The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms series - NK Jemisen. Wooooooo creative and original pantheon that only rips mildly off Zoroastrianism wooooo!
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury. This book cultivated in me a long-lasting obsession with questions of memory and time.
Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Three European men set out on expedition to the Amazon to find a society entirely composed of women. Said society is less than impressed with the men. Did I mention it was written 100 years ago?
Animal Farm - George Orwell. Broke my 13-year-old heart with the promise of revolution and the failure of people.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. I realize these nominations are getting heavy on the old-white-man brigade, but this book changed my life.
World War Z - Max Brooks. This might be the most hopeful dystopia I've ever read.
Pit Dragon Trilogy - Jane Yolen. I literally read these books to pieces when I was a child. My copies fell apart.
Western Comics
Y: The Last Man - Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra. An event of mysterious origin wipes out all the men on earth, except one slacker magician. Society still goes on. HOW WAS THIS NOT NOMINATED EARLIER. SERIOUSLY, IT HAS ALL THE AWESOME WOMEN EVER.
Orbiter - Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran. No story I've ever read, before or since, has captured so well the exquisite agony of wanting to go into space in a society that no longer has a will to do so, pressing your nose against the window glass and staring, longingly, at something you can never have. (Except of course you can have it, eventually, because this is speculative fiction.)
Anime
Ghost in the Shell Universe- Uh, there are like 5,000 related works in this fandom, and I'm not sure which one to nominate specifically. So, blanket nomination yeah!
no subject
Books
Western Comics
Anime