This is great, I've been reading SF since the early '70's when I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and got my first tome of Hugo Award Winners in the mail. Just about everything in the OP has passed through my fingers.. The Foundation Series being a particular favourite, an obviously Dune, which took me three attempts to begin (starting in grade 9).
I was about to chime in with some more, when both Ratbastid and Daniel_ beat me to the punch. Clearly there's a lot to get into, without even going to Doris Lessing or the Russian works. Currently I am working my way through some Canadian authors (Stirling, Robert J Sawyer, William Gibson) but would like to promote a guy who actually lives in my neigbbourhood:
Karl Schroeder. He writes hard sci-fi. I just finished "Lady of Mazes" and have read Ventus & Permanence.
Similar to William Gibson coining the term/concept "cyberspace", Schroeder has developed the concept of "thalience":
Thalience is a concept invented by Schroeder in Ventus. The idea of thalience has been adopted by some members of the artificial intelligence community to describe the self-organizing properties of fine-grained distributed networks.[citation needed] As presented in the novel, however, the concept may refer to the attempt to determine whether non-human sentient systems are truly independent minds, or whether they are merely "parrots" that give back to human researchers what the researchers expect to hear.[citation needed] The novel says that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. However, Ventus also more consistently refers to thalience as a state of being.[citation needed] Entities are considered "thalient" if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world.[2]
- from wikipedia
2
Terse Systems : Thalience and the Semantic Web