"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" punches above its weight for Lem. Solaris is good too. I find Lem interesting but only sporadically enjoyable.
The Strugatskys have gone from being "Roadside Picnic" + a largely unobtainable back catalogue - I expensively amused myself by putting together a collection of pretty much everything they published in English a few years back. They have been celebrated (arguably, over-celebrated) by SF Masterworks and other recent publications so almost everything is back in print.
I enjoyed the new mix-up of "Lame Fate / Ugly Swans" (Ugly Swans was previously published as a standalone book, but is now intertwined with a book about the hassles of dealing with an AI-based evaluator of book quality, the book in question being Ugly Swans). The Doomed City was the original candidate for that, but was too long to fit - that's also available on SF Masterworks.
If you want to see where Iain M Banks extracted a good quarter of his ideas for the Culture, "Hard to be a God" is a decent read.
The Strugatskys have gone from being "Roadside Picnic" + a largely unobtainable back catalogue - I expensively amused myself by putting together a collection of pretty much everything they published in English a few years back. They have been celebrated (arguably, over-celebrated) by SF Masterworks and other recent publications so almost everything is back in print.
I enjoyed the new mix-up of "Lame Fate / Ugly Swans" (Ugly Swans was previously published as a standalone book, but is now intertwined with a book about the hassles of dealing with an AI-based evaluator of book quality, the book in question being Ugly Swans). The Doomed City was the original candidate for that, but was too long to fit - that's also available on SF Masterworks.
If you want to see where Iain M Banks extracted a good quarter of his ideas for the Culture, "Hard to be a God" is a decent read.