There’s a lot of interesting suggestions here, but I want to recommend Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim. It’s like a sci-fi Name of the Rose, only far better. Flynn’s grasp of language should take anyone’s breath away and the story is well-researched and incredibly touching. It has aliens and even a spaceship, but the story is more focused on the everyday lives of people in a medieval village, and the timeless theme of people trying to grasp the world around them.

‘Spin’ by Robert Charles Wilson simply took my breath away.

Ted Chiang’s short stories are meticulously crafted gems of deep-thinking genius/

Robert J. Sawyer’s ‘Mindscan,’ ‘Rollback,’ and ‘Calculating God’ are awe-inspiring for their philosophical bent combined with good story-telling.

Patrick Lee’s ‘The Breach’ is probably the best when it comes to combining science fiction, breathless pacing, and deft twists of the plot that would give any mystery writer a run for his/ her money.

But, Mr. Edelman, keeping your ‘literary’ requirement in mind, I’d highly, highly recommend:

‘Daemon’ by Daniel Suarez to those literary snobs, or to anyone else for that matter, you included. It is just too good a book to miss. Do give it a shot, if you haven’t already.

I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file-drawer labeled ”science- fiction” ever since [publishing PLAYER PIANO], and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station.

The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology. The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.

There’s more at http://www.vonnegutweb.com/archives/arc_scifi.html. Obviously, Vonnegut got out.

In her famous BBC inteview years ago, Atwood said that science fiction was about bug-eyed monsters and talking squids in space and that obviously, what she wrote was speculative, not science, fiction. Conveniently “SF.” She’s backed off of that position a bit now, but still prefers to keep the bit in her mouth and lead the audience this way or that, depending.

I think that often people who read quickly simply don’t like to be slowed by the unfamiliar terms that those in the sf club absorbed years ago; it is a kind of code that keeps some readers out. Also, as Vonnegut says in his full essay, it kind of goes back to Snow’s two-culture observation, in which a wilful ignorance of All Things Technical (or, conversely, All Things Time-Wastingly Literary) seems bred into our sadly bifurcated education system.

I did recommend The Dispossessed to a high-lit friend of mine over thirty years ago; plucked it from a college-bookstore bin in Corvallis and said, “You ought to read this.” His reply: “I don’t read science fiction.” Period. I didn’t continue the argument at that point.

Most people are simply not very catholic readers. If you want a non-sf reader to acquire a new taste, you really do have to tread carefully.

I do recall the exact time and date (July 4, 1980) when I plucked Crowley’s Engine Summer from my father’s pile of vacation reading and he looked up from reading Heinlein and said, “That’s really good.” It is. Wouldn’t be a bad place to start the converstion process.

I agree that Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land might scare off beginners.

If you do happen to step into the Fantasy world with this discussion, I think that The Dark Tower and A Song of Ice and Fire are worth mentioning.