>Like space opera >Ask /tg/ for a series now that I finished

Someone at work was listening to an audio book of Red Rising that seemed pretty cool

>>54791372
>>Like space opera
>>Ask /tg/ for a series

The Culture series, by Ian Banks. Read The Player of Games first, that'll tell you if the rest are worth your time.

>>54791372
You appear to be mad.

>>54791408
I enjoyed the serious.

Keep your head on a swivel for the Straight Outta Compton reference tho

>>54791372
Nothing.

My dad loves them for some reason. It's okay, we bond over Hammer's Slammers and Starship Troopers.

>>54791517
>not the Use of Weapons

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>>54791582
*enjoyed the series, fuck.

It's a trilogy if you're interested.

>>54791372
I didn't mind them too much but Weber should have kept with the plan of her dying during the battle of Manticore.

After that it just becomes an incestuous mess of side novels.

>>54791609
I AM CHAIR

>>54791372

Okay, Book 6 has *utterly hilarious* (albeit highly lethal) Q-ship shenanigans in the good guys favor, though there's a rather unfortunate wish-fulfillment subplot about bullying, but the latter doesn't involve the main characters. For me, the Q-ships were worth it.

Later on... well, I skipped the second half of either 8 or 9 and missed nothing that I couldn't pick up from the following book, and now I'm planning on tracking down the spinoff involving an anti-slavery movement and hoping that since other authors are involved in that one, it'll be better than the main series. After binge-reading a couple books on days when I had to sit still for hours at a time, it got to the point where I wanted to grab Weber by the collar and shake him. (Over a minor detail, no less. NORMAL HUMANS DON'T HAVE YELLOW EYES!)

>>54791670

make that the second half of book 7 or 8, not 9. Ironically enough, it sounds like I actually missed a lot of interesting stuff, but I'm still not going to go back and find out.

And yeah, you might want to check the chronological list on WIkipedia. I really hate series that fork out like that.

>>54791372
I've seen this exact OP before

Nothing much. Honor is as much if not more of a Mary Sue than Rey ever was. You have better luck with The Expanse series

>>54791517
consider phlebas will tell you if the rest of the series is worth your time

It's kind of weird how everyone else, the main thing they focus on is Honor's Suedom, where for me EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT THE BOOKS is so darn *bad* that the problems with Honor herself fade into the background. Every time I get desperate enough to try another one I end up thinking "Dude, you can't write!"

>>54791646
Autistic fandoms have money, they will be the death of anything even slightly good and a lot more besides.

I still need to read some of the side novels, but the Shadows ones are okay. Though there are some low points, because I don't find turkey shoots fun.

I honestly think the post-Hades book is the best we've ever seen of Honor as a senior senior officer - like 50% of everything else with her as an admiral is just her carrying on being great at shit that there was never much indication she should be good at, but that one is actually nice.

Also don't read War of Honor unless you MUST know the story, or you hate yourself, it's the most tedious shit, and I say this as someone who generally enjoys the series even with Honor being ridiculously OP.

>>54791956
Curb stomping the Solarians was pretty funny but a lot of the Mesan Alignment stuff left me cold. A completely unknown force wipes out the fleet and shipyards of a major local power using a fleet of unknown new stealth ships and no other nations go into panic mode? Yeaaaah.

>>54791517
I don't think you know what "space opera" means

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>>54791372
>He fell for the Harrington meme

>>54792070
>and no other nations go into panic mode?
Haven and Beowulf do.

Also, the clue's in the name, accounting for Weber's murrica-boner
Oyster Bay = Pearl Harbour

Not necessarily the actual Pearl Harbour, but the perception

>>54791372

This is copypasta, but I don't dislike these threads

Since I assume there are well read people here:

Does anyone have any recommendations for good sci-fi? I'd like something pulpy, or something Gonzo and slipstream but I'm easy going.

>>54792161
the Halo novels

>>54791646
I read the series just becomes garbage after a point.

>>54791372
It's a terrible retarded series, but damn I loved the battles and the space tech.
The last couple of books I read I was practically skimming through anything that wasn't space fights.
Also fuck that psyker space cat, I hope it gets euthanized.

I liked Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon.
I perceive the protagonist's successes as being the product of learning from her failures, but I couldn't blame someone else for finding it Sue-y.

>>54792161
Armor if you want something with a lot of action. Rendezvous with Rama if you want less punching and shooting.

>>54792179
I've already read the first four or so way back when Halo was on original xbox. I only really remember the fall of reach and the flood, are any others worth a read? I'm getting flashbacks to the fucking ODST troops dropping in and spitting blood after smashing through those trees.

>>54792229
I haven't heard of either, I will definitely take a peak at both. Thanks anon.

The last book I read and really enjoyed was The Engineer: Reconditioned by Neal Asher. Goddamned that book was good, really high concept hard sci-fi full of weird shit.

I thought it was a fun read., but not objectively good. If you like space battles also try out The Lost Fleet.

Basically, guy at start of war is frozen in escape pod and woken up 200 years later with the 2 empires still grinding at eachother with the extremely high attrition rates killing off any experienced officers on both sides. The result is they all know fuck-all about any tactic other than "charge", so he takes command due to seniority (200 years frozen).

Flawed but fun.

>>54792161
Neal Asher's Polity series is good pulp. Think the Culture series with less magical tech and written by a rightwinger instead of socialist.

The Soul Cycle books are a vaguely D&D-esque space fantasy, they'd fit right in to a planeswalking-heavy Starfinder campaign.

Ninefox Gambit isn't "real" scifi - it's totally soft, down to consensus-reality based tech - but it's a lush world.

Ken Macleod's Corporation Wars are hard SF with...better than usual political balance and factions that aren't democracy all over again, based around colonizing a new solar system.

>>54792310
His Agent Cormac series is also great. Who doesn't love a good old nanotechnology plague?
Spatterjay is also good, but gets weaker at the end book.
His newest series I thought was pretty crap.
I loved Hilldiggers. If you want to read that read the spatterjay books first since the main character is an Old Captain.

>>54792233
Fall of Reach, First Strike, Ghosts of Onyx. Everything else got screwed up by shit writers.

>>54792358
Wait, so there is a series about splatterjay? I read the short story, or I guess it's a novella, in the engineer Reconditioned, but I didn't know there was more to it. Fuck, I think I've got to check that out, I knew that idea was too well constructed to be just one short chunk of another book. Either way I think I'm going on an Asher kick for a while, like this anon also suggested >>54792350. I just got lucky and found that one in a bookshop, I'll go hunt for a quality PDF if I can't find some hardcopies.

Have you fine folks read Fire Warrior? I've read that shit like 5 times, Simon Spurrior hits the tone of the cleanly Tau interacting with necrotic servators and nonsensical chaos so well. But it's been a few years since I remember reading it, and I used to be a huge edgelord so it may not have aged well. Otherwise, and completely irrelevant, I really enjoyed Don Quixote. It felt very /tg/ from start to finish and is laugh out loud hilarious in parts.

Honor Harrington fell apart as David Weber stopped following the script...

>>54791823
>I've seen this exact OP before
So have I. Anyway, I stopped reading at "War of Honor" or whatever it was called because it was almost 1,000 pages made up of solid tedium and nothing.

>>54791372
I read up to like, Flag in Exile I think, and not only was it tiresome that Honor was the best at anything, but also how much suffering was piled up on her to "balance" things. She all but fucks her career over at the end of Book 1, she gets grievously wounded in the second book, she gets a sweet boyfriend that then gets duel-murdered, then there's the time she has to watch as a bunch of cute space mormon boys of her space mormon country get splattered, and of course she goes through crews and ships like it's fucking Star Control 2. The constant whiplash between SHE'S THE BEST and SUFFERING was a headache.

Great fights, though, and a fantastic example of shaping your space magic to give you the combat aesthetics you want in your sci-fi story.

>>54792511
If you want really good 40K stories, read the Shira Calpurnia books and the other short stories Matt Farrer has done.

>>54792350
Been reading Corporation Wars for 15 mins now and I'm quite interested. Thanks for the recommendation anon.

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Honor Harrington is so bad it made /lit/ and /sci/ join together in their hatred of engineers

>>54791956
>Autistic fandoms have money, they will be the death of anything even slightly good and a lot more besides.
wait how are they the death of things by funding them?

>>54793961
Remember how Harvey Dent said "Either you die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"?

"Either a writer stops writing something while he still cares enough about it to actually make it good, or he keeps writing for the guaranteed nerdbux long after he stopped giving a shit about quality."

I mean, I came to the series with book 6, then found the earlier ones and read from 1 to 9 from there, while there were still space-battles in the books that were supposed to be all about them... but these days, Weber clearly cares more about Important World-building than about Shit Blowing Up. And the fact that the world-building is grossly inconsistent with the world established in books 1-9 really grates a lot of people, too.

>>54792410
I read Last Light awhile ago and that was pretty good so maybe the newer novels have gotten back on track

>>54792311
>guy familiar with 18th century gunline tactics is given command of modern combined arms military
Haha no, that's retarded.

Harrington needed to die in book 10. She needed. to. die.
But then Weber chickened out since he had to go and spit out more sequels. Really rather lame.
Lest we forget, by book 7 she develops fucking psychic powers, and gets a railgun hand. To augment her mastery of politics, naval warfare, ancient handgun dueling, stunt driving/flying, ancient mormon katana dueling, and making friends of only good people. Also, xenolinguistics.

Did I mention she gained psychic powers, in a universe that doesn't have humans with psychic powers?!

Turn off your brain and go read the Vorkosigan saga.

>>54794792

>in a universe that doesn't have humans with psychic powers?!

Everything else yes, but I thought the books made it pretty clear that latent psy-potential runs in a number of human bloodlines-- probably more than we see, since it usually only manifests as 'cat-bonds-- and it's especially strong in the Harrington line, probably due to a combo of the Meyerdahl Beta mods and repeat tree cat exposure. (Look up epigenetics-- Lamarck was wrong, but he wasn't *completely* wrong). Hamish Alexander is foreshadowed as an empath way back in Book 4.

>>54794764
Except technology hadn't advanced either, or in fact had regressed because everybody was so focused on "frontal attack NOW". I'm not sure - I haven't read The Lost Fleet myself.

>>54791372
Somewhere along the way, Weber heard the quote that "the bomb only lives as it is falling," and decided to apply that principle to telling the lives and times of the gratuitous missile spam in the series.

>>54792161

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765397536

I just got this book in an order because the blurb amused me and it was short.

It's cute so far. Or you can read some Greg Egan if you want to give yourself a dimensional headache:

https://www.amazon.com/Dichronauts-Greg-Egan/dp/159780892X/

Elizibeth Moon's Vatta's war saga is one of my favourites. The tactical applications of adding instantaneous communications technology to space fleets mid war and the tactical adaptation they had to do because of it was really neat.

I heard Weber got unbelievably lazy in later books. Like, literally copying entire chapters, word for word, lazy

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>>54792161

The Revelation Space books by Alistair Reynolds

The Gap Sequence by Stephen Dolandson

A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky and Children Of The Sky by Vernor Vinge


Those are all top class Sci Fi

I got about 20,000 words into writing a space opera novel before I realized I was just writing Legend of the Galactic Heroes with Slavs instead of Germans, and gave up. Frustrating exercise.

>>54791372
The Lost Fleet.

>>54792311
If you want a reprieve from a series about a main character who is good at everything, do NOT read The Lost Fleet. It's the fucking worst.

The guy who wrote it was a buttmad naval officer who writes a blatant self-insert to call senior officers incompetent gloryhounds. It's tedious, it's dry, it's duller than dishwater, and worse of all it's repetitive. We fucking get it, everyone except the self-insert main character is a fucking retard. Every battle goes over the exact same points and while I do like hard SF, I don't like hard SF that feels the need to exhaustively explain things over and over again. I stopped after reading the, like, 20th explanation of time delay over extreme distances and how information they were getting on sensors was hours or days late based on distance because I FUCKING UNDERSTAND ALREADY GODDAMN.

I guess it just depends on how much you buy into the premise, but it's really obnoxious in my opinion, and the idea that in 200 years everyone lost any ability to reason is retarded. Instead of being a brilliant tactician he just comes off like the only normal guy in a setting where everyone but him is retarded. To be charitable, subordinate officers are well-meaning and valorous retards but they are still retards. Nobody tries any tactics or maneuvering ostensibly because officers die too fast to teach their knowledge to others but this retarded concept denies the characters in the story any agency or ability to think for themselves. Like, is it really such an earthshattering revelation that if a fleet surrounds its enemy on multiple sides sides it's more effective at breaking the enemy's will to fight than a head-on attack? That's really something all of mankind forgot when it's been a mainstay of warfare for literally all of human history, to where we have three thousand year old texts discussing it?

Look at the fantasy series the same guy wrote under the pen name Jack Campbell, it's a lot better.

>>54794764
Due to the constant demands of a 200 year long war and the constant deaths of officers with experience, tactics and strategic understanding has gradually degraded until space navies know literally nothing else but the full strength frontal assault.

This premise is, as previously discussed, retarded, but that is the book's explanation as to why a guy in stasis for 200 years is the best tactician in the galaxy.

>>54795519
This is a common problem with writers who honestly aren't very clever -- they have a 'genius' who is only smart because his foes are morons. You can only be as cool as the challenges you overcome.

Honestly, why not raid history books for some clever strategems used by real geniuses, like obscure commanders most people haven't heard of?

>>54795519
After the first book the enemy faction starts adapting to "whoa, they have an admiral that actually uses tactics now." They start changing their tactics to take advantage of and counter his assumption that the enemy doesn't understand tactics. While that seems like smart writing, think about it - it violates the very premise of the fucking setting, it proves that at least the enemy faction absolutely can think flexibly and adapt to battlefield conditions, they just bizarrely chose not to do so until after the main character reminds everyone that thinking is allowed in warfare. If they actually did have captains and admirals capable of flexibly adapting in warfare, why didn't they do so prior to right now? And if they weren't capable before, why are they so capable now? Because the story demanded it is the only explanation, and that's bad writing.

>>54795519
>Look at the fantasy series the same guy wrote under the pen name Jack Campbell, it's a lot better.
The Pillars of Reality series, it's called.

Annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be a pirate copy of the fifth or sixth books online anywhere. audiobooks yes, but fuck audiobooks.

>>54792161
The Sprawl trilogy. Tons of people have read Neuromancer, but Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are also good.

If you've never read Snow Crash you're doing yourself a disservice every day you don't correct that error.

>>54795538

You do know that this is based on the Macedonian army, right? After Alexander the great did his thing with the Macedonian phalanx, everyone copied it east of the ionian. However, over time they forgot how to use the Macedonian phalanx properly - you're supposed to use cavalry to break the enmy formation from the sides and rear, but people who picked up the model seemed to miss this, believing the troops themselves and not the combined arms tactics were what won the wars. Also it was just easier to only raise one kind of soldier in this manner. This is when the roman's came in they were defeated - a few people argue that a proper Macedonian army with proper cavalry support would have faired better vs. the roman armies when they invaded. They wouldn't have won, mind, but they would have faired better.

>>54792410
the forerunner trilogy is pretty good, Last light was good, but the rest are either bad or not noteworthy like the nylund books were.

>>54795800
The SoS lead dev did a pretty informative video laying this all out. The Macedonian Phalanx was there to "fix" enemies in place for flanking actions, yet over time people just forgot about it and tried to crush opponents with it frontally without the use of combined arms. Hence humiliating defeats like Pydna, or that fuckup where Phyrrus almost lost to a numerically inferior Roman force in a frontal clash that lasted five hours until he remembered that he had elephants and used them to rout the enemy. Heraclea I think?

Tactical degradation is depressingly real. People get so fixated on the effectiveness of certain tactics that they forget WHY they were effective, and so simply try to emulate previous successes without developing a mastery of the tools that brought those successes about.

>>54795421
Doesn't sound that bad.
What was your story like?

>>54795840
The entire concept of a "frontal assault" doesn't even exist in space, which is three dimensional despite dumb people lining everyone up on the same axis like they're on the ocean

It's a dumb concept used to jerk off how smart and cool the main character is and nothing more

>>54795519
There are smart people. Right in the beginning, you can see how they're sent to die in Syndic space. The Alliance's government supposes that if they won too hard and too much, they'd get into politics as victors and oust the old senate and rulers, and that the military-industrial complex would lose its usefulness. No doubts Syndics do something of the kind to.

>>54792161
Night's Dawn trilogy.
Even if the ending pissed me off no end, and the token advanced alien species were busybody cunts.

>>54795800
Does that work in a scifi system, though? Can the average admiral not use Space Google?

>>54795691
Google the title of the book + epub and it's one of the top five results for every one of the books including the new one. This works for pretty much every book ever written that is even slightly popular.

>>54796217
Space Google's servers got blown up/cyberwarred to death.

The Sector General books by James White were pretty good, if you can find them since they're fairly old and obscure. They're about the people that work in the eponymous massive space hospital and all the wierd and wonderful species they have to figure out how to fix, despite possibly not knowing what's wrong with them as such, what "fixed" would look like or whether the being in question wants any help because they're in the "new species" department for the second half of the series. It's not so much a straight conflict series so much as a bunch of puzzle stories that eventually work out in clever ways, though. Apart from Star Surgeon, which has a massive space war around SecGen which was pretty well done.

Has a slight touch of Ciaphas Cain syndrome in that it repeats some of the exposition a few times, like the classification system for species, path chick is pretty, Diagnosticians (people with the memories and personalities of half a dozen people in their heads to devise new medical treatments for alien species, most have one or two memory tapes temporarily) are a bit mental, etcetera, because the books used to be all separate stories in the sci-fi publications, but still worth a read.

Also gonna toss out David Brin's Uplift series, which is long as all hell and does a pretty stupendous quantity of interesting worldbuilding. Slight HFY occasionally, but really not much of it, since humans are still like three tech levels below most of the aliens and get totally rolled if they're not clever about their ambushes. Also there are chimps and dolphins there to keep the PoV characters varied, plus about five other alien species in the second trilogy.
Traeki a best.

>>54796842
The second trilogy of Uplift blows dicks, though.

>>54796871
Certainly first three are better, although I kinda liked some of the Slope characters it just went on, and on, and on with nothing much actually happening and no new stuff showing up. Emerson (and friends) spend like seven chapters riding in what's basically a straight line and fighting random urrish bandits, you could have skipped that whole thing easily. Would have been good if it had been two books with less filler everywhere, it's not like Jijo really mattered at all the moment they left it. Still first three are excellent and last three probably worth one read-through.

>>54796842
Sector General originally was serialized iirc. Thus the repeated exposition.

Are there any good space navy stories like honour that don't have painfully obvious Mary sue MCS?

>>54792161
>something pulpy
Read Philip K. Dick books. Most of them are a great ride, just don't start with the Valis trilogy.

>>54795840
This was however also because the diadochi lacked a decent sized cav force and the phalanx grew heavier thus inflexible.

>>54791372

If you like Foundation, try the Culture series. My most enjoyed (not necessarily best) books were Surface Detail and Hydrogen Sonata. Player of Games was probably objectively the best story, though.

>>54797029
the most /tg/ one, at least

>>54795743
I think Count Zero is my favorite of the trilogy. Explores the widest array of cyberpunk fiction.

Can I get some recognition for Jack Vance?

The Dragon Masters, Showboat World, Ecce and Old Earth, the Alastor books, all fantastic. And all totally different.

>>54791372
Honorverse is the gayest shit, and its fans are the worst.

>>54796842
If you like Sector General you might also enjoy the Prostho Plus series by Piers Antony. About a prosthodontist who gets abducted by aliens and introduced to xenodentistry.

>>54791874
> telling people to read the worst book in the series first
But why?

>>54791372
If you want more suggestions:
A Fire Upon the Deep
Hyperion

I'd recommend Dune but it isn't really space opera.
Have you read all of the foundation books?

What tg thinks about Berserker series?

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>>54791372
Just read this, it's actually a good and well respected classic of space things. Space Opera attracts too many chodes.

>>54795519
>comes off like the only normal guy in a setting where everyone but him is retarded

This trope should have a name

>>54799969
Idiocracy?

>>54799969
Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond, although that applies to all situations where only one character has normal capabilities.

>>54799969
Only Sane Man?

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I've been reading the Chanur saga by Cherryh. I like it so far. I recently finished Pride of Chanur. Has anyone else also read this and willing to share their opinions? I really like how alien the aliens are in the book. Cherryh does a good job fleshing each species out and how their biology impacts their culture.

>>54791372

I remember this pasta.

>>54799969
Only Sane Man, Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond. Yes, those are the TVTropes names.

>>54799712
My cocojin. That shit is fucking brutal.

>>54800858
any of here books in that universe are great, also you should read the foreigner series by the same author really delves into the otherness of aliens, even if the look mostly humanlike.

>>54792161
It's not pulpy, but Lem's Eden does not hold back when it comes to an alien planet and its inhabitants being batshit, well, alien. I highly recommend it.

>>54799667
I second this. The Hyperion Cantos is absolute madness. Dan Simmons turns everything he touches into gold.

And IMO Illium/Olympus is great too. The dynamic duo of Mahnmut and Orphu of Io is an interesting exploration of science fiction and literature in a post-human world.

>>54795203
>A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky and Children Of The Sky by Vernor Vinge
a billion times this. a Fire Upon the Deep is the best "and ancient evil awakens story you are like to read this decade.

>>54791609
Player of games is honestly better for a fa/tg/uy to start with. Use of weapons and consider Phlebas are for the /lit/izens. The rest of the series are for people who enjoyed the other books and wanted more of the same.

>>54797029
Surface Detail and Hydrogen sonata for best ships
Matter for coolest world
Look to Windward for maximum comfy

>>54805988
I know some people did make a real game of Azad, but I've always thought it would be fun to write rules for a whole tournament like Blood Bowl. Would be interesting, especially if you had the ability to cheat between matches with performance-enhancing drugs or getting better help like Gurgeh's opponents. You could flesh out the different Game Colleges and make a little character-creation thing. Pick College, branch of government and some Principles a la Stellaris, between matches spend influence to gain side benefits or bank it for permanent upgrades, etcetera.

Only read Consider Phlebas and TPoG so far, really need to find some more of those around.

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>>54791372
>In short, in this universe, Mahan exalted as a Solar and beat up some Shinma so Decisive Battle doctrine is flawless and dominant, forever.
[image], captioned (not actually that many dots in Sail)
>In Honorverse, having a bigger fleet fails to produce victory for only two reasons:
>1) Manticore's technology lets it punch way above its weight, always, without exception.
>2) Everyone in Honorverse is a stupid fucking idiot who wouldn't know naval strategy if it was licking their eyeball.
>[...]
>Enter Solaria.
>Solaria's plan is "Mob together an undefeatable fleet, bypass all irrelevant systems, conquer enemy capital, dictate terms."
>This is the first good strategy Honorverse has ever seen. The implementation is lacking (okay, that's an understatement), but they're still the first people to have even the core of a good strategy, and it happened by accident.
>The author makes it pretty clear he has no idea this is sensible. Characters comment about how dumb Solaria's strategy is. It's not just the tech gap they refer to. Solaria's strategy is too simple to be good, see? It's understood that they need a more complex one. They need to split their force a bunch of ways and twirl left and right and loop some battlecruisers around and... I don't know.
>Why it needs to be complicated is never described. It just needs to be more complicated.
>Meanwhile, our oh-so-clever heroes have only one response, which is 'mass even more combat power,' because that's the only way to stop a fleet in HH. The heroes only had the opportunity to do this because of an intelligence coup. Even then, they're spreading lighter units out all willy nilly. Old habits die hard, I guess.

>>54797901
I agree. It's just a much more interesting book than Neuromancer in general. It also got me hooked on novels with more than one viewpoint character.

>>54806169
I just think it's weird people don't recognize how much of a gamer Banks was. He openly admitted to being inspired by games of Civilization, and uses the metaphor of game-play, or games that can become "real" many times over the course of the series. The Culture are his ideal faction in his ideal game of Interstellar politics that he'll never get to play. It's a pity he died before Stellaris came out. Although maybe also a pitty that Stellaris isn't as out there as his books.

OFC, the Culture are also a bunch of dirty cheaters, but Banks maintains that even cheating is part of the game sometimes. Jumping in and out of Contexts like a ship in hyperspace is how the Culture wins it's battles.

>>54793961
Because they will mindlessly fund utter, low effort garbage as long as it appeals to some part of their sad, adolescent, emotionally stunted psyche. See: huge success of writers like RA Salvatore, Brandon Sanderson, Jordan etc. As a result, the field never really get cleaned out and good authors have to compete on uneven ground against pandering hacks and those still living off their popularity from when fantasy was a niche genre and we had to take whatever was on offer.

>>54806192
not necessarily always haven was doing a number on them there at the end of the war. Which was nice to see, but it was only in prelude to being bffs against the sollies who are pants on head retarded. Although to be fair the sollies havent fought a real war in ever.

>>54806429
I REALLY need to get Stellaris. Been watching streams of it and such, but I want to play Spess Azad quite badly. Or possibly Uplift Trilogy, because I hear you can do that.

>>54806429
if you aint cheating you aint trying.

>>54806705
You kinda can, but it's not that fun the way it plays out. Maybe after a few more DLC it will be better, but it's not CK2 in space like we were promised.

As with all Paradox games, I suggest buying it, pirating all the DLC, and then hoping it will be worth playing at some point in the future.

>>54806609

FINALLY, someone else who hates Sanderson!

>>54791372
I gave up on Honor Harrigan just a little into the first book when some other character is thinkig about how much he hates her because she is perfect at everything & young looking even though she is sixty. I thought to myself "Yep i'd hate her too" then i figured hat if she was that much of a mary sue i didnt want to read it. & this is from a guy who finished the Sword of Truth books

>>54791372
The Serrano Legacy if you like fox hunting, show jumping, people hunting and space mafia empires ('The Compassionate Hand').

>>54806802
In fairness, she's sixty but they live to four-hundred or something.

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>>54806778
OK then, that seems sensible. I had hopes for Civ Beyond Earth, but that just completely flopped.
Good to see there's at least one game that lets you rank all the way up to Kardashev 2, because after reading the Uplift books and Pandora's Star I realized just how OP Dyson Spheres/Swarms actually are. Somewhat getting my head around what galactic scale meant kinda changed the way I see sci-fi.

>>54806609
Which Sanderson books, specifically, pander to sad stunted etc. people.

>>54806860
I understand, im just trying to give a reference to the what the guy was thinking. I dont mind the use of anagathics. Its just what was going through the other characters mind

>>54792229
Seconding Armor. I really wish the author could have finished that series, I wanna follow Felix & his beserk rampage through space. I wouldnt exactly call it action though. The space pirates chapters are slow as hell

>>54791646
Honorverse became his money project. Safehold is where his passion went, I fully believe.

>>54791372

not much. honestly there was a really good 3-5 books series about how space naval combat would go. Member now its the Seafort saga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafort_Saga

Check it out. Much better then the Honor Harrington series. Also if you liked Larry nivens stuff, I'd suggest you go checkout some of Alan Dean fosters scifi. Tad williams is always good, also for a lighter side, anything by Harry Harrison, specifically the Stainless Steel Rat series.

>>54792161
John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldemata, as well as his Net Wars series are decent. Old Man's War trilogy is also pretty decent.

There was a rather good book by David Weber I remember that had humans with genetically engineered talking rats and bats facing off against Scorpion Tryanids.

>>54808322

Um, Alan Dean Foster sometimes manages to be more *entertaining*, but his writing actually tends toward dreadful almost as much as Weber's. That said, it's a pulpy kind of dreadful, and there are a couple of books of his that I re-read periodically (The Tar-Aiym Krang and Sentenced to Prism).

>>54791517
>The Culture series, by Ian Banks. Read The Player of Games first, that'll tell you if the rest are worth your time.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU NO.

I fell for this meme, Player of Games is boring and gay. I put down the book after getting 2/3 in and STILL NOTHING IS HAPPENING. If I recall, he got on some talking spaceship and is learning to play space chess with it.

>"Hurr I'm so smart"
>"But it's boring being smart"
>"My culture is so enlightened. Everyone's a tranny, that means we're enlightened. Everyone's so happy because everything's so awesome. Nobody has anything to worry about, it's all the best".
There, that's the first 200 or so pages.

>>54808623

Depends on which series yer reading desu. his earlier stuff was certainly "harder" Almost forgot to mention Timothy Zahn's Cobra series. Thats a pretty good read too.

>>54796976
Don't listen to this anon. He's yet to write anything that wasn't trash.

The Quantum Thief trilogy.

Posthuman sci-fi done fairly damn brilliantly. Fuckin' author got a three book deal on the first ten pages or so.

>>54792161

The Miles Vorkosigan stories. High drama, mercenaries, feudal lords in space.

>>54791408
I liked Red Rising alot, would recommend. It suffers a bit of what the Honor Harrington books do (the main character being great at almost everything) but I fee it's alot more forgivable.

>>54809509
Red Rising is the absolute shit dude. Just finished up the series a few weeks ago and I'm looking for more.

>>54791517
I love Ian Banks. Favourite book is Inversions, which is strange considering it's only really half sci-fi. Picking up all the little points and making connections between the stories the characters tell made it well worth a second and third reading.

>>54805060
I think my favourite character moment was the lead in to the puppy in the well story. Just how witnessing the shit that guy had to go through was making people crack.

It's definitely something that sticks with you.

>>54808795
I would recommend powering through till the end.

I remember that book took a lot of setting up compared to some others in the series.

>>54807213
Yeah Safehold's mostly lacking in nuance character-wise but all the stuff about rapidly modernising firearms, tactics and industry in general has been fun.

I loved the reasoning for building a full on steam ironclad - it is complete overkill for what they need but it's something that will irreversibly shatter the technological prohibitions because you need tech to fight tech.

The whole Siddmarkian land war felt a little drawn out but it'll be fun to see where things go next.

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Forever War.

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>>54794792
>by book 7 she develops fucking psychic powers, and gets a railgun hand
Oh ffs what is she, a lost primarch?

The Legend of the Galactic Heroes novels are releasing in english now. The prose is a bit stiff but you get that with translations. Beautiful covers.

>>54794792
>>54812487
She was a psyker as early as book 3, anon

>>54812594
>best at everything ALL the time
>wins almost every battle she's in
>escapes an inescapable prison planet bringing thousands of other prisoners with her
>has a cute fuzzy psychic familiar
>gets psychic powers herself AND NOW SHE'S GOT A RAILGUN HAND

Alright, who would win in a knock down drag out: Grand Admiral Giga-Sue or the God Emperor? Place your bets. Tzeentch will hold the money.

>>54812807
Before the battle begins Abaddon will make a surprise attack on Terra.
HH will singlehandedly defeat him and the ruinous powers.
Then she'll convince the Emprah about the wrong of his ways.
The Emprah will immediately create new female space marines using the superior Manticorean technology.

>>54812487

Hardly-- she's an artificially jumpstarted pop-sci "next stage in human evolution". Aren't those a dime a dozen in comic books?

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>>54791372
>What did I miss?
I don't think you missed anything. Honor Harringtom is pretty much 100% based on Horatio Hornblower, who is one of the most overblown and shameless Mary Sues in the history of literature. He never did anything morally or ethically wrong, was always proven correct when anyone disagreed with him, was stronger, smarter, and more noble than everyone in the world, and never failed at anything. That's what made him popular. It's what makes her popular. It's a character type that has always been and will always be popular. It's not really "good", from an objective, narrative point of view, but a lot of people like stories with a clear hero who never fails and is always right. It's why people like Superman, Doc Savage, John Cena, and a ton of other characters in fiction. If it isn't for you, just don't read it.

>>54792161
Legend of the galactic heroes has been an enjoyable read so far.

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>>54812991
Nothing in this post is even remotely true.

>>54812954
This is pretty much exactly what would happen if Weber alone was writing it.

>>54812962
If I wanted a 1 dimensional comic book character I would read pic related.

>>54813073
>If I wanted a 1 dimensional comic book character I would read pic related
Only if you were a masochist. Even for one dimensional comic characters, unironic gay niggers from outer space is staggeringly bad

>>54813633
>unironic gay niggers from outer space
Is it at least so-bad-it's-good in that Ed Wood kind of way?

>>54791372
>female protag

That was your first warning

>named "Honor"

And that was your second. You have nobody to blame but yourself, anon

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Honestly I was considering starting to read this series when I didn't know anything about it, I don't mind a bit of pulp in my sci-fi, in fact I rather like it. But then I heard about later on when the Royal Whatever Navy launches it's newest, most badass ship ever, the Honor Harrington-class Dreadnought, Honor Harrington, commanded by Honor Harrington, and I was like nah. That is some harry potter fanfiction tier shit and I do not have the constitution to bear that magnitude of cheese.

>>54814104
TBF they thought she was dead, so it was safe to name a ship after her. And I don't think she ever actually commanded that ship, though she did spend a little time on it after escaping the prison planet.

>>54814137
Oh, that's not so bad. Still, it seems like you have to be really into that writing style not to get frustrated.

>>54791372
Well they go on and on about how Space France is evil because it 's socialist for five books before Space England learns about automation from the Space Amish and promptly puts an entire nation of shipbuilders out of work, presumably with no pention because that is parlously close to socialism. It's the only series on earth that combines Liberal girl power idiocy with Conservative economic idiocy.

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Don't be a plebe, read Blindsight.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

>>54814218
Yeah, well, as I mentioned when I posted >>54794195, I stuck it out for about two more books after that before my interest really died. The side-novels were okay for a bit, especially with the adventures of Victor Cachat, but then the world-building about 'why' things were happening started taking over from 'what' was happening and it just got to be too much to wade through.

>>54814273
Hell yeah, If I have to wonder if consciousness is virus eating up processer time in the human mind and holding us back and free will is an illusion, so should everyone else. Also it has hard science vampires and the sequel has sentiant cancer. If you find all that to light and optomistic read Starfish.

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>>54792161
>>54791372
The Well World series

>>54814239
>Space England learns about automation from the Space Amish
Ah: Space England developed the new generation of shipboard automation, but didn't implement it straight away - officially because they weren't sure it would hold up under combat conditions, but mainly because Big Crews Have Always Had Big Crews (remember, Space *England*). The Space Amish were new to having a large space-navy to start with, and they didn't have all that tradition and cultural inertia to overcome, so they took the designs for that automation and happily threw it into their own ships to free up manpower. Thereby making the Space English look and feel very dumb for being beaten to the punch, with their own systems, by people they thought were backwards chauvinistic xenophobic dogmatic hillbillies.
I don't recall there being any mention of similar automation being developed or used for shipbuilding - the way the Manties were shocked at the way Graysons built so much stuff by hand in Book 3, it sounds like Manticoran shipyards are already as automated as the process can get.

>>54814327
Put in that way sounds awful.

>>54791372
Heh, the fifth book was also when I gave up on the series. However it was not Honor being able to beat a katana expert in a sword fight that made me give up. That part just barely, barely made itself acceptable to me. It's because the narration went out of its way to say that she did not win due to superior skill, but because she psyched out her opponent and caused him to lose his nerve. Basically she'd been in real life and death fights before, she'd killed people, she wasn't scared to die, he hadn't and he was afraid, so he lost his cool and made a fatal mistake. Honor herself admits she's not sure how she won, one moment she saw him twitch and the next she's standing over his corpse.

You know what? Fuck it, fine, i can give that one a pass. No, the part that made me give up was what happens immediately after. Honor Harrington is beyond exhausted, she is injured, she hasn't slept, she's undergone a series of phsyically and psychologically draining trials. She's just done. So she goes to bed and the instant she closes her eyes the system gets attacked and she proceeds to drag her ass out of bed to save the day.

What? No, i call bullshit, there is absolutely no way this woman is fit for duty. Assuming command in her condition is grossly irresponsible on her part. Any decent commander would have taken medical leave and put her second in charge, because attempting to command a fleet while dead on your feet is putting lives in danger.

But it gets worse, oh it gets worse. See she still has a numerical disadvantage, and while she puts up a good fight, her fleet is wrecked, and the enemy can still accomplish their objectives. So she has a patrol of small ships make themselves look like bigger ships on sensors, big enough the bad guys couldn't win. So the bad guys fall for it and retreat right? WRONG, THEY DON'T FALL FOR IT AND RETREAT ANYWAY. BECAUSE REASONS!

Jesus Fucking Christ.

>>54813830
No.

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>>54791372
>Star Carrier series by Ian Douglass
Pretty standard mil sci-fi about humans fighting galaxy-spanning alien empire blah blah you know the drill. Has a hard-on for mushroom ships and black-hole propulsion.

>The Last Angel by Proximal Flame
web novel where humanity lost to an all-conquering alien empire thousands of years ago and the few remnants have been completely indoctrinated into the new galactic order. The only one left to carry on the fight is a half-insane AI inhabiting a super warship that been conducting a hopeless guerrilla war for the past thousands of years.

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>>54815094
>half-insane AI inhabiting a super warship that been conducting a hopeless guerrilla war for the past thousands of years.

>>54815094
Aren't only the first three books of Star Carrier good, and the rest has... Well shit I forgot, but there's something wrong with it, isn't there?

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>>54815180
First three books ended with the Confederacy making a ceasefire with the Sh'daar on the threat of possibly unraveling the timeline as everyone knows it.
The 2nd trilogy has even more powerful aliens and time travel shenanigans
It isnt bad, but the blatant america-wank in the 2nd trilogy gets negative points from me. Reminded me too much of all those Baen books i read I guess.

>>54791372
Out of curiosity, what's the nearest fantasy corollary to HH?
What shit wish fulfilment series is closest in tone to it? Is it like Eragon, derivative, purple prose laden and poorly conceived? Or is it more like Sword of Truth, with the infallible protagonist, straw man antagonists, and blatant author tracts?
Or some other series in that sort of plying field?

>>54814759
The 'don't fall for it' is only one guy - to the sensors on his ships they are pretty much fooled, but Theisman puts his brain in gear and strongly suspects that they're not.
However the new regime he's working under aren't all that smart, so they believe their sensors.
The other big point is that Theisman knows from experience Honor is quite willing to attack him even if there's no chance she'd win, and he's not willing to get killed for the new regime over Grayson.

And iirc they basically pumped Honor full of drugs and sent her to bed immediately after the first signs of the enemy withdrawal.
The later books basically stress that she's the genetic descendant of a super-soldier program who's then grown up in high gravity, loads of exertion and then a shitload of training and war, to basically back-justify all the shit she did

>>54807213
>>54812403
I really tried to get into the Safehold series because the premise was interesting but I gave up at book 4 or 5 because I didn't like any of the main characters.

>>54791517
>The Culture series

Worst advice ever. OP hates Mary Sue characters, so you recommend books about a Mary Sue civilization. The "good" guys are so overpowered that all the books are boring. There is no suspense and you start rooting for the underdog bad guys to win. That's always a sign of bad writing.

So what do people think of Tom Kratman and his books?

>>54815094
The Last Angel was lame, I hated that the ship had such a human personality and had an evil twin sister. The 'horror' segments also weren't scary at all, just plain boring. The premise had so much potential too, which just further drove down my enjoyment.

>>54805959
No love for "Fire Upon the Children"?

>>54814239
It is completely hilarious to me that the evil space empire in this series is evil because they have SOCIAL SECURITY.

You can certainly tell it's American.

>>54791372
Oh. Hey. We haven't had this thread in a good month or so. Thanks, anon.

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Beep beep here comes my favorite book rec pasta

>The Ancillary series should have been called ‘Fascism Can’t Possibly Be This Cute.’ The whole trilogy is adorable.

>In the Radch everyone is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ The AIs that run the ships can control multiple human bodies, and when they get upset they have the bodies hug one another to feel better. The ships also give relationship advice to their human crewmembers, such as when it’s appropriate to sleep with your subordinates, or how to apologize properly for hurting your girlfriend’s feelings. The soldiers are constantly fussing over their officers, dressing them, bathing them, making them tea, tucking them into bed, and crying or panicking when they get separated on missions. On ships living space is cramped, so it’s also normal for the soldiers to sleep bunched up together in big heaps. Giving and receiving gifts holds vital importance, meaning everyone is constantly obsessing over tea sets, memorial pins, jewelry and clothing. Everyone wears gloves all the time, so getting to touch someone’s bare hand (or god forbid, hold it) is a huge deal.

>It creates the impression that the feudal space empire is run by anxious, insecure, perpetually feuding anime schoolgirls. On one page they say something about exterminating solar systems or putting whole planets in storage to thaw the population out as slave labor, and on the next one of the lieutenants interrupts a dinner party to give the captain news, when in reality it’s because she’s 17 years old and wanted to see if she could get any leftovers. Later she cries because she had a crush on the horticulturalist and the Fleet Captain forbid her from speaking to her. The protagonist is able to win partially because she’s a legendary badass, and partially because most of the time she seems like one of a few adults in a room full of squabbling, loveable children.

>10/10 series, would recommend

>>54820054
I'm disgusted and intrigated. how are the spaces battles?

>>54821060
Personally haven't gotten that far yet, first third of the first book so far is about conspiracy most foul on a newly annexed colony world (and also ensuring the Lieutenant drinks her tea, she's been all nerves lately) and a later-in-the-timeline b-plot where a rogue AI is hunting down a relic collector who may or may not have run off with a Forbidden Thing (and also bullying a fussy, sulking aristocrat who has just woken up after 1000 years of cryostasis)

>>54791372
try Dan Simmons and Peter F. Hamilton

>>54821856
>Peter F. Hamilton
more specifically, start with Fallen Dragon for something shorter and standalone before the several thousand page long super sagas

>>54816416
It seems like you're kind of missing the point of it. It's like saying that Star Trek is awful because the Federation is a bunch of mary sues, when the focus has always been on questions of how underhanded Special Circumstances is willing to go to export the Culture way of life, how civilizations with radically different ideologies react to something to absurdly powerful, or how the people on the fringes of the Culture or in contact with the Culture make a living.

The Culture is always a bad case of people just reading power levels on their wikipedia page instead of actually reading the books themselves.

>>54822264
>Star Trek

It's good that you mentioned that. The Culture is as arrogant and conceited as the characters of first season of The Next Generation, times ten.

>wikipedia
>civilizations with radically different ideologies react to something to absurdly powerful

A wiki cannot represent the level of smug that Banks puts to paper. When someone from the almighty Culture shits, the entire galaxy gives a standing ovation every time a turd hits the ground.

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>>54791372
Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon.

I can't recommend these enough, basically humans have started colonising the Moon and the settlements are controlled by dragons who are a cross between tech startups, the Mafia and the noble houses from Dune.

Mainly politics, assassination and intrigue but the scifi is really convincing and believable too.

>>54822621
Like, literally dragons?

>>54822791
No sorry, I should have said 'dragons'. They're basically the first venture capitalists to establish themselves on Luna, who've monopolised everything of value and rule/live like medieval nobles in terms of how much power they have over everyone else, they own the air people breath and charge by the breath via biometric implants.

Hence the name suggesting hoarding of wealth and danger I guess.

>>54822933
>venture capitalists

Are we positive it's not a reference to Dragon's Den

>>54823010
There's a distinct possibility.

>>54815753
It would have to be a fantasy series where the main character is perfect and the narration takes forever to explain details we don't care about.

>>54800858

there is a song about that book, if you're interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nUi3DaWzGI&ab_channel=weyrdmusicman

>>54820054

that's the gayest fucking shit I've ever heard desu senpaitachi

>female author

it checks out

>>54821856
>Peter F. Hamilton
Yeah, will second that one. Commonwealth Saga was really rather good, if you can stand a bit of a wait (like 400 pages of admittedly quite interesting fluff) before everything kicks off. Paula Myo was good, Ozzie was a bit boring IMO given he basically spent the first two books hiking for no reason, Wilson and Oscar were awesome, etcetera. I honestly didn't notice that not much was going on when I first read them, I was too busy going "ooh, wormholes!". Also Primes are perhaps the best "interesting alien physiology" I've seen in a while, aside from maybe the Jophur from Uplift.

Void Trilogy was also worth a read, although the technobabble started getting a bit too "It's magic with a different skin" for my liking towards the end with Accelerator Chick, the Raiel and the Void Heart. That's fine with books like the Culture, where it's not really a plot thing often or the main focus of the books, but jarred a little when I was used to tech somewhat grounded in reality.

Haven't tried Night's Dawn or Fallen Dragon yet, and Great North Road was just SLOOWWW all the way through.

>>54822530
Its like you've never even read the books

Quality copypasta, thank you up 8.

>>54791372
>ctrl+f
>armageddon cycle
>peter f. hamilton
>0 results
sort yourselves out, mons.

>>54824060

>>54823767
>>54821856

Haven't ran into the Armageddon Cycle yet, and you seem to be a man of culture. What's it about?

>>54792213
Starting it now, actually.

>>54823954

I read two of them. You just have no argument. I read the one where a furry alien visits an orbital and tries to blow it up. I was rooting for him to win. And the one where a giant sphere pops into the galaxy, does nothing, then disappears.

>>54795595
The enemy is kind of corporate hell. It could honestly be that he's trouncing them hard enough that even CEOs who got to their positions by following the book and being cagey political animals stop being able to spin encounters in career-saving light. Or die. Causing them to be replaced with slightly less rigid, more capable ones who weren't quite as good at politics.

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Not really spehs opera but if you want old school military sci-fi, "Armor" is a totally-not-a-ripoff-of-starship-troopers that is really good.

>>54796871
I liked them except for the native girl. I stopped reading when it turned out she didn't die in book three, but the series was nicely momentous and excellent hfy.

Startide Rising is by far the best though, even if Uplift War had the tymbrimi waifu.

Sector General sounds excellent. I'm trying to scrape up more of the Commander Grimes series, which I've read three books of but thought was great.

>>54800858
Cherryh is good, but I think "brain damaged human spacer stows away on a tramp freighter crewed by catgirls" sounds more like an anime than a serious scifi novel.

I want time dig up her union/Terra war series.

>>54824579
>I stopped reading when it turned out she didn't die in book three,

Who, Sara the mathematician chick? She was pretty unimportant as they go, what made you dislike her so much? Personally I didn't really like either Rety or Dwer, so them faffing about with that native tribe and then wandering around aimlessly in Spess was a bit of a waste of a plot thread IMO.
Personally I thought Emerson was a badass, so that always made her chapters decent.

Startide Rising def. the best one, and Streaker showing up again in Uplift Storm was nice. Did you actually finish book 3? Because the ending at Earth was totally awesome, even if the bit before that was slightly WTF in terms of tying up plot threads.

>>54808623
> Sentenced to Prism
Fuck yeah.

>>54792213
It wasn't bad, but not that good either. A solid six, Vatta was humorless and dry, his Granny was lots more fun. The setting okay, nothing too fleshed out but neither with big holes. The combat was fun and the idea of the ansibles was cool.

>>54824678
Rety. That was the one I meant. She was just such a colossal shitter in all regards. I hated her.

>>54824678
Oh, and yes, I finished it. I really adored that ending. It seemed momentous and mythic and numinous all at once.

>>54820054
I'm actually quite enjoying the books. The whole "she" and "her" thing is due just to the way the language and culture is constructed, and how it's implied to be rigid and stagnant for thousands of years due to the continued rule of the same person. The use of gloves as a propriety thing I found interesting. It's basically just a view into a different culture. Much more interesting than a rebranded space-France.

Second Contact by Mike Resnick. Low key space opera under the guise of a thriller.

Santiago / Return of Santiago /The Outpost, all by same author (space western)

His Starship: Mutiny starts a series that's pretty decent.

Poul Anderson has fun scifi- or rather, bland and unremarkable 60s scifi that I can't explain why I like, it just comes across as insanely comfy. Star Fox(no relation) -privateering; Nicholas van Rijn - mercantile adventure; Flandry of Terra - spies and holding off the Long Night.

>>54825012
Mankind doesn't deserve the Santiago books, desu.

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>>54824840
Yeah, Rety was just all-round unpleasant. Frankly Dwer is a better man than I would be to go around saving her and putting up with her nonsense all the time. She's not even a CLEVER dick, she's just annoying and abrasive despite tiny urs dude being pretty chill.

The whole "Time of Changes" ending was amazing, I loved it. Still hoping for a sequel or just more books in the series, perhaps the full story of why Tom Orley was frying on Venus when Gillian rescued him and what happens to the longboat with Orley, Toshio, Dart, Hikahi and Credeiki after Startide. Also more Jacob Demwa.
Only plot hole I ever found after like three readthroughs was the fact the whole 17/11/etcera/5 galaxies thing was explicitly quoted in a Jijoan Scroll and then showed up as some great revelation to the Galactics in Heaven's Reach.
I just want a whole bunch more worldbuilding and glorious new species, I'm probably going to get that Stellaris game just because it lets you uplift races as Protectorates and ride around the galaxy as Earthclan + Kids. There's a GURPS book for Uplift, so I might get that too, but I've only ever found one copy for sale and sadly the minis that came with it are so OOP they might as well be Progenitor corpses for how likely I am to find any. I want my walker-dolphin Jokaero counts-as dammit.

>>54825108
Don't fall for Stellaris, my earthclan. Unfinished game they make you buy by inches.

I agree though, 10/5 worldbuilding above all else.

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Glen Cook did a pretty good sci-fi book called Passage at Arms that's Das Boot in space. Alien invaders, tense combat, decent characters, I'd recommend it.

>>54806038
Spaceships in the Culture were always the best part just for the names. "Stood far back when the Gravitas was handed out" anyone?

Also, Xenophobe. Starship wants cuddles.

>Xeny; you are a million-tonne starship; a Torturer-class Rapid Offensive Unit. Even—
>But I'm demilitarised!
>Even without your principal armament, I bet you could waste planets if you wanted to—
>Aw, come on; any silly GCU can do that!

>>54791372
I honestly don't know why did he do this
The Mary Sue shit also almost made me quit it
Its otherwise a decent series

>>54792161
Lost Fleet is pretty good

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>>54791372
You missed nothing.

Better space opera recommends:
J.A. Sutherland's Alexis Carew novels: age of space sails rollicking adventure stuff

Ann Aguirre's Sirantha Jax novels: pure adrenaline ride through an intriguing galaxy

Lindsay Buroker's Fallen Empire novels: take one part Firefly, one part Star Wars, throw them in a blender and that's Fallen Empire

Jamie McFarlane's Privateer Tales: uncomplicated but competently-written space opera filled with believable characters working towards their goals

Michael-Scott Earle's Star Justice: this is basically /tg/'s perfect series. Paranormal harem space opera. Decently written, too, which is a pleasant surprise.

Nathan Lowell's Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series: most of this is really different. The focus is on a cargo hauler's career from wet-behind-the-ears to master of his own shipping company. It's genuinely worth the read: Lowell knows the seaman's trade and he adapts it very well to space. If you're comfortable skipping over the learning phase, you can probably try out Milk Run (Smuggler's Tale) and see if the universe appeals.

I'll be watching the thread if anyone has questions.

>>54791609
>>54805988
>not excision
casuals

Seconding Old Man's War if you haven't read it.

>>54791372
Go back to the source. Go read Smith's Skylark and Lensman series.

>>54809453
Came here to recommend this
Ivan a best

>>54791372

i know this thread is about space opera, but honestly anybody who read or tried to read honor harrington for the space combat/tactics should really give the Horatio Hornblower series a shot. I came to the honorverse after reading hornblower because i did a google search for books about naval tactics

hornblower is the most readable series i have ever read, i read all 11 in like a month because they were the sickest shit. hornblower isn't a mary-sue, he has a shitton of self doubt but the fucking tactical shenanigans he gets up to to bamboozle the french were constantly blowing my mind

can't recommend it enough. weber was paying it homage when he named his protagonist with 2 H's but honestly he cant hold a candle to it

>>54816298
Why not?

>>54824377
t. speedreader~kun

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>>54827555

>>54814273
>>54814327
Blindsight is 2017's House of Leaves, isn't it? Yet another meme book that would-be edgelords like to spank themselves dry over.

>>54814339
>dose tits
>dat whip
>dat...horsetail?
Not sure if want....

>>54822621
Solid choice anon.

Aside from the solid world-building, I enjoyed the examination of low-collateral-damage corporate war. It would be a great low-firearms GURPS setting.

>>54828391
Is Blindsight a bit memetic by now? Yes. It's still well-written hard science fiction with a philosophical slant that isn't "but androids were human all along."

The sequel, Echopraxia, isn't so explicitly philosophical (you noticed every Blindsight character on the ship was a different theory of mind right?) but it's a decent read too. Everything Watts' has written is desu. Collateral and Malak are short stories in the same setting, and the Sunflowers series might be related.

Also rec'ing Richard K Morgan here, although the only space opera involved is when Kovacs' and associates take decisive battle theory to its brutally logical conclusion after the FTL starships are discovered.

>>54816599
Insane ramblings written in shit-tier prose by a batshit fucking lunatic. This is a guy who thinks bottles of ammonia can penetrate the NBC system of an M1 Abrams and disable the crew (they can't, former Abrams crew-members told him this, and he tried to tell them they were wrong), that it's a *good* and *desirable* thing to lose a notable percentage of recruits in avoidable training accidents to 'toughen up' the survivors, and that real-world infantrymen choosing to carry _first-aid kits_ instead of that more weight of ammo shows they lack the will to absorb losses and actually get shit done.

>>54815142
Ah then you will probably appreciate this

http://www.audible.com/series/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_1srSrs_sa?asin=B00MJ1M6UU

>>54814759
>WRONG, THEY DON'T FALL FOR IT AND RETREAT ANYWAY. BECAUSE REASONS!

"Reasons" in this case having the meaning of "The Theisman Boy has yet again hit his shit-limit.".

I love those Reasons. It's always entertaining when it happens.

>>54816599
Knew him when he "was with 5SFG" and, uh, well.

He knows his way around making shit up.

Does no one else read the Stainless Steel Rat anymore?

>>54828820
I read it. It's a bit dated by now, but still a classic. Robert Silverberg is from the same era, and survived a bit better. If you're an expat, Downward to the Earth will give you feels.

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>>54828391
>>dat...horsetail?
>Not sure if want....

Well of Souls revolves around a miraculous computer that alters reality, and of /course/ the first thing its inventor uses it for is altering his research partner into a hot centaur chick.

And then the universe itself conspired to bring them both to the secret planet of transformation fetishism -1560 unique, experimental biomes in a hex grid- and shit gets even wackier.

Somewhere in the middle of it all is a message about how Space Communism is bad and God just wants everyone to, like, feel the love, man.

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>>54791372
I've only read books 1 and 2 so far, and yes it has its share of the first time writer's mistakes and yet it blows all of Weber's drek right out of space. Who knew bloodthirsty spaaaace miiiiice with advanced war-tech could be so scary?

>>54828898
kek this sounds like someone wrote a fapfic, then cleaned it up just enough to get it published. I may actually have to give this one a try.

>>54799969
>>54800029
>>54800097
>>54800416
>>54801595

Sounds more like a HFY, but with alien humans.

>>54791372
good shit:

Lost Fleet:
Guy gets frozen in an escape pod and left for dead in the opening attack of a war, 200 years later and the war is still going on, his pod is found on the way to the enemy home world for a final attack, stuff happens, fleet is now caught deep in enemy space without the shortcut back available.
By the way, guy has the oldest date of rank, is now in charge, and was turned into a heroic propaganda tool by the government while he was "dead"

The series focuses on interesting fleet politics, and the mechanics of combat at 10% the speed of light. It does a damn good job at them.
http://www.audible.com/series/ref=a_search_c4_1_4_1srSrs_sa?asin=B006K1S7IU

Star Force:
guy gets abducted by a nanomachine AI spaceship, it turn out to be recruiting him as it's captain, to help stop the non nanomachine AI spaceships from destroying all organic life. By the way, ~200 of these ships came to earth, each one recruiting its own captain, thus Star Force is born.

Series about an inter-planetary war for survival, encounters many cool and unique alien species, try and mostly fail to peaceably interact with them, build an army, comes up with duct tape technologies, all the while both sides work to figure out this whole space combat thing.
http://www.audible.com/series?ref_=a_pd_Sci-Fi_c2__1_sa&asin=B006WAMYG0

Imperial Radch:
Spaceships have AI and control many brain dead puppets alongside normal crew, to be used as frontline infantry. This is the story of one that got brown up with all hands lost, by being betrayed by her boss, the immortal cyborg/clone hive mind (human) that is the leader of the empire. Leaving her consciousness in a single puppet, on a quest for revenge.

Shorter than the above 2, this series still fells quite complete, it focuses on world building and character development more than shooty bang bang, mostly because the MC is the instigator, not the reacter.
http://www.audible.com/series?ref_=a_lib_l__vsml_1_40&asin=B00MJ1M6UU

>lost fleet
>hard science fiction

Pick one. I get the feeling that a lot of people used to watching star trek or star wars think that "ships pass each other fast, turn have to decelerate to turn around" means it's diamond hard.

Lost Fleet doesn't have a drop of science in it. The crews are 80IQ idiots written so that normies can feel accomplished for playground-tier inventions in tactics like focus fire.

>>54792161
The Known Space series by Niven, mostly short stories. Read up to and including Ringworld and maybe Ringworld 2. Don't read the Man-Kzin Wars unless you are into the Humans Are Special and Humanity Is Superior tropes.

>>54814339
>>54828898
It actually has an RPG.

>>54792134
It's actually not. I saw OP asking around the other day on other threads. It was fun.

>>54791372
This thread again?

Doesn't this EXACT thread pop up in here at least once a month?

How do you faggots keep falling for this?

>>54829346

>over 200 posts of space opera book discussion and recommendations
>"falling for this"

what exactly did we fall for? a decent thread?

>>54829346
it's a good thread to discuss military sci-fi books, so I don't mind the repost

>>54825037
I read them at an impressionable age and loved his mythic inner frontier, and the characters he described with just a snippet of Black Orpheus' great ballad about them.
>He has no future, he has no past,
>His eye is sharp, his gun is fast.
>He lives for the moment, he lives for the kill,
>His name's Dimitrios and he's angry still.

>>54795743
I liked the bridge trilogy best.

>>54795743
The Peripheral is good. If Neuromancer was the grim future of the 80s, it is the grim future of the 2010s.

I love pulpy sci-fi bullshit so in no particular order I recommend:

BV Larson's "World" series. Earth is basically ruled by alien overlords that use us as near-immortal mercs to shoot shit.

Calouette's "A Star Too Far" series. Mild amounts of politics but mostly focuses on the boots on the ground/deck.

Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet/Stark's Command. Premises are stupid as shit (as others have noted) but if you can accept that it's an alright read.

Evan Currie's Odyssey One series. Future America figures out warp drives, only to get dragged into interstellar war. Writer has a boner for the Air Force (space jets lul).

Star Carrier. It's okay though I felt it was also sort of an asspull at certain points. Some novel worldbuilding though.

The Seafort Saga. Interesting but very "CRAWLING IN MY SKIN"-tier protagonist who hates himself for making tough choices when shit hits the fan even though he had no other options.

Charles E Gannon's Caine series. Really fun shit revolving around a spess journalist that gets pressed into service as a intelligence agent.

Jack Campbell's Sinclair series. Spess lawyers and spess JAG. Actually well-written compared to Lost Fleet.

Honsinger's Man of War series. If you want "sailors in space" that leans more towards the sci-fi end of things, this will likely be your jam.

Elliot Kay's Poor Man's Fight series. Corporations rule the future. Follows a grunt-level dude caught up in the struggle between the Corps and his home system.

Marko Kloos' Terms of Enlistment. Solid grunt-level fighting. Starts off with Earth-only dystopian civil unrest shit, then progresses to alien invasions.

Elizabeth Moon's Trading in Danger. MC is slightly Sue-level but to be fair, a lot of her ability comes from having a mafia-level trading family at her back.

Thomas A Mays Sword Into Darkness. Aliens are visiting Earth. We try to intercept them. Has a nice twist on the alien's motivations.

1/2

>>54791372
Michael Z Williamson writes some good Sci-fi books. Plus most of them are all interconnected in some way. You have his Freehold series where the books are follow each other but never cover the same person or his Mercenaries in space series where it's the same group but on different assignments. Haven't read his standalone stuff yet

>>54827129
>Michael-Scott Earle's Star Justice: this is basically /tg/'s perfect series. Paranormal harem space opera.
you seem a gentleman of taste and I would subscribe to your newsletter

>>54830150
Ringo/Weber's March to the Stars series. A space prince and his personal guard are betrayed and have to bail on a planet full of alien barbarians. They begin a months-long trek to get to the other side of the world where they can reach a spaceport and hopefully rescue.

Renneberg's Antarian Codex. More space spy shit. Spy is trying to stop humanity from fucking itself by breaking a pact it has to not access classified technologies before we join the greater galactic community.

Ringo's Live Free Or Die. Conservative chest-thumping aside I rather liked how the silly parts of this novel built up into a serious conflict - kinda like how many retold military stories have their stupid larger-then-life moments in them.

We Are Legion by Dennis E Taylor. Nerd CEO gets frozen only to wake up being forced into service for a theocratic US's space program. Has a self-replicating spaceship since the program is about finding colonization planets. His handlers cut him loose and he goes about trying to do his best for a humanity he doesn't really recognize much.

Timothy Zahn's Cobra series. Space cyborgs fight guerilla wars. It's fun shit and well written because it's Timothy Zahn.

Spineward Sectors - this series is hot garbage. Seriously. It's fucking awful. I also can't stop reading it for some reason. Send help.

>>54828741
>I love those Reasons. It's always entertaining when it happens
"Goodbye, Citizen Chairman."
[Deleted and reposted because I fucked up the spoiler-tags.]

>>54830329
>Spineward Sectors - this series is hot garbage. Seriously. It's fucking awful. I also can't stop reading it for some reason. Send help.
It happens. Sorry you got Sky Wachter'd.

Focus on how dumb his name is and you can probably shake it.

>>54828391
>Blindsight is 2017's House of Leaves, isn't it? Yet another meme book that would-be edgelords like to spank themselves dry over.

Nice meaningless buzzwords.

>>54828391
It's popular with autists because they think lobotomies are like autism.

>>54828230
Nice historical A-line dress. Probably Georgian style.

Eh, I like it. It's got spaceships, battles, politics, and needlessly complex math equations to explain ALL the tech. And it also shows the more...human side of it all.

Do I wish it were written better? Yes, of course. I could go for more "boots-on-the-ground" type action with the Marines, the side-plots need to either be trimmed off or contribute to the main plot, and honestly I wish there was SOME measure of dogfighting mentioned in the books (though that may be because I have only gotten to around book 5/6 and audiobook-wise I'm on book 2, so the dogfighting may indeed be in a later book)...

Is Honor a Mary Sue? Short answer is no; long answer is yes with a HUGE but that rivals Kim Kardasshian's in terms of sheer size. She has her moments of Sue-ness but never really gets to the point where she ALWAYS wins because of "she's special and therefore superior" (such as with Bella in the Twilight series, but then again Bella is essentially an emotionless Lego brick in a poorly written fapfic about vampires while Honor is a badass lady commanding a ship and then later a fucking fleet in a hard sci-fi setting); I feel that she EARNS each promotion and title of nobility that she's granted, especially in the first book, where she's firmly planted her feet on to the ladder up to Flag after she performed what was essentially a suicide maneuver against a Q-Ship several tons heavier in a dinky little light cruiser (granted, said light cruiser had a fucking grav-lance, but still).

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>>54808795
Given your writing style, I think you're right. You should never touch Banks. In fact, I'd advise steering clear of anything outside the YA section of your local library. That way you won't have to be bored.

>>54814339
MY NIGGA.

Seeing someone recognize that that acid trip of a series exists is bringing a huge smile to my fave. Absolute clusterfuck if a story, but the Diviner and the Rel were pretty fucking cool.

>>54791646
Eric Flint's stuff is fucking great.
Although I will admit to being a major fan of the series. What really grabs me is watching the situation surrounding the characters unfold.
>>54794829
Amen, Vorkosigan is pretty damn good. Again, another world watching exercise for me (and pretty good pulkp to boot)
>>54795182
Yeah, because the individual books in the different plotlines have plot point and action intersections, so of course he copies the relevant chapters. I do want to see those from other perspectives though.
>>54807213
Yeah, and that's basically Heirs to Empire naval warfare edition (of course, he is a military historian specializing in Naval History. Of course safehold is his passion)
>>54808443
Rats Bats and Vats. Pretty sure Flint was involved (it has his style of humor all over it)

>>54795800
That's false you fucking idiot. The later Hellenistic armies had larger and superior cavalry forces then Alexander. The general way of war was for the phalanx to crush the other while cavalry on both sides clashed to determine a winner. Macedon itself had a lack of cavalry however due to most nobles going to Syria or Egypt and therefore had to rely on it's infantry. But the Seleucids and Ptolemies had large and experienced cavalry forces.

Slit your own throat for believing in and spreading Total War-tier history. I fucking hate people like you.

>>54795840
Again, people didn't forget. Pyrrhus elephants were out grazing and needed hours for their handlers to collect and ready for battle. The entire battle was a clusterfuck where forces were fed piecemeal. The phalanx was an offensive tool known to be all but undefeatable from the front.

>>54791372
The first book was objectively fine though. It madei t clear Honor was given a shit job she was supposed to fail at and managed to find a clever way to succeed. In winning she loses almost everything. All of her friends are dead. Her ship is slag. The only thing she walked out of it with was a successful space battle that gets her promoted. Absolutely none of what happens in the first book is omg she's so perfect. Her stubborn refusal to withdraw nearly gets her killed and does kill of 99.9% of her crew. It's clear from the onset that she would value completing the mission over the lives of her crew and that's something that actually grates on the nerves of said crew and would follow Honor right up until Weber stopped giving a shit.

Andre Noryton's Star Guard (two short stories, one of which sets up the deep background situation in the first).
Actually, let's start recommending old pulp sf to each other too.

>>54829435
OP is a pasta.

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>>54792161
> I'd like something pulpy, or something Gonzo and slipstream
Stanislaw Lem, Stanislaw Lem, Stanislaw Lem.

umm... old pulp sf series

Retief
Flandry
Stainless Steel Rat
Bolo
Dumarest
Sten
Matadora
Perry Rhodan

>>54832042
>Flandry
>Stainless Steel Rat
>Bolo
I know these. Tell me about the others.

>>54826051
Seconding this book. He also did a cool trilogy called Shadowline: the starfishers that is a cool one about mercenary companies, intrigue and merchants. Fun read.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein is great, recommend it.

People earlier were recommending C J Cherryh , which I approve of. Does great aliens which feel different and fun. The foreigner series is good.

>>54829168
>>54820054
Also this one, its pretty great.

>>54830329
>>54830389
Yes spineward is hot garbage. On that note avoid this one sci fi series by thomas de prima (prina?) its awful. Every single character but the MC is absolutely, completely, hopelessly incompetent. Also did this thing where his descriptions of characters went like this. "he had brown hair, was six feet five and a half inches, with blue eyes and..." Could only get through the first few chapters.

>>54832304
Also forgot The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook. Another good one.

>>54824642
>brain damaged
I thought that he was fine, it's just they all treat him like an idiot because he doesn't speak their language.

>>54832348
Cherryh likes angsty/traumatized male leads, but the thing is that humans don't deal with being awake through jumpspace at all well. He basically got mindraped.

>>54832042
I need to find Perry Rhodan.
I also to learn German so I can read everything that hasn't been translated.

SFA...that's what you missed.

>>54831469
>honestly I wish there was SOME measure of dogfighting mentioned in the books
Weber's FAQ for the series explicitly declares there won't be any - it's just not how drive-technology works in his setting. Even LACs are more like the various flavours of WW2 torpedo-boats.
The Grayson-inspired ones used by the RMN/GSN cheat by mounting a battlecruiser-grade spinal graser, kind of like cramming an 11" gun into an S-boot, but their tactics are still more like 'swarms of jousting knights' than 'turning and burning F-16s'.

Can I crash this sci-fi lit thread with a fantasy series? I want to read Elric and have no fucking clue what to buy. I'd prefer kindle versions on account of having one, but there are so many different collections that I haven't a clue where to start. Any advice?

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>>54832739
>I want to read Elric and have no fucking clue what to buy.
The Gollancz printing called Elric is probably a good place to start. The Dreaming City, While the Gods Laugh, The Stealer of Souls, Kings in Darkness, The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams, and Stormbringer in one volume.

>>54832601

>no dogfights

>no opportunities for Ace Combat and/or Top Gun references

What sort of flavor is this suffering?

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>>54827207
Mind rape should be served AFTER the deconstruction of the ego. Featuring the mind of the pro/antagonist being literally sliced to pieces by a combat/medic drone.
>>54791874
Use of Weapons was so much better than Phlebas. Please do not make people read Phlebas first. Horza cucks himself out of everything good in the universe. He hardly uses his shapeshifter powers for anything other than lazy writing! He cancels the effects of drugs and stuff on his metabolism and he's a furry.

F U C K H O R Z A

U

C

K

H

O

R

Z

A

>>54832224
Dumarest is an adventurer seeking his lost homeworld (Earth) - one of the series that developed key concepts later used in Traveller

Sten is an rough outlaw from a corporate hellword who eventually works for his Imperial Majesty's Dirty Tricks organization

Matadora is a martial arts master that becomes part of a rebellion against an evil Terran empire

Perry Rhodan is a long-running German space opera that has many many stories (only the first 100+ have been translated)

Retief is a sane/effective diplomat foiling devious plots of humorous aliens in the same universe as the Bolo books

>>54833085
>Retief is a sane/effective diplomat foiling devious plots of humorous aliens in the same universe as the Bolo books
Who's the author?

>>54833217
>Retief
Keith Laumer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief

>>54830329
Aw yeah, March to the Stars/Empire of Man is really good. Weber doesn't write much in it, it's mostly Ringo. Hopefully there'll be a fifth book some day.
Also Zahn's first Cobra reeks of a poor copy of Starship Troopers, but the following books are fucking golden.

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This thread has been awesome, thanks to you assholes I have a list of sci-fi to last me for like 3 years straight.

Is there any sci-fi book(s) in a similar vibe to Terry Pratchet's Discworld? Reasonably well written, focus on being funny and self-aware, sometimes gets fucking real for a minute?

>>54833810
Strata and Dark Side of the Sun by the same author. Strata even has a discworld.

>>54833855
sheeeit I never knew, neato

>>54832886
The kind that wanted to be different from Star Wars by being Napoleonic Naval Combat IN SPACE. Of course, it'd be great if Weber would get back to the actual NAVAL COMBAT part of that some time soon....
I mean, I like the things you mention as much as the next guy, but I have the X-Wing novels for that, right?

>>54807213

It's just so massively drawn out.

I really wanted to like Safehold, I love me some ISOT-y tech ramp-up, but while I understand his reasons for dragging plots out into multiple volumes (put kids through college), it's a chore to read.

>>54815094

>Last Angel

Thoroughly unlikable main character - the ship AI is just on a rabid revenge run, and most of its victims are pretty much completely innocent (if part of the wrong side).

The setting also repeats a LOT of bad military sci-fi tropes - which is to say, HFY tropes.

>>54828874

It's definitely dated - but it's funny how some of the "sci-fi tech" tricks he pulls aren't really used anywhere else.

Like his favourite move of wearing air-filter noseplugs and carrying knockout gas grenades.

The Kovacs books have him use hallucinogen grenades to good effect, but I can't think of any other example.

It's a tactic that carries over fantastically well to tabletop, by the way. GURPS (in general), Shadowrun and Dark Heresy are very generous about the things you can stick in a gas grenade.

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>>54828391
I feel the same way

>>54828616
The meme side had put me off the book, but I didn't see what made it stand out from the other new age sci-fi tackling the same topics.

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Could anybody recommend a sci fi series about hard sci fi space combat? When I say hard, I don't just mean basic newtonian physics or some FTL restrictions. I mean that they have to worry about reaction mass, waste heat, the fact that there is no stealth, centrifugal gravity, etc.

Preferably with actual relatable countries instead of abstract space empires or confederations of humans and aliens. I'm consistently surprised at how often actual countries fighting each other is never represented in space opera fiction.

I've already read Through Struggle, The Stars, and I've found it to be mediocre mainly due to the incompetence of the author rather than any aspect of the plot or setting (although the characters were sub paper-bag tier in how they were developed). Is there ANY other book like it that's made by a better author? I've scoured the net for a while and have found nothing.

>>54836434
No, authors are dumb and don't want to hurt anyone's fee-fees by involving real nations too much.

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>>54836434
Is truely hard sci-fi even capable of space combat in a way that would be engaging to read about?

Realistically it'd just be launching thousands of drone-like missiles at something several AU away and hoping to overwhelm any point defence they have, whilst they do the same.

Plus I can't see it occuring whilst any modern nations are still around, given we've not even got even a token human presence outside of LEO yet.

The closest thing I can think of to what you're describing would be The Expanse series, though it's still not as hard as you want really, they don't have artificial gravity, there are still specifially constructed stealth vessels and they use nearly-reactionless drives so you don't see them worrying about reaction mass other than 'oh we need to refuel'.

>>54805959
It's also full of early-modern acoustic hive weasels for no reason.

>>54792350
Fair warning, Ninefox Gambit and its sequel Raven Stratagem are written by a tranny and they injected creepy gender role/identity politics into everything. They're still good books despite that, but it is offputting if you're not prepared.

>>54829204
>The crews are 80IQ idiots

That's kind of the point, isn't it? The author is drawing upon the frustrations he had serving in the USN.

>>54838438

That >>54836434 book did it well. Whatever the character issues, the selection of physics and engineering capabilities show the author did his work. high GW engines for the travel time. Low GW power for lasers in the hundreds of megawatts, making armor relevant, different orbits different terrain, and space vs surface battles that need tactics instead of a curbstomp one way or the other.

David J. Williams implements a similar tech level for DEW-centric combat in the Mirrored Heavens/Autumn Rain trilogy. I highly recommend it as a Clancy-esque military cyberpunk, although the motivation selected for the final plot device is unfortunately cliche. the head of future-CIA helped kickstart the war to ascend as a demon prince of Tzeentch

Stross's Singularity Sky has good, relatively hard space combat showing off different tech levels submarine/battleships with lidar & nuclear torpedoes vs antimatter-powered drone carriers vs nanowank semi-stealth mine networks and his nanowank is easy to ignore.

>>54814327
The Rifters series is an exercise in crushing depression and dehumanization.

>>54838492
It's not really noticeable, because it's not a shitty identity-politics meme. I'm as rightist is it gets and I don't care about a few flipped pronouns, because (she?) is a decent character writer and there are no shitty sex scenes.

Even if there were I'd put up with it for the Vancian setting descriptions.

>>54838701
>tfw you will never have happy family memories erased and rewritten as graphic child abuse to toughen you up for megacorp wageslave life
>tfw ywn wreck the first world with bioweapons in revenge and then find out your memories were faked all along

>>54809453
good taste.

>>54828616
>>54830958
>>54835367
Oh don't get me wrong, I like it, it's a good book. It's just that we here at Chan d'Four have a way of latching on to things.

>>54838651
>Singularity Sky
This is next on my reading list.

>>54823010
Science Fiction dragons den would be a great show

>>54836434
>>54838438
There was a fucking great game in the style of Myst that has space combat like that: Mission Critical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Critical_(video_game)
> Modern space combat involves unmanned combat space vehicles. These drones do most of the fighting, with little human input other than initial decisions about how to arm and deploy the drones.
A plot point has your taking an experimental drug that boosts your brain speed so you can control the drones yourself and find holes in the enemy's programming

>>54791372
Does Ender's game count as space opera? I think it does. Either way, very good series.

>>54799712
Wait this book is good? I got it as a gift 5 years ago and it's been sitting on my shelf.

>>54792161
It's comics, but everyone should read Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon

>>54832304
>The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein is great, recommend it.
Mah loonie.

>>54844268
The computer system in this book, Mike, was great... great sense of humor.

>>54844332
I named my first computer Mycroft.

Stranger in a Strange Land is supposed to be his most influential book, but I can't possibly agree that it's his best one. I like Moon the most and Farmer In the Sky maybe second best and maybe the first half of Time Enough For Love which I'm 60% through but can't finish

>>54843997
I enjoyed it. Reportedly Heinlein did, also. On second reading at least.

Well, I liked half of it. The quarter at the start and the quarter at the end.
The entire middle is a B-plot involving an entirely different set of characters and its narrator is unbearable.
For some reason the book is structured such that the A plot is in the past and its records have been uncovered and relayed by the B plot narrator and he's all the more unbearable for it.

File: Two-thumbs-up__44.jpg (42KB, 620x455px) Image search: [Google]

42KB, 620x455px

>>54832866

Thanks Anon

>>54792161
Walter Jon Williams Praxis trilogy is pretty good. The space battles have a cool hardish scifi slant to them and the alien cultures are sort of interesting. Fair warning though, the side the protaganists are fighting on is objectively evil.

>>54831761
This, more or less. Basilisk station is a good story. Honor has some silly shit going on in her background but her character in the first book is relatable. When I read the second book I remember being so disappointed that all of her surviving subordinates now think she's the bee's tits. Her actions got a lot of her crew killed and realistically her judgement should be called into question.
I'd much rather read the story where she has to come to terms with the shit she's done than what we got after. The entire space mormon crap was uninteresting and ultimately came off s a strawman for Honor's own motivations.

>>54791372
The Honor books is where I seen where feminist line would go in SciFi. Men are evil rapist, the Marry Sue always wins

>>54792161
Larry Nicems Known Space setting. N
Less of a series and more of a setting for multiple books and series. Start with Ringworld or the first Man-Kzin wars anthology. If you do start with Ringworld it has some slight spoilers for Man-Kzin wars.

>>54844665
Larry Nivens*

Tmothy Zahn's Blackcollar series.

Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero series or his Deathworld trilogy.

>>54795421
Finish it please.