Edged in Blue

I’ve decided to resharpen my scifi chops after a loooooong absence.  There are two reasons for this.  First, there are more paying SF markets than there are crime markets.  So one is for credit, the other is to pay off the new heat pump I have to buy for the former Rancho Winter.  (I hate being a landlord.  Stupid housing market!)  Second, I’m sick of explaining to people I went to high school with that I’ve been doing crime fic for the better part of a decade.  (They also seem puzzled that I’m more into Garbage and The Foo Fighters now than The Beatles.  Hey, I kept all my Led Zep albums, too!  Doesn’t that count?)

However, let’s be honest here.  My science fiction chops came from Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, and Terminator.  I could have probably spun some decent tie-ins for Babylon 5 or done one or two episodes of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.

But aside from a couple of Robert Heinlein novels and John Scalzi’s output, I am utterly clueless as to written SF.  Here’s where you come in.

I need a list of 1.) classics every SF reader should know and 2.) which modern practitioners are must reads.  Some restrictions.

• John Scalzi is off-limits.  I’ve read all his work, including the novellas (well, almost all of them), and it’s a forgone conclusion I will be pre-ordering The High Castle as soon as Tor begins teasing us on Amazon with it.
• Heinlein:  He’s a given, so let’s just assume I’m going to be pulling two or three of his off the shelf.
• No fantasy.  If I wanted to read fantasy, I’d go back and reread Harry Potter (which is really science fiction when you think about it.  The magic has rules and is so technobabble-laiden one wonders if Rowling isn’t one of Scotty’s ancestors.)
• Hard SF:  I’m not really a fan of hard SF.  I read fiction for the stories.  I read it for the characters.  I do not read it for someone’s dissertation on the gravitational effects of supermassive blackholes.  It’s not that I don’t find it interesting.  I read A Brief History of Time, and that was interesting enough without Hawking pretending he could spin a yarn.  “Here’s the neat stuff I make my living studying.”   Blathering on and on for the entire length of a story about some scientific theory or discovery and calling it “fiction” is kinda like calling Ann Coulter’s books philosophical studies.  (Exception:  “They’re Made of Meat.”  The whole point of that story was irony.  Me digs irony.)
• Media tie-ins.  Read them.  Some were good.  Most sucked.  And I’ve already seen all the Star Treks and Star Wars movies.

That’s it.  Have at in the comments section.