Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars is quite marmite I think, for me it’s the best science fiction I’ve ever read. but it does taste very different to Dune (which honestly, I didn’t much like) Old scifi has a pretty different character.
Revelation Space series is, uh. Well, I absolutely love it when it’s good, and that was enough to have me read through endless ****-all happening. Vast and cool and unsympathetic but it does have an imperious style about it.
Foundation? Random leftfield option, Roger Zelazny’s absolutely mental Lord of Light might work for you from what you said about not spelling everything out.
Old William Gibson also has that feeling of a story happening in a world that’s never really explained, you just see it and have to work it out.