BSG
I just want to point you all here to first, the old archive By Your Command where most of the existing BSG slash lives. Check out the lot, but I recommend anything at all by Heidi Maroney. Anything.
There's a new archive (the old one hasn't been updated in a couple of years now), also and confusingly called By Your Command. Just so you don't get too bewildered, here's the link to the All New By Your Command.
Stargate Atlantis
Look!!! It sparkles!! Ah, Teh Shiny!
I have been seduced into Stargate Atlantis. Given that I couldn’t bear the original Stargate series, this was quite an achievement (thank you, Luthien!), but oh, how I love it now I'm here. Pretty pilots and snarky scientists – what's not to love? Sheppard-McKay is my pairing of choice and here's a few of the stories that make this a great fandom.
John gets steamrollered into marriage stories - here's two favourites. Don't Tell by Jenn, which is the first SGA story I ever read and which I loved to DEATH - all her stuff is brilliant (more later)- and A Not So Modest Proposal, by Reccea. In both of these, John's helplessness in the face of Rodney being... well, Rodney, makes for great laugh-out-loud reading.
I tend to run screaming from kid!fic, but there's one exception. Jenn is also writing Teacher's Pet, a wonderful and sad story of John being regressed to an eight-year-old by a sneaky alien orgasm-giving priestess. Read it at Jenn's fic page, along with everything else she writes. Brilliant stuff.
For the John who lurks below that charming exterior, the John who kills over 60 Genii in "The Storm/The Eye" in series one, the implacable ruthless killer, read Exigencies by Rivier, who not only is a damn fine writer, but turned out in real life to be a close work colleague of mine. Rivier and I may fight over things like headcount and budgets, but we sure as hell bond over the wonder that is John and Rodney.
Wonderful first time story : Chelle's A Better Fate, with John and Rodney on Earth finding each other. John's parents are brilliant. If I have a criticism of this story, it's that I can't for the life of me see John as a New Yorker.
For Atlantis and Ancient tech as something semi-sentient with a link to John Sheppard that isn't all sweetness and light, read Lacey McBain's Distraction.
And what will happen when Elizabeth's sweet little crush on her military commander comes up hard against an epiphany she would rather have avoided? Read Luthien's Enlightenment to find out.
For gen stories, you just don't get better than Martha Wilson's Retrograde series, where Atlantis and SGA1 meet in a sweepingly brilliant epic with lovely characterisation and gripping plot. It even gets a bit slashy (in a threesome) in the very latest story in the series. Read anything by Martha. Anything at all.
And finally, there are a lot of soldiers on Atlantis who have to try and figure out having Sheppard as their commander. Domenika Marzione has created an entire world within Atlantis's Little Tripoli with beautifully crafted and realised original characters, both Marines and her incomparable Dr Yoni Safir. Wonderful series of gen stories, here.
Archives : Area 52 or Wraithbait. And a whole slew of recommendations, mostly slash, to work your way through.
Lancer
I've recently rediscovered an old, old favourite: Johnny Madrid Lancer, that prototype for all the dark, messy-haired men I came to love. It's a Western, from 1969-1971. Murdoch Lancer, a Californian rancher, is being threatened by land grabbers and sends for his two estranged sons to help him. Scott (a rich Bostonian) is the eldest son whom Murdoch has only seen once; Johnny Madrid, a famous gunman down on the Mexican border ("Madrid's an awfully expensive gun to hire." "The suddenest man I ever saw." "What's another dead man to Johnny Madrid?") is the younger son who was abducted by his mother when he was two. I am hooked, totally hooked. And astonishingly, all the fiction is gen and I don't care.
There are one or two really excellent stories out there. All my recs relate to the transition period as these three strangers forge themselves into a family:
The best, by miles, is Suzanne's "Boy with a Past" - in the files section of the Lancer Writers Yahoo Group. This is both a look at how the family interacts and gets to know each other and a great mystery story. Really beautifully observed characterisation and a wealth of detail that just sucks you right in. It's still a work in progress, and to read it and catch up with new instalments as they come, you'll have to join the Group. I can barely believe I'm back in a Yahoo Group, but still, it is worth it. One of the best fanfics I've read.
More great transition stories with a damaged and difficult Johnny is Marcia's A Kind of Homecoming and An Uneasy Alliance (this latter is also in the Files section of the Yahoo Group and you'll have to scroll down through the Homecoming files to get to the right ones). Johnny in the series is aggressive and wary in the first episode and a sweetheart charmer in all the subsequent ones. Marcia deals rather more realistically than the series did with the adjustment the dangerous gunman had to make to become the rancher.
Cindy's Touchstone is a remarkable little look into Johnny's head, a tag to the pilot episode where he's still on his feet despite the bullet in his back and struggling to make sense of his feelings about his father and brother, and the offer of co-ownership of the ranch.
Whistle's Second Thoughts examines that same post-pilot period from the two outsider POV's - the Mexican ranch foreman, Cipriano, and the wife of a local storekeeper, Mrs Baldomero. In the series, both are cameo roles but Whistle gives them real flesh and bone. And Headwinds is another lovely story about the Lancer family trying to adapt to being a family.
Archive : PeterBrownTV.com
Harry Potter
Mad Martha's Harry Potter stories : Singlehanded, Martha converted me to Harry-Ron through the astonishing Aurors series (especially "One Week in Summer" and the immense "Circles of Power") and to Harry-Draco through an utterly awesome "Lodger." And then she even made me believe in Slytherin Harry in the Two Households series. Martha's slash is gentle, not graphic. Really, they're barely slash at all except in that in the course of them Harry is in a relationship with another man. Don't expect hot sex scenes because you won't get them. But they are lovingly done, psychologically acute, densely and cleverly plotted. Whether it's Harry deciding the only way to off Voldemort is through sacrificing himself with blood magic, or a broken Harry post-War looking for a purpose in his life or just schoolboy Harry trying to get along in Slytherin - well, all I can say is that I've read these far more times than I've read JK Rowling.
You can find all of Martha's fics archived at Martha's Library.
Sam Storyteller : oh, what to say about the glorious, glorious AUs that Sam tells. I loved his Cartographer's Craft story, which is post-Half-Blood Prince and really ought to be the seventh book. I came to Sam's work through his wonderful Stealing Harry story, totally AU, where Harry is saved from the Dursleys by Remus and Sirius, who never went to Azkhaban - but that's a different story and one you really must read. Also try the follow-up, Lacoon's Children (just follow through the Stealing Harry link and scroll down and down and down...).
Lord of the Rings
The slash in this fandom is almost universally dreadful, so I've tended to read more of the gen fics. I've two authors I want to rec here.
Jastaelf's Dark Leaf : This is a wonderful, poetic, lyrical tale of a Legolas captured by Nazgul as a child and imprisoned in Dol Goldur until he's old enough to be bred with orcs. Gripping, glorious - a fic that sings. And a fic that's on very slow updates, to my great grief. You can find the story at Edholland and Jasta promises that updates will appear first at her yahoo group, the Royal Mirkwood Home for Wayward Elves. Quite the best, I think.
Oh, and for one that has a wonderfully scruffy Aragorn and effortlessly superior Legolas, check out Jasta's "The Scruff Factor".
Daw the Minstrel : Daw has more than 30 tales of Mirkwood and of Legolas growing up there. Her Thranduil is just magnificent, every inch an Elven King, and her cast of OCs completely convincing. Thranduil and Legolas's elder brothers are as Tolkien would have written them if he'd had the time. I think my favourite is "When Shadow Touches Home" because Daw does Little Legolas so wonderfully well, and with a refreshing lack of twee sentimentality. You can find her stories at Stories of Arda but the only problem is working out the order you need to read them - the archive needs to do some thinking about that!
Phantom Menace
I have a slight Qui Gon Jinn thing - Liam Neeson is just gorgeous. There is a lot of pretty good Master-Apprentice slash around but my favourite of all time is Hiperbunny's Bonds of Choice. It's a great story of a young, emotionally fragile Obi-Wan Kenobi bonding to his master, Qui-Gon Jinn, with all the trauma that brings with it.
CSI
Just one author to rec here because her stuff is amazing - and that's Em Brunsen who stores her fics at Emland. It was Em who introduced me to to CSI. I watched my way through 4 full series - that's 92 episodes! - in less than a couple of months and I just loved it. Gil/Nick is the pairing for me, and Em does that wonderfully. Her stuffy buttoned up Gil and clueless Nick are at their best in Conference, which had me choking cornflakes all over the keyboard. That'll teach me to read at breakfast.
Other good sites :CSI Forensics, From Out of the Lab which is a mixed site.