I DNFed Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. I had high hopes because the concept was reminiscent of Philip K Dick's stories but I found the book to be a confusing slog with characters seemingly pulled from nowhere and with the plot muddling along with coincidences and revelations. There are a few gems of ideas in there, just takes too long to unpack.
dominiquec
Start using it more frequently and favor it over GUI apps. For instance, use cd and ls over the file manager. Launch applications I using the command line. Figure out ways to do in the CLI what you used to do using GUI. Over time you should get more comfortable with the environment.
Project Gutenberg has a pretty good science fiction selection, quite extensive in fact that I think it's better to go by author than by individual works.
For the "classics" there's H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, aside from Verne and Shelley whom you've already mentioned.
There are some surprising names, too, like Jack London, E.M. Forster, and Rudyard Kipling.
For golden age scifi: Frederic Brown, E.E. "Doc" Smith, CM Kornbluth, Jack Williamson, Frederic Pohl, Olaf Stapledon, and Andre Norton. Also, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.
For your criteria, though, I would recommend looking for the works of Philip K. Dick and H. Beam Piper.
For all its alien backdrop, it was the human element of Roadside Picnic that I found more terrifying. I needed a more cheerful and upbeat story as a palate cleanser from its dismal outlook.