Like space opera

>Like space opera
>Ask Veeky Forums for a series now that I finished Foundation and Ringworld
>Get told Honor Harrington
>Premise of Space Britain vs Space France seems interesting enough, I'll give it a shot
>First book is about Honor being the best at everything
>Second book is about Honor being the best at everything
>Third book is about Honor being the best at everything except makeup
>Fourth book is about how everyone loves Honor except a guy who's mad because she wouldn't let him rape her, and also she's better at shooting archaic guns after two weeks of training than a guy who specializes in shooting archaic guns who's done it his entire life as his actual profession
>Fifth book is about space mormons giving her a country, her proving that girls can be just as good as guys, and training with a katana for a year until she can kill in a single strike a guy who trained his entire life and is considered top five on the planet
I gave up after that. What did I miss?

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

>>Like space opera
>>Ask Veeky Forums 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.

You appear to be mad.

I enjoyed the serious.

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

Nothing.

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

>not the Use of Weapons

*enjoyed the series, fuck.

It's a trilogy if you're interested.

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.

I AM CHAIR

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!)

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.

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

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!"

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.

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.

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

>He fell for the Harrington meme

>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

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.

the Halo novels

I read the series just becomes garbage after a point.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 user also suggested . 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 Veeky Forums from start to finish and is laugh out loud hilarious in parts.

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

>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.

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.

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

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

Honor Harrington is so bad it made Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums join together in their hatred of engineers

>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?

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.

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

>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.

>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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

The Lost Fleet.

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.

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.

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?

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The second trilogy of Uplift blows dicks, though.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

the most Veeky Forums one, at least

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

This trope should have a name

Idiocracy?

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

Only Sane Man?

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.

I remember this pasta.

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

My cocojin. That shit is fucking brutal.

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.

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.

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.