Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Science Fiction
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I really love the Culture series.
I need to get off my butt and read them. I always keep getting distracted by something else though.
My favorites are distributed around, and I tend to read in publish order so I have to power through some of the slower ones. They're insanely good, though.
To me many of the culture books start really slow/on the boring side but then they pick up and get really good. I really like how they often describe the culture not directly but through interaction with others.
The payoff at the end of some are so fucking epic. They're probaly my favorite book series.
Publishing order is best with any series, barring Discworld. Authors learn more about their series as they write them, and going out of order as a reader sometimes gives you answers to mysteries before you were ever introduced to a mystery.
Both full Discworld readthroughs were publish order lol. The last go round included Shepherds Crown.
And discworld has so much going on it prolly only matters for individual series. I have a cat named Eskarina and I'm sure a lot of readers barely remember her.
Discworld is the one exception for me because early Pratchett is much weaker, and he bashes one of my OTHER favorite authors which makes me frowny. And he has coherant sub-series with their own little casts of characters and it's easy to jump in with those. (I started with Guards! Guards! and the Night Watch and went forward/backwards from there.)
Everything else though I read publish order, though.
Try Malazan. Also you can message me for a library.
There are so much fantastic space opera out there. Some high-points for me, but depends on what you want out of a space opera:
- Alistair Reynolds, “revelation space” and its’ series
- James Alan Gardner: “expendable” and its’ series
- Timothy Zahn: lord, he has probably dozens
- Allan Cole & Chris Bunch: Sten series
- Simon R. Green: Deathstalker series
- Alan Dean Foster: A Call To Arms and trilogy
- Brandon Sanderson
- John Scalzi did a trilogy a couple of years ago
- John Varley’s “Seven Worlds”(?) series.
- Vernor Vinge: Fire Upon the Deep
- Ken MacLeod’s “Fall Revolution “ series
- Kim Stanley Robinson “Mars” Series
- The Expanse
Saga of the Seven Suns was good from my recollection. I wonder when he'll revisit, Kevin J Anderson is prolific
Some of my all time favorites are the Spinward Fringe series by Randolph Lalonde, The Intrepid Saga from the Aeon 14 universe, and the Imperial Radch Trilogy from Ann Leckie.
A Memory Called Empire was really good, but it wasn't a space battle shoot-em-up, more like large scale political intrigue and murder mystery.
@Izzy brought up Tchaikovsky's Final Achitecture and @ScrumblesPAbernathy mentioned Children of Time series, loved those. Right now I'm on the second of his Bioforms books, Bear Head. After that it's back to Idris and The Lords of Uncreation.
While it probably doesn't qualify as space opera, I have to throw in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I just fucking love Murderbot and ART.
There's always the Bobiverse, The Culture Series, and The Cluster Saga, too.
Anyone who hasn't read The Murderbot Diaries should read The Murderbot Diaries right now!
For shows, Battlestar Galactica is always great. I just started watching Caprica and loving it so far. It might not be an “opera”, but it does so much to fill out the Battlestar Galactica universe.
I also just started reading The Expanse series and would definitely recommend it, even for someone like me who’s not an avid reader.
isnt Expeditionary force a space opera? at least Skippy would like it to be.
For me, the favorite of the genre to date are the Mass Effect games, Star Wars (the good ones, at least), Asimov's Foundation books, Stanislav Lem's Solaris book and, even if it's more grimdark than space opera, Warhammer 40k. I still have to delve into The Expanse but I don't have the time yet
I found I clicked more with The Expanse as the TV show than the books.
Some series are like that for me. I read so much more than I watch shows, but some stories I don't click with until they end up as a movie or TV series.