Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - Miyazaki
Much preferred to the film version... this beautifully illustrated Manga pits the determined mystic against mankind's need for warlike resolutions to save a ravaged world.

Cities in Flight - James Blish
Elegantly written prose probes economics and restless political imperatives during the long relentless game of survival.

"Living seems to be a process of continually being born again. I suppose the trick is to learn how to make that crucial exit without suffering the trauma each time. Good-bye John..."
He thought that what she had said was probably the truth - for a woman. For a man, he knew, life is a process of dying, again and again: and the trick, he thought, is to do it piecemeal, and ungenerously.

In the Garden of Iden - Kage Baker
Fanciful blurring of lines between history and science fiction, young romance and religious passions to serious affect. Not an accident is the fall from Eden.

And as the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so was my beloved among the sons. Et cetera. What would I give, to have that night back, out of all my nights? No treasure fleet could hold it. What I'd give; no caravan of mules could carry it away.

House of Suns - Alistair Reynolds
Much preferred to the elephant series, though burdened with similar lackluster character writing. Stay for the utterly compelling investigation of space travel and various permutations of corporeal knowledge encompassing eons.

To see something marvelous with your own eyes—that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment …that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie
Let not the confusing pronouns and big statements deter you, this book deserves it's accolades on the basis of of imaginative characters, an unusual central conceit, and a tensely plotted narrative whole that reveals one bit at a time.

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

Gateway - Frederik Pohl
A very masculine text with a flawed, psychologically unstable protagonist and his band of ruffian friends, making and breaking their fortunes at the edge of the known human world in a way that will feel utterly universal. Probably my favorite out of this bunch of readings.

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?