Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space books would probably fit your description.

If you like your sci-fi with a bit of hard-boiled violence then Richard K Morgans Takeshi Kovacs books are excellent.

What have you read?

Anyway, not post 1970, but not awkward at all:

-Foundation series

-Solaris (a quick but a must read)

-Dune Series (though the Universe and the summary of the human history was much more interesting than the books themselves)

-Whipping Star and Dosady Experiment (not a long series, though the Universe is pretty interesting)

Post '70:

-Startide rising and the Uplift universe

Thanks for the suggestions! I've got a good list for my trip to the bookstore next pay day.

What have you read?

A pretty eclectic grouping. All of Foundation (including the last two... blech), Rama, all of Card, the Gap Cycle, Dune, Yamato (blech again), some Neal Stephenson, a chunk of the 80's cyberpunk wave, and then lots of short story anthologies and random not-worth-mentioning books picked from stores based on cover art alone. I go through phases for hard sci-fi, so the collection grows in fits and starts.

It's not a multi-volume epic, but one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time is this winner of Best Novel from both Hugo and Nebula: The Gods Themselves. Also, it was written after 1970. Barely. :-)

I've been badly disappointed with my recent book choices lately (most recently, I really thought that The Diamond Age would be almost as good as Snow Crash...), and so rather than take another stab at it myself I'm reaching out for suggestions.

Agreed, I thought Diamond Age was OK but it hasn't aged very well. But if you want to try something different by Neal Stephenson I highly recommend Anathem. At first I was just scratching my head but once I got past the first few chapters I couldn't stop reading. Definitively the best book I read last year.

On top of all the wonderful suggestions so far:

Ringworld and its sequels. It's not exactly the hardest of scifi, but it's pretty good. It may not be up to everyone's taste though, as Niven has a particular style of writing.