SF & Fantasy

• Ian M. Banks: all good "space opera". I first read The Player Of Games and still love it. Set in a far future with ubiquitous advanced technology, the debate is how much this loose pan-galactic Culture should interfere with less advanced civilisations.
• François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, Les Cités Obscures, a series of great steam-fiction comics. My preferred are La Tour (The Tower) and La fièvre d'Urbicande (available in English: Fever in Urbicand (Cities of the Fantastic)).
• Jane Yolen, The Books of Great Alta. Middle-age mostly-historical novel.

The Discworld

Terry Pratchett is not quite as universally known as it is known in England, where he typically gets a whole shelf out of the Fantasy section just for him. That's too bad, because he wrote quite a lot of books - most of them excellent. They take place on the Discworld, a flat world where narrative imperative is among the physical laws.

Hard to recommend a particular book. I particularly liked Thief of Time; A Hat Full of Sky; The Fifth Elephant; Pyramids; The Monstrous Regiment...

Manga & Anime

Japanese comics are not only about martial arts. Most of this work is not translated, so it would not be available to non-native speakers if fansub groups didn't exist. A good collection of animes with French subtitles is Mononoke-BT.

• Yokohama Kaidachi Kikou. Set in a peaceful indeterminate future on an underpopulated earth, the day-to-day life of a slightly naive young woman - in truth a humanoid robot. The "scanlations" I know of are in English [1] [2] or French [3]. There are also two animes. My desktop backgrounds (1024x768): [1] [2] [3] [4].
• School Rumble: pure comic story of College students. Classic plot, but the two TV series of animes are so much inventively over the top that it is a continous laugh.
• The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi: aliens, travellers from the future, super-powers... this random mix of fantastic elements actually shows up in this story for a single reason, namely the girl Suzumiya Haruhi. The 14-episode anime is being released on DVD in English (note: I recommend viewing the episodes in the original TV broadcast order, which is not the chronological one :-). It was also fansubbed in French. The story is based on novels which have also been informally translated. I'm sorry, could you please not agree with the cat as well?
• Sola: one of my favourite animes with (what I think is) a definitely Japanese cultural background. A fantastic story involving Origami (paper folding) and a girl which is really a "creature of the night".
• Noir: a dark, often slow-paced, enigma taking place in a realistic present-day setting. Of the so-called "girls with gun" genre.
• Madlax: from the same authors as Noir, with a touch of fantastic.
• Aria takes place in a quiet Venise city rebuilt on a colonized Mars.
• Mahoraba Heartful Days: simple everyday stories. A student children story writer, a girl that can unexpectedly switch personalities, and a handful of other characters all in the same house. Kawaii and a bit childish, but watching it just leaves a good peaceful feeling :-)
• Ah! My Goddess: a goddess and her two sisters show up in a student's life.
• Noein: a story based on the parallel universes hypothesis of quantum physics.