Books

The expanse

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.

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)

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.

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.

If you like hard eco-political 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.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Hands down the best 5 part trilogy in Sci Fi

Peter F Hamilton: Nights Dawn Trilogy

Ian M Banks: Culture Series

I'm quite fond of the Teixcalaan (don't ask me how to pronounce that) duology by Arkady Martine.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Old Man's war is on my list. What did you like about it?

The Children of Time series was pretty fun. Adrian Tschaikovsky, I think.

The Ancillary series (aka Imperial Radch series) by Ann Leckie is exceptionally good. Start with Ancillary Justice.

Ann Leckie is an amazing human.

Red rising was fun, but I lowkey was very lost towards the end.

Because nobody has suggested it yet, Blindsight and Echopraxia are excellent.

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

Heeyyy, I did not expect that to blow up like this! Thanks for all the recommendations.

Here is a summary of the mentioned books / series (in case someone is also searching for a new good book)

• Starship’s Mage series by Glynn Stewart
• Larry Niven’s Flatlander
• Red Rising saga by Pierce Brown’s
• The Expanse
• Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama
• The Bobbiverse Series
• Children of Time/Ruin/Memory/Strife - Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars (other books from the same autor are Aurora and 2312)
• Peter F Hamilton: Nights Dawn Trilogy
• Ian M Banks: Culture Series
• The Void Trilogy
• Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
• Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine
• Gideon the ninth
• Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer
• Redshirts by John Scalzi
• The Mote in God’s Eye
• CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series and Alliance-Union universe
• Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac series
• Nnendi Okorafor’s Binti
• Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The Interdependency Serie
• Foundation from Isaac Asimov
• The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata
• Project Hail Mary
• Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War
• Alan Dean Foster: The Damned Seies
• Little Fuzzy - Fuzzy Sapiens - Fuzzies and Other People
• The Man Who Never Missed - Matadora - The Machiavelli Interface
• The Ancillary serie

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.

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.

All of these recommendations so far are a grab bag of anything sci-fi. For something with similar themes and more of a focus on space warfare ops I would highly recommend Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson.

Briefest possible synopsis: humans are forcefully introduced to wider space civilization, which is in a constant state of structured war. The focus is on a covert ops team always trying to get an edge by outsmarting much more powerful civilizations. It's dramatic and funny.

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.

It’s a trio of novellas, so kind of reads like a series — I’m a huge fan of Nnendi Okorafor’s Binti