Fandom Lounge's Journal - Day

7:38AM - looking for SF recs

I'm working on a SF original fiction idea right now (decided to file the serial numbers off my SW fanfic and RPG background), and I'm realizing that when it comes to SF profic, I'm at something of a loss. I've read widely in mystery and fantasy and I've watched a lot of SF TV and movies, but I haven't read many SF novels beyond spinoff novels for my two SF fandoms (Star Wars and Halo). I'm not a big hard SF person, the greater the focus on the tech and the science, the less interested I am.

So I'm interested in:
-what you'd recommend as an introduction to SF for people who don't read a lot of SF, including "hard SF for people who don't like hard SF"
-space opera
-social/cultural SF (the science interests me less than the politics of alien cultures, how being humans on an isolated planetary base influences their society/how they relate to each other, that kind of thing)
-anything with precursor races (especially where they're more of an influence than simply leaving behind cryptic artifacts) and anything with sentient planets

Thanks!