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Comment by colinb | Hacker News Reader

Recommendations?

For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.

I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.

If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.

* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.

Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.

Other book recommendations:

- valuable humans in transit by qntm

- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)

- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher

- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)

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