Reading:
The Science of the Discworld 2 by Terry Pratchett, Ian Sinclair and Jack Cohen. I'm a big Pratchett fan - he's just a very very clever and funny guy, and I've been reading him literally from the start (we got The Colour of Magic before even one sequel had been released); and Sinclair/Cohen are very very good science writers. It's good stuff, nothing I don't particularly know already on the non-fiction side, but hey.
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. A bit of a break from hard science-fiction for me, this is (ostensibly) a children's fantasy series, and the third book won the Whitbread award last year. It is, as expected, utterly brilliant. It's got some pretty heavy issues for a children's book - probably "young adult" would suit it better. And Pullman's got a very interesting approach to fantasy (at least here), with parallel worlds and quantum physics being important factors, and magic pretty much sidelined (and in effect explained away as a kind of alternate "science"). The first book is set in an alternate earth where (almost) all humans have "daemons", animal companions, a little like witches' familiars which are a sortof externalisation of their soul or personality. Pullman makes his alternate world work utterly convincingly. Book two is set on the real earth initially, with much world-jumping involved in the last. It's a stunning work, which grabs you right inside... I really envy young kids having this to read ;) Not that I didn't have plenty of great children's fantasy to read when I was a kid.
It's also a great antidote to C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe series, whose Christian apologetics is hardly hidden. His Dark Materials, particularly the final volume (The Amber Spyglass) features a huge critique of organised religion. Pretty cool - a fantasy series which grounds itself in (admittedly pretty pseudo, non-hard) scientific speculation and wears its author's atheism with pride. I like :)
Before that was Alastair Reynolds' latest novel Redemption Ark. His previous novels, and more to the point his numerous short stories, were masterful wide-screen hard science-fiction (the sort of "radical hard sf" which isn't afraid to envisage a future in which changes have occurred in not just one area (say virtual reality of biotech) but in numerous ways at once - hence, nanotech and biotech, relativity-obeying space travel, and huge social structures among other things all jostle around his books). I found them wondrous and fascinating, but worried that most of his characters seemed rather ruthless and unsympathetic - despite some small redemption at the end of the second novel, Chasm City. I'm glad to report that Redemption Ark lives up to its name very nicely. The characters grow in a believeable way morally... particularly exciting about the novel is the way in which one empathises with all the different sides (even while they're at war with each other). The viewpoint changes frequently, while the plot advances pretty steadily, and nearly all the characters' motives are explicated in a clear and compassionate way. I couldn't stop reading it.
It's great to see a writer you already admire having hugely matured. No longer "one to look out for", Al Reynolds is now very much at the fore-front of his field.
Al has had a couple of stories in Spectrum SF, a relatively new science-fiction periodical from the UK. While it's no even keeping up with its quarterly schedule, it's certainly up there with (the monthly) Interzone, which is IMHO the best science-fiction magazine in the world, beating even Asimov's Science Fiction. All three mags have also published stories by my favourite current author, Charles Stross. Charlie is a Linux guru of sorts, and very turned-on about world politics, science, and pop culture... His stories are brimming with imagination and humour. He has a short story collection out called Toast and other rusted futures through Cosmos Books (should be available through Amazon...). Check out Lobsters, the first in his pre-and-post-singularity series from Asimov's (currently up to number 5 out of 9), which has been short-listed for the Hugo Awards this year. Good luck, Charlie!
Charlie has a hugely worthwhile weblog too by the way. Charlie rates a 10/10 in my proprietary Greg Egan scale of science fiction worthiness.
Before Al's novel I was reading Kathleen Ann Goonan's latest, Light Music. It's the last in her nanotech quartet, all infused with the various different musics of America, but at their heart visionary hard science fiction. Her writing is fantastic (she's one of the few American writers in my list of favourites), with compelling characerisation, and she really puts those characters through the hoops! This book was strangely disappointing - perhaps because the "Silences", and other central mysteries of the previous books, get explained in an odd way, a sort of transcendental mysticism right in the middle of all the hard science. But she's writing about a transformation of humanity, a sortof next step in evolution, and if she only just fails to make it all gel, that's no mean feat in itself.
Meanwhile, previous to that, I just finally finished the entire works to date of Paul McAuley. No doubt he is a big influence on Al Reynolds, having been one of the British writers to revitalise space opera in the '90s. One of the Interzone stable (for whom he often also writes very authoratitive book reviews), he's also frequently appears in Asimov's, most recently with a stunningly good novella called The Assassination of Faustino Malarte. That story is set in a future in which off-worlders around the Solar System were defeated by the conservative Earth in the "Quiet War" (quiet because those on Earth didn't actually see any of the action at all). He uses this backdrop for much fascinating speculation about vacuum organisms, the process of science, and much politics.
McAuley's very accomplished at presenting morals with all the shades of grey - there's very rarely a thoroughly good or evil character. His most recent novel is Whole Wide World, a near-future thriller about a cop who becomes obsessed with solving the murder of a young girl, which has been webcast live... It chilling describes London as a surveillance state (which the UK is swiftly becoming), with nice touches like post-Castro Cuba as a data-haven. In some ways, I felt this was McAuley's best book yet.
While I was finishing McAuley's stuff, I finally managed to discover (courtesy of Charlie Stross in fact), the rather extraordinary near-future (alternative history) books of Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I have yet to read the previous sequence (feature ReMix and RedRobe etc) but the latest two, Pashazade and Effendi are simply awesome. This guy is totally hip, a sortof English/exotic William Gibson. The two latest novels (with presumably at least one to follow, which I predict will be called Khedive) are set in El Iskandria, a small independent state in the north of Africa (it's what the Arabs call Alexandria), in an alternative reality in which Germany one the First World War. The characterisation is fantastic, the detail almost baroque... He's known for bursts of ultra-violence, but inasmuch as they occur in these two books, they're justifiably necessary within the plot, and not really any more graphic that Gibson can get. But the development of the characters, and the way that flashback chapters gradually reveal more about their past, is suberbly done.
Other than Goonan, the above writers are all British (as are the majority in my to-be-read pile). Of course anyone who knows me will notice one author who hasn't been mentioned yet, an Australian by the name of Greg Egan. In my opinion Greg Egan is the very best author writing today. His latest novel is Schild's Ladder, which came out a few months ago now. I've been reading so much fantastic hard sf recently that a new Greg Egan doesn't make perhaps quite as much impact as he used to. In my opinion Greg's a master of the short story/novella. His two most recent novellas are "Singleton" from Interzone, and the very loosely linked "Oracle" from Asimov's. Both were superlative. I can't quite say that Schild's Ladder is superlative, but it's without doubt awe-inspiring. His speculation on future physics, cognitive science, personal relationships and much more are extraordinary to witness. There are sequences in the new novel which I just adored. However, somehow it all didn't quite gel into something completely convincing and revelatory. In contrast, the near-future novels Teranesia and Distress are indeed marvellous.
On Egan, see this note below. I recommend trying his short stories, many of which are up on his website. Two collections are also available, both of which trump just about anything else you can buy in book form. One of his best works is the far-future (yet semi-autobiographical) novella Oceanic, the complete text of which you can read here. It's about growing up, and loss of religious faith in the face of scientific understanding.
Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left - Politics, Evolution and Cooperation is a fantastic little volume in the Darwinism Today series. Singer, an Australian now at Princeton University, is famous for his essay "Animal Liberation", which pretty much started that movement, and is a highly regarded ethicist. He is squarely on the side of neo-Darwinism, the Dawkins/Dennett position rather than the sadly-watered-down Gould/Lewontin/Rose stuff - and he develops a way forward for the left to accept the inevitable fact of Darwinian evolution without bowing to any right-wing apparent ethical implications thereof. Cooperation as an advantageous and indeed necessary evolutionary trait is central to it. Compulsory reading for those interested in science and philosophy, and their relevance to the real world.
Singer's ethics are rather controversial; he is in favour of abortion and euthanasia, among other things, inciting people to create webpages like this one. Scarily reasonably-worded, but don't be taken in. Check out this page for a different, pro-Singer, view. Haven't found a homepage of his own - let me know if you know of one! The closest we can get is a very good interview with him on the New Scientist site.
Ages ago, I read both Simon Ings' novel Hotwire, which I found in Melbourne recently, and then last year's, Headlong - as expected, his odd version of bio-cyberpunk, with his obsession with senses, and what happens when one has new senses added, and then taken away again. Headlong is very very good - anyone interested in post-Gibsonian science-fiction should seek it out, and I think it would appeal to non-science-fiction fans too. A wonderful study in characterisation.
Note: my proprietary Greg Egan scale of science fiction worthiness is completely subjective; everything by Greg Egan, a Perth, Western-Australia based author, gets 10/10 because he's an utter genius - just damn right about almost all philosophical, scientific, mathematical, political etc topics. It's great when you find someone with whom you agree so closely who's also so eloquent and imaginative 
, and I just can't help comparing all other writers to him...
Whilst on the topic of writers I admire, the philosopher Daniel Dennett (big influence on Egan no doubt) has many of his papers available online, and they're strongly recommended.