OT-Sci-Fi Book Review

[Cdnwolf]

Anyone starts mentioning sparkly vampires and the Ban Hammer comes down...

Just finished re-reading "The Forever War" and got me thinking of another series of books that used "real time problems" in space...

Jack Campbell The Lost Fleet

[Adm.Lee]

I read Forever war a few years ago, it left me cold.

Scalzi's Old man's war series, I really liked, however.

I'll be hitting Starship Troopers sometime this summer, I think I read it last before T2k was published.

[ArmySGT.]

Anyone else reading Taylor Anderson's "Destroyermen" series?

A WW2 (ok WW1 design) destroyer fighting for their lives in the opening months of WW2 is swept up in an unnatural storm and deposited onto an alternate earth. An earth that doesn't seem to have humans (or does it? ) but two other species that are fully sentient.

[Targan]

The Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies) is excellent. It's "hard" sci fi. The weapons and armour tech for individual soldiers is really interesting. Richard Morgan is one of my favourite authors (his A Land Fit for Heroes fantasy series is also bloody good).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi_Kovacs

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by Targan

The Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies) is excellent. It's "hard" sci fi. The weapons and armour tech for individual soldiers is really interesting. Richard Morgan is one of my favourite authors (his A Land Fit for Heroes fantasy series is also bloody good).

I'll second those recommendations. I enjoyed both series. In both cases, I thought that the first novel was the best- IMHO, Altered Carbon is up there close to Neuromancer in terms of cyberpunk noir. He's a really good writer; I could do with less graphic sex scenes, though, especially in LFFH.

[Adm.Lee]

Last few years, I've been trying to add more sci-fi to my diet. Some of it has been military.

"The Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi. Very good, humanity is facing down lots of alien races while wrestling with their own political-moral issues.

Also by Scalzi: Redshirts is a hilarious Star Trek parody!

Marko Kloos' "Frontlines" series is also humans-vs-aliens, but the aliens are a LOT tougher to take down.

My like for Weber's "Honor Harrington" series has faded as it became more bloated, but the frist 5 or so books are great. He's spun off two series with Harrington's ancestors, I liked both of those much better. "Manticore Ascendant" is one that shows the early days of the Royal Manticore Navy, and the "Stephanie Harrington" series is about the early days of contact with treecats.

"Dragonriders of Pern" was summer 2014's project. This year will be more Heinlein. I re-read Starship Troopers as a warmup, Glory Road is on deck, also a re-read.