The expanse
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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This one, all day long!
Their new series is really good too, but in a totally different way than the expanse. I highly recommend it!
Politics in The Expanse and bureaucracy in the Captives War. Too bad it’s so short, only a trilogy.
I love the way they try to describe stuff given only having our perspective.
Not-turtles, night drinkers, nothing is what it seems. The Expanse is more space centric than The Captives War though.
unfortunately, I've already watched the series. I was not aware that the story originated from a book (well, books). Is this a problem? Do the books have substantially more story than the serie?
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It's older, but Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is one I've read several times.
There are a couple of sequel books that are kind of partially written by Clarke, but do expand the story and characters quite a bit.
I read them all years ago, but opted to skip the sequels on a recent re-read, but my wife actually prefers the sequels for the characters and story development.
No disrespect to your wife, but the Rama sequels are fucking terrible.
My secret shame is that I lowkey love the Rama sequels, though I fully acknowledge that they are political soap operas in space and tonally absolutely nothing like the original.
The Bobbiverse Series
[](We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-we-are-bob)
Came here to make sure someone reccommended this.
Foundation and the broader universe by Isaac Asimov is a good one. Robots, foundations, and they empire series, as well as some stand alone stories all make one large story arc together.
I'm quite fond of the Teixcalaan (don't ask me how to pronounce that) duology by Arkady Martine.
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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.
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If you like hard eco sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series is one I still think about often, and I read it about 20 years ago now. Bonus: if you like it then he's written a whole lot of other great stuff to read.
Second these.
For his other books, Aurora and 2312 are both space heavy.
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I still need to get back to that one and read the third one. Red Mars was the first adult level reading book I purchased as a kid and it was beyond my reading level. I kept that book for 20 years before reading it in my 30s. I read the first two and they are good, but very dense books. Eventually I’ll get back to the third.
Peter F Hamilton: Nights Dawn Trilogy
Ian M Banks: Culture Series
+1 for The Culture. If op liked Old Man's War they'll love The Culture.
Not necessarily. I loved OMW but something about the Culture novels just rubbed me the wrong way. I read the first two books and gave up. They were okay, but I didn't enjoy them enough to want to read any more.
I found that Banks’ writing can be… boring? There is a certain simplicity in it that can rub me the wrong way.
This should not be a reason NOT to read the books, as I found them to be simple reads with amazing concepts.
Consider Phlebas is a great read as it’s told from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the Culture and is exposed to it at a distance.
Other books in the series put you front and centre in the Culture and it can be overwhelming.
Some of his books don’t even mention the culture, but you know it’s operating under a veil in front of the reader the entire time.
It’s all really quite genius.
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Night's Dawn was so immensely frustrating. He revisits some of the same ideas in later books to much better effect IMO and skips over some of the terrible stuff.
Tap for spoiler
The biological starships were great but then we have the ghost of Al Capone possessing a body and leading a war against unpossessed humanity? That was fucking awful.
The Culture is nothing but gold though. Recently revisited Inversions and it's still amazing.
To each their own, I enjoyed the trilogy as an excellent mixture of drastically hard sci-fi mixed with delusional fantasy.
I do agree that he perfected concepts in further books, but also found he didn’t particularly deviate from those ideas in truly meaningful ways.
For example: The Great North Road did an excellent job at mixing portals and biological science fiction, but that concepts like brain computer interfaces remained largely the same and too familiar despite being a distinctly separate universe. It felt repeated and old hat.
Good book nonetheless, I was just a bit disappointed he rehashed the same ideas without deviation or too much expansion.
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Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Hands down the best 5 part trilogy in Sci Fi
I was skeptical, but I just started And Another Thing (part 6), and so far it feels like Adams work, and the HGG universe.
Have to see how it plays out, but I really love the first 5.
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:
- Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Redshirts by John Scalzi
- The Expanse series. Although I only made it part way though book 5 when I started watching the show and stopped reading it.
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.
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.
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Alastair Reynolds “Redemption Ark” series is great.
Ann Leckie's “Ancillary Justice” (Imperial Radch) series is fantastic.
...
Alan Dean Foster
The Damned Seies: https://www.goodreads.com/series/40571-the-damned
Peter F Hamilton
The Commonwealth series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/108563-commonwealth-universe Start with Pandoras Star and go from there.
The Children of Time series was pretty fun. Adrian Tschaikovsky, I think.
I haven't disliked any of his books so far. His Elder Race book was such a good blend of sci-fi and fantasy even if it was a little cheesy. I'm really looking forward to part 2 later this year.
I usually like Niven and Pournelle's stuff, and particularly recommend The Mote in God's Eye for a great first contact encounter. There's a sequel The Gripping Hand which is not as great, but still worth the read.
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Red rising was fun, but I lowkey was very lost towards the end.
The Ancillary series (aka Imperial Radch series) by Ann Leckie is exceptionally good. Start with Ancillary Justice.
Ann Leckie is an amazing human.
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
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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.
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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.
its rather towards the soft side of sci-fi (honestly some of the tech in it feels like something out of the hitchhiker's guide books except not generally played for humor), but I remember quite enjoying David Brin's "uplift" series. Not all of the books are set in space per se but there are significant chunks that are and the parts that arent often at least involve spaceships and alien planets.
Because nobody has suggested it yet, Blindsight and Echopraxia are excellent.
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Dan Moren's Galactic Cold War series might be a good fit. Like Scalzi, it's very soft sci fi, with a somewhat military bent (spies, in this case) and well-written characters.
Also, if you liked Old Man's War, I actually thought Scalzi's Interdependency series was better so you might enjoy that.
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.
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)
Also a big enjoyer of John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", I really enjoyed Pierce Brown's Red Rising saga..
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