I haven't read fiction in a long time. The last fiction books I read for fun were Orson Scott Card's Enders Game and Homecoming series. They're also the only fiction books I've read not made for children. I've since moved on to history books and they're just as fun and more useful.

Enders Game itself is a classic. Humans have united after alien invasions. The whole world is reorganized under a semi-fascist global confederacy that controls everything down to birth rates to keep humanity ready for war. All children are monitored and screened for the army. The book follows one of them.

There's some sequels that follow his story. They get weirder. Metaphysics, more alien species, etc.

Other sequels and prequels follow side characters as they get wrapped up in the post-war politics of Earth. The global government collapses immediately and these super genius child protegies, now teenagers, end up at the center of the conflict.

Then the Homecoming series is separate. It starts with a human society on another world, colonised by refugees of a nuclear war on Earth. A satellite acts as a god, working to prevent any similar abuse of technology. When it starts failing, it leads some chosen people on a journey and they end up establishing a new society. It's heavily inspired by the Bible, but still interesting.

He also has other works, like a short story of elephants using biological warfare to destroy humanity and create a new genetically engineered master race of humanoid elephants.

Some common themes with his work:

He's Mormon, but controversial in his community. Religion is present in the books and taken seriously, but it's not pushing Mormonism or ever portraying religion as true. Instead it's often recreating religious themes in whays that could be seen as blasphemous. Definitely an interesting thing to analyse. Examples include a Catholic fertility clinic that has a whole warehouse of frozen embryos, because discarding them would be murder; the aforementioned satellite deity; an AI god thing; human beings conjured by force of will; and Catholic missionaries preaching to alien groundhogs.

He also has a way of saying things brazenly. The type of anti-woke, evolutionary sociology you'd expect from 'enlightened' conservatives. This is kind of common in sci-fi because of the whole colonizing thing requiring births from a small starting population. Homecoming has a gay character who's expected to mary and procreate, and has to work out some sort of relationship with his assigned wife. One of the Enders Game sequels has a discussion about how you could just use a machine to make and raise embryos and then women would be worthless. This sort of stuff never defines the entire book. In fact, it's relatively minor. It's just clear he's trying to address these topics when it's not necessary and he doesn't have much to contribute.

Even if I don't agree with any of it, there's something refreshing in seeing a gritty, stark aproach to sci-fi that at least tries to grapple with geopolitics, culture, religion, etc. both within human society and with aliens.