Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Stories by Phillip K. Dick are about as "high-concept" as you can get. Valis, UBIK, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said", "A Scanner Darkly", and "Our Friends From Frolix 8"

Altered Carbon has a setting where minds can be swapped between bodies, if you got the money. It makes the wealthiest virtually immortal. Meths, as in as old as Methusalem. And it creates a whole lot of human suffering as people exploit the various nasty alternative purposes of such tech.

The protagonist is hired/black mailed into investigating the suicide of a Meth who is convinced that is was murder. The man shot himself in the head, triggering his backup to be installed into a clone. Thus missing the memories of the final moments of his life and so convinced that he'd never do this to himself.

It's a wonderful cyber punk film noir story where technology throws the traditional murder mystery for a loop.

Dune is my first sci-fi novel and I'm really enjoying it.

Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a near-future first contact story where a crew of meta-humans, led by an AI-enhanced autistic space vampire, try to respond to an alien ship that appears in Jupiter's orbit and scans the earth. It goes deep on neuropsychology and philosophy while the crew struggles to make sense of the event.

It has some extreme weirdness but it's all scientifically justified. The book has copious endnotes explaining the basis for everything from blindsight to Cotard's delusion to the vampirism and does a great job bridging the gap between bizarre reality and pure fiction.

The Expanse? Near future space sci fi, very popular, they probably heard of it. There is a shadowy org doing some psudeo-eldrich things once they get past some politics, but letting them find it blind is good.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

"The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula Leguin.

Anything by Robert Heinlein

Red Rising by Pierce Brown is one of my personal favorites

How about Fantasy? Lord of Light by Roger Zelasney is a great read

Necroscope series and spin offs are excellent. The writing gets better as the books go forward. Misspellings and punctuation are noticeable at the start. Vampires, werewolves, esp, espionage, grey holes and alternate universes. There are many books the main series that are mists if you get into them are: Necroscope - 5 books and Blood Brothers - 3 books

The Anomaly is very much speculative fiction in the sense that it’s not about the anomaly itself, and it’s not science fiction in the sense that there will be a scientific explanation. It simply has something strange happen and then explores in detail how all the characters deal with it, which is a different way to approach storytelling.

If you’re interested in books like that, Jo Harkin’s Tell Me An Ending fits the bill— you’re contacted by a company, it turns out that you paid not only to have a memory erased, but to have r your memory of erasing the memory erased. Due to a lawsuit, they have to offer you the opportunity to get your memory back – but you can’t know what it is beforehand. Do you trust your past self? Or does not knowing what happened to you drive you so crazy you’re willing to re-traumatize yourself/destroy your marriage/whatever the consequences would be that your past self was trying to avoid? Then it follows the people involved as they struggle with the decision/consequences.

In more typical sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s Doors of Eden explores what would happen if we had parallel earths where evolution had taken a different path. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of – so… what would happen if squids became dominant and ruled earth? What would happen if rats did? Sounds crazy but it’s a really great book.

"The city we became" is a magical but weird story.

The Book of Dave by Will Self. Essentially, a taxi driver writes a horrible, bigoted journal of his hatred of all manner of aspects of modern Britain and it becomes the holy text for a religion hundreds of years in the future.

It has unfortunately only gotten more prescient in the 15 or so years since it was published. A really great book.

Ancilliary Justice is the great start to a trilogy around a galactic empire using AI controlled people and what happens if one unit becomes detached from the Hive Mind. Really good book, my favourite of the last few years.

I think most things by Adrian Tchaikovsky fit your description very well.

Hyperion, Foundation, Ubik

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Also his Final Architecture series was really fun (only 2 of 3 books out yet though). It's not as serious as Children of Time but it's a wild space tale with very interesting sentient alien life forms and a nice sense of humor.

"The Warrior's Apprentice" and all the sequels by Lois McMaster Bujold. A genius nobleman with brittle bones 'accidentally' becomes the admiral of a mercenary fleet of spaceships. Hijinks ensue.

{{Tau zero}} by Poul Anderson is great hard scifi. Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is great too but a big time investment.

I really liked Ring World

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks. AI run egalitarian society and their various run-ins with the rest of the universe.

The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Kind of sci-fi/fantasy but the high concept is of a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle.

The Bobiverse series by Dennis E Taylor. More traditional sci-fi in futuristic adventure & cloning, but high concept in that the clones have different personalities & the planets they find in their adventures are sometimes inhabited.

Please post recommendation requests in /r/suggestmeabook or the weekly thread.

The Three Body Problem trilogy. I think it will fit what you're looking for exactly

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