Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Kesper North posted:

Way I see it, the only thing that's economically worth fighting an interstellar war is trying to prevent the spread of an idea or technology so dangerous your species doesn't want to risk being contaminated by it, or risky behavior on the part of your interstellar neighbors that you think could end up screwing you as well (like tampering with their star and putting surrounding systems at risk to their sun going supernova) or unintentionally creating/summoning weakly godlike agencies that want to enslave or consume the mind of every sentient in the neighborhood.

In the space opera series I'm working on, humans are regarded as dangerous due to our being willing to research and adopt any sort of crazy-assed technology without fear of the consequences. Our first contact was with a species that uses pheromones to rigorously enforce a caste system; genetic engineering could level the playing field for the mistreated but more numerous lower castes and ostracized no-castes (individuals who are caste-blind, or who do not exude their own command pheromones). The spacegoing humans in my universe are transhuman shading to post; genetic engineering is a boutique industry for them, and the first aliens we run into regard the very idea as an existential threat to their way of life. And then there's the revolutionary faction who want to buy a fix for the caste issue from mercenary human scientists...

Then there's the species of uplifted lab critters that live in the shattered remains of their progenitor species' hard-takeoff singularity (which seems to have gone off the rails at some point, leaving the wreckage of vast megastructures and other fascinating things in their home system that humans would just love to get their hands on) and are not at all fond of their creators. They fear anything that could result in their creators' return from wherever they went, assuming they aren't all dead - and the fact that humans stuff themselves full of technology and hang out with AIs all the time worries them deeply.

So pretty soon we have a reputation as suicidally reckless, dangerous, disruptive mad scientists who refuse to leave anyone alone and, unfortunately, have all the best toys.

I want to read this.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 22:12

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 09:33

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Hammerstein posted:

So I realize that most of this is trash, but I enjoy stuff like this on rainy days and save my Heinlein and Scalzi novels for the beach. But is there anything which is not quite that terrible but still has plenty of fleet action and laser pew-pew ?

I'm so sorry, this is going to fit most of the tropes you just described, but I really enjoyed this series of decent-if-not-great space opera: The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell. The main hero is a little bit of a gary stu, but in this indulgent way where he wins fights by using actual strategy and teamwork with methods that have in-universe been killed out of the current generation of spacers due to everlasting war (TM). If you like the first book, the next five are more of the same, and the sequels after that go into some interesting directions with other factions and stuff.

I don't have anything else to read as the only other sci-fi I've been reading lately is CJ Cherryh and while she does fantastic starship battles there's usually only one or two per book and they're very small-scale engagements.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2016 01:11

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Rocksicles posted:

This is a loaded question but does anyone know numbers of non binary people worldwide? gotta be less than like 3% right?

I don't think you can get a real answer?

I mean, going off of my tiny experience, but I know two non binary people and neither one has come out as such given that they live in places where it's not safe to do so.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2016 10:49

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

n4 posted:

God drat it John C. Wright.

Nooooooooooo no no. :ughh:

# ¿ Feb 2, 2017 07:40

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

jng2058 posted:

The Lost Fleet books have a bunch of problems too. Blackjack Geary ain't quite the Mary Sue that Honor Harrington is, but he's in the vicinity. Worse, though, the books all have a similar feel.

The fleet's in trouble, Blackjack gets them out of trouble, some dipshit idiot fellow captains complain about it, said captains are proven to be incompetent, traitorous schemers, or both and receive comeuppance at the end of the book. Meanwhile, Blackjack leads the fleet to crush another hapless enemy fleet while taking just enough losses for Geary to reflect on the horror of war, while never taking enough damage to actually slow him down appreciably. But! As the book comes to a close, a new enemy threat appears!

Next book: The fleet is in trouble....

The Lost Stars books are better since the main characters are allowed to gently caress up and not be perfect, but they don't have nearly as many space battles, being equally concerned with ground combat and politics.

Whatever you do, don't be me and read them all in a few weeks.

...That said, I say that the books are great! They're like - if you just want neat space battles with heroes you can root for, no questions asked, they're good. It's like watching a kid's show, almost, but with detailed space battles. Bureaucrats and idiots bad, bad communication bad, let's fight the bad guys! ... Over and over again. Soothing, when you want space but you don't want something dark or too complex. And I can't say that for a lot of books, especially genre fiction.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2017 09:57

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Miss-Bomarc posted:

There was nothing so fun as seeing "Book 1 of the (x) series". I still remember when I stumbled over the Chung Kuo series, and holy gently caress there's like SIX of these and they are HUGE, I'm gonna be reading these for the whole SUMMER.

And on reading the Wikipedia page, I find that there were eight actual books published in the original group, and "[the author] announced that the publishing rights for the series had reverted back to the him and that he plans to self-publish the entire twenty book series starting in 2017."

Were they any good?

# ¿ Jun 13, 2017 07:50

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 09:33

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Drifter posted:

I've read the first two of the original Chung Kuo series way back when and thought they were really interesting. It wasn't all action plot all the time, so some people said it got a bit wordy, but I enjoyed the books. The only reason I stopped was that it was hard to find the rest of the series.

If you have enjoyed Game of Thrones at some point, you'd likely also have enjoyed Chung Kuo. I'm pretty shocked reading all the one star reviews on goodreads about this series.

Excellent. I own the first one because it was a dollar at a library, so I'll throw it into the "actually read this year maybe" pile instead of in the "when I get to it" pile.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2017 10:22

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.