omg spoilers.
Yeah, sentient spiders. Best kind.
Like Michael Z Williamson’s Time Slip books?
I’d like to recommend them too.
Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Forget boring old Dune- when are these coming to the big screen?
I want to see Poul Anderson’s Fire Time on the big screen.
Robert Heinlein:
Space Cadet.
Red Planet.
Farmer in the Sky
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
If you like those, then try Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, and Glory Road.
I love Andre Norton, but her best stuff is more fantasy than science fiction.
For Ray Bradbury and Larry Niven, skip the novels, and go with a collection of short stories.
I’d recommend Starship Troopers, followed by Haldeman’s The Forever War, Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, and Scalzi’s Old Man’s War for a great tetralogy.
I’ll always recommend The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton.
For something a bit lighter, try The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow
A great time … indeed! I haven’t read all the titles mentioned in this thread, but I have read that. It’s so explicit! Heinlein fans will admit it is largely about sex (plural marriage to be specific), but it is about many things. It is about revolution. It is about anarchy. It is about how government (specifically democracy) arises from anarchy. And it is about A-I … a (benevolent?) A-I that “wakes up,” (toys with humankind,) ultimately foments a rebellion of the Lunar Colonies, and (Heinlein is a little vague about this.) either disappears or is destroyed after the shooting war described in the closing chapters. I have the impression that the A-I is just bored with people and, having achieved its objective of irrevocably altering their destiny, has decided to ignore them in the future. Probably that’s the best outcome that could be expected in real life and, as such, is an up-beat ending uncharacteristic of most Sci-Fi of the era. It’s very ontological.
This, the rest of the series is really good too.
Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series is really, really good too.
Well, how about Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster. 
There are lots of lists online which claim to tell you what are the best science fiction of all time, of which these are three random examples:
If all you want to do is get lots of recommendations, you can go through many such lists and (in general) start from the highest recommendations on each list. Do you know of any local monthly reading and discussion groups that do mostly science fiction? I’ve belonged to one for over four decades that mostly reads fantasy and science fiction. Each person in the group gets to choose a monthly selection in a way so that everyone regularly gets a pick. Belonging to a reading group gives you more incentive to finish the book each month. Having a reasonable number of people in the group (maybe a dozen) means that the selections will be varied.
No one has mentioned Isaac Asimov yet, so I’ll do my bit to encourage you to read his work. It’s fairly cerebral stuff, with a lot more dialogue than action, but still fun.
The Foundation series is a set of three fairly short novels - Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation - that describe the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. sort of like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but with spaceships. He also later wrote two prequels and two sequels that are good, but not as great as the original trilogy. The original trilogy should be read in order.
There are also the robot novels, with the famous three laws of robotics, and a few standalone space operas. I really enjoyed The Stars Like Dust and The Currents of Space
A recent novel that I quite enjoyed was John Scalzi’s Redshirts. It starts off very much like Star Trek, but then the characters *and the reader) realize that things are not as they seem. I don’t what to spoiler it for anyone, so I’ll jst say that there are some clever twists.
It won the Hugo Award for best Sci-Fi novel, which is a good place to look for book ideas.
I want to add, “Artifact Space” by Miles Cameron. A story of a young midshipper on her first deployment on a deep space merchant/marine type of ship. I am waiting very impatiently for part 2 of 2 to be published.
Fun fact, I learned recently that the author was a US Navy F-14 RIO (rear instrument officer) serving from a carrier in his past and that made sense why his flight ops and military life seemed so realistic, for a space opera.
To veer off into fantasy a bit, what are some great Star Wars novels?
And I enjoyed the first book so much that I’m reading the second one, which is now out! Fun space opera with a decent mix of tactical and science-y stuff.
metrophage by Richard Khardey its his first book… i do believe he had a popular series called “sandman slim”
But even tho this book was written in the late 80s but its still relevant today
I read “Deep Black” this past weekend (loved it!), and followed it up with the collection of novellas called, “Beyond the Fringe” which made the promise of two more Arcana Imperii books to follow Deep Black… Woohoo!
Other recent stuff I’ve read and recommend:
All of Andy Weir’s works (The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary). The last of these wasn’t as good as the other two, but still very good.
I’ll second Martha Well’s Murderbot books. Mostly novellas, but there have been a couple of full novels now.
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuro Ishiguro. Told from the point of view of a robotic “artificial friend”, about the sickly girl she’s bought as a companion for.
Huh. I thought most people considered Artemis the weakest of the three. It has by far the lowest rating on Goodreads (3.69, as opposed to 4.42 and 4.51).