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It’s like reading about modern battles between oil, culture and money, but in countless years and star system into the future.
Honorable mentions for Hyperion and Neuromancer for my favorites :)
"Use of Weapons" by Iain M. Banks. Edit: Overlooked the "fun" and "lighthearted" part. Let me change my answer to "Excession", same author.
Not light-hearted, but definitely pretty fun in places. And a cracking story - I go back to it and dip in randomly every few months.
2. The tales of Vlad Taltos, by Steven Brust. Gods, swords, elves, humans, cooking, and one of the best snarky first-person narrators ever. Has a side series of five books pastiching Alexander Dumas.
3. The Vorkosigan universe, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Best characters; you'll care about their fates.
4. Seanan McGuire's Incryptid series. There are monsters hiding among us; the Covenant of St. George was founded to find them and kill them. The Covenant are the bad guys.
Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" Is one of my favorite books of all time. Its pretty much a grand exploration of this universe and every other universe to ever exist, through the eyes of the main character. I'm rereading it right now again.
Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash were great. Others you might: - The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (superb short story that Arrival was based on) - The Three Body-Problem (Cixin Liu) - Dune (Frank Herbert) - The Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler) - Lucifer's Hammer (Larry Niven) - The Kundalini Equation (Steven Barnes)
Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash were great. Others you might: - The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (superb short story that Arrival was based on) - The Three Body-Problem (Cixin Liu) - Dune (Frank Herbert) - The Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler) - Lucifer's Hammer (Larry Niven) - The Kundalini Equation (Steven Barnes)
I know OP wasn't looking for dystopias, but if you like Parable of the Sower, I recently read two excellent new scifi/dystopia books: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and American War by Omar El Akkad. American War was really cool - it's by a journalist who covered military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring, who transposes the stories/atrocities he witnessed as a reporter onto the future US.