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sci-fi series recommendation (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/books@lemmy.world
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I've finished the "Old Man's War" series from John Scalzi. It was great!

Can you recommend any other good sci-fi series playing in space for my next read?

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[–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

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 spoilerThe 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I read Great North Road and several other of his books before I read Nights Dawn, so those "repeated" ideas added to my frustration with the trilogy. Had I read them the other way around, I bet that would changed my opinion some.

    Have you read Exodus yet? I have it on my shelf but have been in the mood for shorter reads lately.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    I haven’t, but I’ve also found that I prefer his earlier works. The Void Trilogy is another good opera.

    I’ll tack on here: if OP doesn’t want to commit to 2500 pages of trilogy: the first book I read by Hamilton was Fallen Dragon.

    It uses some concepts familiar with his other works, but presents them in very different ways, and the overall novel is shortish.

    The use of semi biological power armor throughout is honestly super cool.

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