speculation line - his novel Venus Plus X, with its fascinating take on gender as a pathological condition for human society was a really thought-provoking book.