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IonClash posted:I'm going to catch hell for this, but I really enjoyed The Saga of the Seven Suns by Kevin J. Anderson. I enjoyed the array of characters and locations. It's 7 books long and covers several alien races, their sub-races, and humans (as well as their separate cultures). It's a bit daunting to keep track of, and KJA likes to flip-flop between characters/locales quite a bit. They were still an enjoyable read though. This was one of the best modern space operas I've read in awhile...KJA is a great author, never read any of his stuff I didn't like. I'm kinda pissed because I never bought the last book and now they've reprinted them, so when I do buy it the spine and cover will be different.  Have to hit a used bookstore I guess. He created a very rich universe there though.After reading this thread I'm going to check out Friedman's In Conquest Born. Read this description on Amazon: "The novel is built on the contrast of two protagonists, young people whose talents lead them to the tops of two space-going societies: one militaristic, paranoid and male-dominated; the other pluralistic, with advanced mental powers. The plot follows them from birth to their clash as the two vast space-empires struggle for domination. This is space opera in the best sense: a combination of high-stakes adventure with a strong focus on ideas and characters whose fate an intelligent reader can care about." Sounds very Legend of Galactic Heroes to me, so I'm looking forward to it. Also his book Madness Season was fantastic and it was absolutely criminal when io9 did a "Vampires in Space" list the other day and left it off. (Though they put E.E. Knight's Vampire Earth on there so I can't hate them too much)
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Jul 7, 2009 02:54
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EX-GAIJIN AT LAST posted:Ah, are they all out in paperback? I was waiting to start it until I got the last two, but they weren't out yet and I had such a big stack of other books to read that I pretty much forgot about it. Yeah, I pretty much did the exact same thing with the last book. They're out in new reprints, but the covers are so horrible and plain compared to the beautiful and detailed art of the first printing. His books can be kinda pulpy, but good. Ill Wind was decent apocolyptica, and his Wells and Verne pastiches were fun.
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Jul 9, 2009 06:23
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Chairman Capone posted:I just got S.M. Stirling's The Sky People today. For those who don't know it's set in an alternate history where in the early 1960s the first US and Soviet space probes to Venus and Mars found, instead of the dry dead worlds of reality, worlds teeming with life - Venus a jungle-like planet with dinosaurs, Mars a Barsoom-like planet, both with human tribes and kingdoms and whatnot on them. So instead of someone like John Carter meeting Dejah Thoris you have NASA astronauts meeting the kings of Mars. I'd be very interested to hear what you think when you're done. The concept sounds fantastic but I can't stand Stirling, so I'd need a really good recommendation before I drop money on that.
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Aug 9, 2009 15:31
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I like the Lost Fleet series. The criticisms above are correct, but it's still compelling and the protagonist is a great character. It does seem to be dragging a bit, but there's some interesting twists that when they finally address them it will be a big turning point (the aliens and what he does when he gets home).
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May 12, 2010 16:55
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Tanith posted:Book two of Lost Fleet and Captain Falco... Captain Falco is awesome.
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May 13, 2010 22:05
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Decius posted:Who are a major plot point for the rest of the series, although without direct appearance - or nearly so. These will be about Geary having to struggle with deciding to take over, right? And the other will be about the aliens? I think these will be awesome plot threads, but I worry that if he moves as slowly on those as he did this one it'll be 20 more books before it's over, not much will have happened.
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May 14, 2010 22:59
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fermun posted:This is what he says about them on his website: That sounds cool as hell.
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May 15, 2010 17:57
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Somehow I'm just a sucker for his stuff though. He lacks the punch and brilliance of say, John Scalzi, but I still like him so much more than other authors who can get a bit repetitive.
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May 16, 2010 03:58
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coffeetable posted:One bit of space opera that hasn't been mentioned yet is Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake. It suffers a little from a Stross-esque focus on ideas rather than characters, but as a Scot I'm rather partial to the thought of a Glaswegian gang controlling a galaxy-spanning wormhole network and making money by thieving post-human relics. I read that a few months ago. It's fantastic.
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May 17, 2010 17:23
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Guess what I got today? 
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Jun 4, 2010 03:03
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Tanith posted:He sets himself up for both new storylines he's planning on following in this, by which I mean MY FULFILLMENT This is great so far. Seems to be going in a much less predictable direction, and I love the fact that from his own perspective he's gone from a Commander to Fleet Admiral in about 2 months!   : "I'm not qualified for this." : "Sure you are!": "No really, I'm not qualified for this."
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Jun 6, 2010 18:31
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Tanith posted:I do wish he were more visually descriptive though, since space opera is something you want to imagine, and he's very sparse with mental imagery and background stuff. Shark-like being the only indication of what the Alliance ships look like is not helpful, especially when it doesn't come to book 6, and is only relative to a different fleet. I'm not asking for flowery nonsense, but a little help in this department would be nice. I literally see all his space battles and the screens the characters are watching them on as the ships and interface from the old game Imperium Galactica becaues I have no other frame of reference.  Edit: Just finished it, it was awesome. It actually covered more ground than I thought it would, and rather quickly. A great wrapup to that arc. Can't wait for more! Astroman fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jun 7, 2010 |
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Jun 6, 2010 23:20
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WarLocke posted:I never knew they made a game out of that. This isn't a bad idea. Between Flint and Turtledove alone, there's a lot to talk about. As bad as some of those books can get, I'm a sucker for the premise.
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Jun 8, 2010 16:57
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Hobnob posted:If you really want Hornblower in space, you should look for David Feintuch's Seafort Saga, starting with Midshipman's Hope, which really nails the "angsty captain who can't live up to his own standarhttp://forums.somethingawful.com/editpost.php?action=editpost&postid=377984665ds but everybody else thinks is the bollocks" part of it. Hell yeah. I was going to bring this up after reading this page, til I saw your post. Very, very specific about naval life and regulations, the most so of any novel besides Hornblower; and the regulations plus the main character's religion and morals put him in to all kinds of impossible situations he somehow gets out of with amazing ingenuity. Apparently Feintuch was working on the 8th book when he died, but it has yet to be published.  Wikipedia posted:Galahad's Hope is the current title of the eighth and final book in the Seafort Saga of science fiction novels, and the sequel to Children of Hope. The manuscript was reported[1] to be completed before the death of author David Feintuch, however orbit have no current plans to publish this book. According to an Orbit online marketing executive, they haven't been approached by anyone connected to David Feintuch with a view to publishing the manuscript.  Tanith posted:Geary is actually pretty Hornblower-like, but I think it's not done as well, or not with enough variety. He has his problems, and they keep getting repeated. Hornblower's insecurities, while following a general theme, at least evolve or change such that they're at least not practically verbatim. Campbell said in an interview that he wanted people to sort of be able to pick up the later books in his series without being totally lost, but still, it gets a bit much. Take a shot every fleet council where Geary gets mad, says something and didn't realize it until everyone stared at him etc. I hope he doesn't go with that in his new stuff, because it's annoying and his prose can get terribly redundant. There's still a bit of that in the latest book but Geary has definitely evolved. At the same time though he does some callbacks to the first book to show the contrast. There's also more references to the changes in society Geary is having to face outside the fleet, which are appropriate and good.
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Jun 9, 2010 17:15
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Noricae posted:I agree and was pretty underwhelmed. It didn't help that I nearly read Forever War/etc back to back with Old Man's War and sequels (Haldeman first), I guess (in that it added to being underwhelmed, and now I continually mix aspects of both series up). Don't do this. I loved OMW and bought 2 of the sequels so far; I really dig Scalzi. That said it's no Forever War, but what could be? That book is a giant.
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Jun 14, 2010 16:09
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I just finished the first couple of books of Roger Allen McBride's Solace series, The Depths of Time and The Ocean of Years and they were pretty good. I've pretty much been sitting on these for years because I'd bought the second one in the series accidentally and then took forever to buy the first and then forgot I had them. The plot involves a society where intersteller travel is effected by a complex system of cryosleep and worm holes-people spend years traveling sublight while frozen to a wormhole, then go X number of years back in time, toodle along some more in sublight, and by doing so end up where they want to be within a few days or weeks after they left subjectively, but with 50-100 years of time passing on ship. There's a big crazy mystery involving terraforming, a galactic puzzle hunt, and a brooding admiral as a protagonist who's right up there with Seafort and Black Jack McGeary on the emo scale (though he's a bit harder to get in the head of than either of those two, because most of the story is told from the POV of his companions). Really fun reads. I'd never read any of his stuff before and was pleasantly surprised. I'll definitely be looking for the third in the trilogy.
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Jul 29, 2010 02:58
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Insane Totoro posted:I have to admit, I love Ian Douglas and his whole idea of the USMC in outer spaaaaaaaaaaace. Douglas' books are great, I have 2 of the 3 so far. Campbell is good. If you can stand the angst of Black Jack, then I'd recommend David Feintuch's Seafort Saga, though it's more a Napoleonic version of the military than a modern one, and the main character is great but  as hell. It's also jarring at first how this series which takes place in the future has such old-fashioned religious and moral sensibilities, but when you get into the background of the society it's interesting and plausible how they got there.
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Aug 11, 2010 17:54
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Yeah, say what you will about Lost Fleet he does eventually move the story along and when the plot does advance, cool and interesting stuff happens.
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Jun 26, 2013 23:36
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We're talking about Hornblower/Age of Sail IN SPACE and nobody mentions David Feintuch's Seafort Saga? For shame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafort_Saga Set in a future where society has somehow reverted to 18th century codes of life, religion, and military, the hero is a conflicted young man who starts off as a midshipman and through an accident of circumstances finds himself in very reluctant command of a starship on a months long voyage. Following that, he progresses through the ranks. In later books, the author goes back to Earth and actually explains, quite reasonably, how it is that society got that way, going all the way back to our present. It's almost a 1:1 conversion of Hornblower, with the exception that the hero is even MORE angsty and self doubting.
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Sep 11, 2013 16:59
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The Saddest Robot posted:I picked up a couple of these books used. I enjoy them as kind of trashy sci-fi but they all feel similar to one another in a formulaic way, especially in the way that every book I read has an emotional climax with Seafort attempting some sort of hail mary/suicide play, but getting denied his sweet sweet suicide as someone else does the hail mary suicide play instead. True, but at least he's more Hornblower perfect than Honor/Black Jack perfect. And he does somewhat have an arc where he grows and matures and finds some sort of happiness (even if he's still very rigid).
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Sep 29, 2013 18:19
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