@unhedged these days I'm in too much trying to catch up on nonfiction and longreads, so fiction dah lama not read anything current. That I even read King is a surprise because I'm a chicken with horror.

My choices quite common I think: Terry Pratchett for sure, but he's really a guy whose worldview really became nuanced the longer he went on that it's almost a crime to say start with the early books in discworld, but they're good to set the stage and also to see how the world developed (it's a very loose series so you can really dive in and out). The other one is CS Forester - he does the Horatio Hornblower books and it's really the worldview of a white British man who came of age before the British empire ended so it can be very rah-rah. But in the 1930s he's got a good gig writing for Hollywood so his novels really go very fast - the Crichton of his time lol. I want to get into contemporary science fiction but i get really impatient with what they think is important and what i think (lol) but that said, Ted Chiang and his short stories are sooooo berhantu - his high-concept stories always stick in my head.