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Well, if you liked Diane Duane's Star Trek novels, then you'll like her "Wizards" series. She's got a YA version with teen wizards, and a grown-up version with cat wizards. Both are good, though the latter books in the teen series are starting to be a little formulaic, imho.
They're ostensibly fantasy, but with a fairly grounded scientific background and "explanations" for how the "magic" works, what with the worldgates and time-travel and extraterrestrial planet-visiting, and all.
Quick search of Kobo and Sony stores shows that while all the YA novels aren't represented, you can get the two "cat wizard" books, although Sony seems to have only the 2nd one.
There's plenty of Mike Resnick up at Baen's Webscriptions. His best available is the Kirinyaga collection, though the AU Teddy Roosevelt collection should also have some good ones, and you can read some of the award-winning stories in full, free online as samples there.
He's also written a book about writing science fiction, which dissects and analyzes his own stories as examples, but it looks like the MultiFormat version disappeared off of Fictionwise along with a huge chunk of his novels; perhaps one day it'll show up at Baen.
Given that you like Asimov, kind of like Clarke, and Carl Sagan's Contact, as well as John M. Ford's The Final Reflection, I think you might like to try Robert J. Sawyer's "Factoring Humanity", which is a not-quite-first-contact novel based on receiving and interpreting a mysterious message from the stars, and how it ultimately affects society.
RJS also puts some of his award-winning short stories/novellas online free on his website (I linked it in the Hard Science Fiction recs thread), along with some helpful articles he did on the business in Writer's Digest or some other professional magazine.
It looks like not all his work is yet available as e-books, but it also looks like Tor's been steadily putting his backlist out in electronic editions (the Sony store has an interesting mix of his earliest and latest works), so I expect it'll eventually show up.
Another one of his that might be interesting to you as a writer is "Mindscan", which involves an author's intellectual property rights in an age of consciousness transference and immortal plastic bodies.
This is probably long enough giant wall o'text for starters and I have to catch a bus soon, so I think I'll leave at that, though if you mention any story/theme elements you particularly like or dislike, I'm sure it'll help refine people's suggestions.
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