Softpaw, in some ways Terry Pratchett is sci fi.
Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a fun, gentle start, and nothing to be scared of.
Generally, there's no need to be scared of sci fi anyway - even the 'hard' stuff from the masters like Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov et al. If the writer is good then the book will be good, regardless of genre. In the early days, people like Clarke used laws of physics, current technology, and the likelihood of where things were going in order to make a background world for a story. As a result, I live in science fiction land now; credit cards, mobile phones, pcs, all these things lived only in books when I was a young teenager, reading those sci fi books of my dad's. I still expect faster-than-light travel and matter transformers to become an ordinary part of daily life at some point, if today's scientists would only try instead of blathering on about how these things are impossible..... 
Also, book wise, as a novice sci-fier I enjoyed Simak and Dick; City by Simak particularly because it involved dogs (I was only 10ish and actually understood it all which made a change from grappling with Asimov for instance). The first book I read which had an e-reader in it was The Revolving Boy by Fridberg (?) and I have wanted one ever since.
The Culture novels by Iain M Banks depict an almost utopian society; the first Culture novel is The Player of Games.
I mentioned Charles Stross upthread. The Merchant Princes series is one I find terminally dull, but that's because every book is the same as the others, but the first was good. I prefer his Laundry series, the first being The Jennifer Morgue (I think). That was the first book I read which married sci fi with the occult.
I used to turn up my nose at a lot of what is considered sci fi and call it fantasy, based on the experience of my youth with such soft porn offerings as Barbarella. I also thought that if it was sci fi it had to be difficult - this was because I had started reading that stuff when I was really young and The Big Daddies of the genre did base their stuff on real science and physics and stuff I hadn't got near at school yet.
Now, I'm fractionally wiser, and don't care whether it's fantasy or not; if it's a good book, it's a good book.