At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have plucked some bluebells in the forest. (Unless you happen to own an entire forest. Do you? Well OK then.) SF and Fantasy are common ground that any writer can build their house upon, but pretending to own them just makes you look silly.
And it’s doubly silly if you’re an aspiring writer of the fantastic, because you may be hurling away the best chance to learn you will ever get. If as a writer you are only as good as what you read, then how good can you expect to be if your book diet is filled with derivative works of pulp fiction? A fast food diet may please the taste buds, but you wouldn’t expect to dine out on Big Macs every day and become an olympic athlete. So why expect to write even a good book without reading them first?

I want a good Sci Fi book to read.

I've sort of dropped off my novel reading in the past few years and I think I have to unplug from the snack reading of Internet and sink into books again.

But I go into book stores and the "Sci-Fi" section is full of Fantasy.  Vampires and Lord of The Ring knockoffs.  And perhaps Star Wars novels.  Quality "hard" Sci-Fi seems to be thin on the water nowadays.

So who are the sharp Sci-Fi writers now?  Who are the new William Gibson and Bruce Sterling?  Are there any recent books that would make me go "Whoa, I've never looked at the world that way!"?

The last one that did that to me was Vernor Vince's "Rainbow's End", set in a world of Wearables... where everyone with smart contact lenses that put an overlay of Internet and Enhanced Reality over everything.  One of his Singularity themed books.

So what's new and good?