Hyperion is 4 books long, and each book is worse than the previous. Read the 2nd one if you want to see how the dangling cliffhangers of the 1st wrap up, it's still pretty good and provides a real end to the story. The 3rd and 4th are a sequel, so they stand alone - they aren't *bad*, but they don't measure up to the first 2.
ran88dom99The 2nd Neuromancer book actually sticks out a bit because it's a bit more "teen lit" than the first - the protagonists are teenagers. I read it back in highschool and it was my favourite Gibson novel back then.
Anyhow, if you like the cyberpunk genre, I highly recommend Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash". It's a wonderfully weird cyberpunk book.
Also, everything @[DOOP]fortaleza mentions is awesome. I particularly recommend The Forever War. Also, if you get into Larry Niven's "Ringworld", it's good but I honestly think his short story anthologies are his best work - the various Beowulf Schaeffer and Gil Hamilton of Arm stories. That and "Protector".
Also, @[DOOP]fortaleza - the books sound *knid of* like the "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand", but some of the details are different so I could be wrong. It's about aliens living in a nebula and trapped in a cycle of nuking themselves back into the stone-age, but the nebula doesn't thin and there's no lottery or anything.
Mote/Gripping Hand is a collaboration by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle is somewhere to the right of Moussolini politically, so many of his books are thinly-disguised unpalatable political rants, but when he has Niven present to lighten the tone they produce some great stuff together, and the "Mote" books are one of their best.
Also, since we're talking about the classics (and if we're going to talk Heinlein, Moon is a Harsh Mistress is his best, not Starship Troopers) then I have to bring up the old Retief books by Keith Laumer. They're nice and light James-Bond-esque stories about a Diplomat of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, as kind of a satire of cold-war diplomacy in various 3rd-world countries.
Don't read anything Laumer wrote after his stroke, though. And honestly I can't stand his Bolo stories (about giant anthropomorphized tanks) but some folks love them.
