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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 for in society is revealed later.
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.
This all the way, as well as The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Tchaikovsky
Red rising was fun, but I lowkey was very lost towards the end.
The Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is epic!
Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series is equally good but much calmer, less action.
Other sci-fi series or books I've really enjoyed recently:
I've never bothered trying to watch the Expanse show. I've read the series. Seeing the show would be cool, but knowing that the show is only half the story? Nah.
It's the same part of me that feels tricked by Game of Thrones and Name of the Wind. Not a fan of unfinished stories.
I've read the series a few times and watched it as well.
The first season is sort of amazing and I really appreciated the adaptation. Honestly , the first several seasons were good. Definitely not as good as the books though.
The fourth season is not really worth it. Amazon bought it and pretty much just killed it.
Oh hell, I'm going to start reading them when I'm done with mine lol.
Oof, feels like such a sci-fi heartbreak show. It SOUNDS amazing, and if they could have done a faithful adaptation of the entire book series, I'd be all-in.
But...cancelling it before they even reach the halfway point of the story? Ugh.
💯 but, I do think that first season was some of the best sci fi produced and the following seasons were surprising strong until the acquisition. It's a good story.
It was like too good for modern consumption lol. I am real interested in media adaptations, so it may intersect with another of my interest.
I think you seem to have a pretty good handle on it.
To be fair, I think those last couple of books would have been real difficult from a technical point of view.
What do you think would be hard to depict on screen? To me, the passage of time would be the biggest challenge. Look at Outlander. Jamie and Claire are supposed to age 20 years before being reunited, but they still look 30 in the later seasons!
Other than that, I wouldn't actually worry. Makeup and CGI would do for most of the alien stuff involved in the story.
Oh, the age was the big hang up. I guess you're probably right though, they could probably whip something up. It is a bit harder to pull off that perspective shift though.
It isn't even a hard thing. We've had passable age makeup for longer than I've been alive. They just need to use it!
It is surprisingly good, but indeed by the 4th season it is deviating heavily from the books in prep for wrapping up.
Tap for spoiler
They also basically dont mention the void entities at all since they werent able to go in depth with the late timeline stuff
The show is worth seeing after the read. It’s unlike any other sci-fi show out there and the production is A+++. They hit a lot of the notes the book pushes and honestly it’s refreshing to see some of the changes despite it affecting the cast.
I really enjoyed the first of the Final Architecture books, and found the second enjoyable, but by the third I was starting to fatigue to the concepts and found the story to be more and more tedious to finish: something Tchaikovsky’s other works didn’t do to me.
Some older stuff - Larry Niven's Flatlander collection is really good.
Gideon the ninth. Not very Scalzi (whom I admit I'm not always a fan of), and only a bit SciFi but I keep coming back to this series cause her characters are excellent
(Maybe this doesn't qualify cause the first book is hardly in space)
This is the first time I've seen someone else recommend Gideon the ninth. I read the first book when it originally came out and have been recommending it to friend for years, but no one has taken me up on it.
We are not alone! I haven't enjoyed the rest of the series as much, but after a few rereads I liked them better.
I'm.waiting on rhe next one, any gossip about it?
Also a big enjoyer of John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", I really enjoyed Pierce Brown's Red Rising saga..
Two series I deeply love:
Little Fuzzy
Fuzzy Sapiens
Fuzzies and Other People
H. 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 Interface
Steve 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
Churl
Totally different subject matter from old mans war but The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata is really good. There's also a prequel trilogy The Nanotech Succesion, which you don't have to read before Inverted frontier but it's good and I reccomend it as well.
Project Hail Mary
The Salvager series py Alex White (science fantasy)
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.
CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series and Alliance-Union universe