Yeah - I actually meant to reply to this thread earlier but didn't have time and, when I did, I'd forgotten that you hadn't read Methusaleh and to agree with Vertigo for that reason, too.
Which ones? Anderson and Brin or Heinlein? I don't know very much Brin - I read a book or two of the Uplift series and
Earth and a collection and didn't really care for any of it. Not to say he's bad or anything, but he just didn't click for me.
For Heinlein,
The Past Through Tomorrow is probably #1, but also the rest of his stories. For novels, any and all of his Scribners juveniles are good to great. For non-juvenile novels, there's
Double Star and
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress though, again, you can't go wrong with any of the 40s-50s stuff (though I wasn't overwhelmed by
Beyond This Horizon).
For Poul Anderson, he also writes good short fiction though I don't know a definitive collection. His Polesotechnic League/Terran Empire series (which is a mixture of novels and shorter stories) is great. But I'd have to make a special pitch for
Tau Zero - that's one of my favorites of any author. It's also a Breathtaking Adventure involving a runaway spaceship.
And
Brain Wave is an interesting novel about Earth being stuck in a stupid zone of the galaxy and what happens when we come out of it and everyone's IQ triples (or whatever factor it was). And, also again, I'd suspect it would be hard to go wrong with any of at least his 50s-60s stuff, though his output has been so prolific and varied that there's a lot of his stuff I haven't read.
