I’ve finished the “Old Man’s War” series from John Scalzi. It was great!
Can you recommend any other good sci-fi series playing in space for my next read?
Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War series might be a good fit. Like Scalzi, it’s very soft sci fi, with a somewhat military bent (spies, in this case) and well-written characters.
Also, if you liked Old Man’s War, I actually thought Scalzi’s Interdependency series was better so you might enjoy that.
Children of Time/Ruin/Memory/Strife - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Trigger Warning: I have pretty serious arachnophobia and it took me several weeks of interruptions to be comfortable reading this series.
Two series I deeply love:
Little Fuzzy
Fuzzy Sapiens
Fuzzies and Other PeopleH. Beam Piper - From 1962: What happens when human induced climate change causes a previously unknown race of people to mass migrate into human territory? On a world controlled by a corporation that only has rights so long as the planet has no native population?
Really light and breezy and the first one is public domain:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18137
The Man Who Never Missed
Matadora
The Machiavelli InterfaceSteve Perry - A soldier engaging in genocide on a backwater world has a religious experience and walks away. Through a few serendipitous events, he trains in a few unique martial arts and starts a one man campaign to bring the fascist campaign down. But not as himself, he’s under no illusion that one man can survive. He builds a philosophy that attracts others to finish his work if he’s unable.
Outside the core trilogy listed above, each of the major characters gets their own book:
Omega Cage
97th Step
The Albino Knife
Black Steel
Brother Death
The Musashi Flex
ChurlJust started Matadora, thanks, it starts strong and doesn’t feel dated at all.
You are in for a RIDE! No spoilers!
Heeyyy, I did not expect that to blow up like this! Thanks for all the recommendations.
Here is a summary of the mentioned books / series (in case someone is also searching for a new good book)
- Starship’s Mage series by Glynn Stewart
- Larry Niven’s Flatlander
- Red Rising saga by Pierce Brown’s
- The Expanse
- Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama
- The Bobbiverse Series
- Children of Time/Ruin/Memory/Strife - Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars (other books from the same autor are Aurora and 2312)
- Peter F Hamilton: Nights Dawn Trilogy
- Ian M Banks: Culture Series
- The Void Trilogy
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
- Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine
- Gideon the ninth
- Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer
- Redshirts by John Scalzi
- The Mote in God’s Eye
- CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series and Alliance-Union universe
- Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac series
- Nnendi Okorafor’s Binti
- Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- The Interdependency Serie
- Foundation from Isaac Asimov
- The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata
- Project Hail Mary
- Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War
- Alan Dean Foster: The Damned Seies
- Little Fuzzy - Fuzzy Sapiens - Fuzzies and Other People
- The Man Who Never Missed - Matadora - The Machiavelli Interface
- The Ancillary serie
If you like hard eco sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series is one I still think about often, and I read it about 20 years ago now. Bonus: if you like it then he’s written a whole lot of other great stuff to read.
I still need to get back to that one and read the third one. Red Mars was the first adult level reading book I purchased as a kid and it was beyond my reading level. I kept that book for 20 years before reading it in my 30s. I read the first two and they are good, but very dense books. Eventually I’ll get back to the third.
Second these.
For his other books, Aurora and 2312 are both space heavy.
I recently re-read Aurora. It’s incredible, maybe my favorite of his.
I’ve not yet read 2312 because when I find an author or director I like I want to spread out reading/watching them. I hate the idea that one day I’ll have read all of KSR’s books. I think it’s time to dive in though.
I kind of do that too. I read the Mars series for the first time a few years ago, and read 2312 and Aurora back to back a few months ago. NY 2140 will probably be my next one of his.
I’ve also had The Martians (short stories from the Mars series) on my desk for a couple of years now, and I read it in short spurts here and there.
I’ve found the Starship’s Mage series by Glynn Stewart very entertaining.
Premise: interstellar flight requires you to have at least one mage on board who uses their magic to move the star ship by a light year but then needs to sleep off magical exhaustion for several hours.
How and why mages developed and where they fit in society is revealed later.
The expanse
Their new series is really good too, but in a totally different way than the expanse. I highly recommend it!
Politics in The Expanse and bureaucracy in the Captives War. Too bad it’s so short, only a trilogy.
I love the way they try to describe stuff given only having our perspective.
Not-turtles, night drinkers, nothing is what it seems. The Expanse is more space centric than The Captives War though.
This one, all day long!
I think it’ll take you at least two days to read all nine books.
Hahaha you sir underestimate my ability to read slow!
I actually do read slow and I’m ok with that
unfortunately, I’ve already watched the series. I was not aware that the story originated from a book (well, books). Is this a problem? Do the books have substantially more story than the serie?
The Bobbiverse Series
[](We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-we-are-bob)
Came here to make sure someone reccommended this.
Foundation and the broader universe by Isaac Asimov is a good one. Robots, foundations, and they empire series, as well as some stand alone stories all make one large story arc together.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Hands down the best 5 part trilogy in Sci Fi
I was skeptical, but I just started And Another Thing (part 6), and so far it feels like Adams work, and the HGG universe.
Have to see how it plays out, but I really love the first 5.
its rather towards the soft side of sci-fi (honestly some of the tech in it feels like something out of the hitchhiker’s guide books except not generally played for humor), but I remember quite enjoying David Brin’s “uplift” series. Not all of the books are set in space per se but there are significant chunks that are and the parts that arent often at least involve spaceships and alien planets.
Peter F Hamilton: Nights Dawn Trilogy
Ian M Banks: Culture Series
Night’s Dawn was so immensely frustrating. He revisits some of the same ideas in later books to much better effect IMO and skips over some of the terrible stuff.
Tap for spoiler
The biological starships were great but then we have the ghost of Al Capone possessing a body and leading a war against unpossessed humanity? That was fucking awful.
The Culture is nothing but gold though. Recently revisited Inversions and it’s still amazing.
To each their own, I enjoyed the trilogy as an excellent mixture of drastically hard sci-fi mixed with delusional fantasy.
I do agree that he perfected concepts in further books, but also found he didn’t particularly deviate from those ideas in truly meaningful ways.
For example: The Great North Road did an excellent job at mixing portals and biological science fiction, but that concepts like brain computer interfaces remained largely the same and too familiar despite being a distinctly separate universe. It felt repeated and old hat.
Good book nonetheless, I was just a bit disappointed he rehashed the same ideas without deviation or too much expansion.
I read Great North Road and several other of his books before I read Nights Dawn, so those “repeated” ideas added to my frustration with the trilogy. Had I read them the other way around, I bet that would changed my opinion some.
Have you read Exodus yet? I have it on my shelf but have been in the mood for shorter reads lately.
I haven’t, but I’ve also found that I prefer his earlier works. The Void Trilogy is another good opera.
I’ll tack on here: if OP doesn’t want to commit to 2500 pages of trilogy: the first book I read by Hamilton was Fallen Dragon.
It uses some concepts familiar with his other works, but presents them in very different ways, and the overall novel is shortish.
The use of semi biological power armor throughout is honestly super cool.
+1 for The Culture. If op liked Old Man’s War they’ll love The Culture.
Not necessarily. I loved OMW but something about the Culture novels just rubbed me the wrong way. I read the first two books and gave up. They were okay, but I didn’t enjoy them enough to want to read any more.
I found that Banks’ writing can be… boring? There is a certain simplicity in it that can rub me the wrong way.
This should not be a reason NOT to read the books, as I found them to be simple reads with amazing concepts.
Consider Phlebas is a great read as it’s told from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the Culture and is exposed to it at a distance.
Other books in the series put you front and centre in the Culture and it can be overwhelming.
Some of his books don’t even mention the culture, but you know it’s operating under a veil in front of the reader the entire time.
It’s all really quite genius.
I didn’t find Banks’ writing to be particularly boring. The plot in Consider Phlebas was interesting enough for me to finish the book, at least.
The Player of Games was a big letdown, though. Similarly to the first book, the plot was interesting enough. But by time I got to the end, I realized: I just wasn’t having fun. I didn’t particularly care about the protagonist, and I wasn’t impressed with the way he was characterized. Just, overall…meh. It doesn’t resonate for me.
I’ve read most of the series and I would say this is my experience with half of it.
Some books are bangers others are flops. But overall the entire thing is worth reading for the universe he presents.
Hmm, it has been a while since I read them. Maybe I should put the next one in the series on hold at the library.
So. To save you some time, none of them need to be read in order (although Consider Phlebas is the best starting point), the books I recommend are:
Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward, Matter, Surface Detail
…. Wait. You know, I just looked at a list of the Culture novels and realized I HAVE read them all except Surface Detail(which I am currently reading and enjoy) and honestly Player of Games is the weakest of the lot followed by Hydrogen Sonata.
You really did stop reading right as it gets really good. Use of Weapons and Excession especially open up the world and really start pushing cool concepts.
It’s older, but Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is one I’ve read several times.
There are a couple of sequel books that are kind of partially written by Clarke, but do expand the story and characters quite a bit.
I read them all years ago, but opted to skip the sequels on a recent re-read, but my wife actually prefers the sequels for the characters and story development.
No disrespect to your wife, but the Rama sequels are fucking terrible.
My secret shame is that I lowkey love the Rama sequels, though I fully acknowledge that they are political soap operas in space and tonally absolutely nothing like the original.
2001: A Space Odyssey still holds up incredibly well. A true classic of the genre that not even the equally great Kubrick adaptation could fully capture.
John Scalzi’s other books are pretty great too. Check out The Interdependency Series. It’s about an interstellar empire that can only navigate through wormholes that are now closing up. The last emperor foresaw this and is trying to save as many humans as possible while fending off political rivals and assassins.
For a similar series check out Foundation from Isaac Asimov. It’s more of an anthology of stories over the course of a millennium but Asimov has a brilliant way of piecing the story together through the vast gaps in time.
Hyperion is an honorable mention. It’s another anthology told a la Canterbury Tales revolving around a mysterious and invincible metallic monster known as a Shrike, which is known to impale its victims in a metal tree - dooming them to an eternity of agony in a pocket dimension.
I really enjoyed seveneves
edit: even if there are some … less than desirable characters in it.
