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sci-fi series recommendation
(lemmy.world)
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For the Old Man's War flavor, I recently finished Neal Asher's Agent Cormac series, which is a subset of his Polity series. The stories are stellar, excellent character development, and deliciously complex moral issues. I'd say it's interstellar James Bond (Daniel Craig's version) having a love child with The Culture, early Tom Clancy, and "Heart of Darkness." My one caution is that Asher's sentence structure sometimes almost feels like reading Thackeray.
I am now going back and reading the rest of the Polity novels in order. I am quite pleased. I kinda wish I started from the beginning, but it's also been fun to have that "foresight" on events now that I'm in the earlier novels.
Oof, I'm partway through The Soldier, feeling like I'm missing some clues. I picked it up at the library having seen "book 1 of..." on the cover. I had no clue it was midway through a big, established setting!
Maybe I should return it and re-request after I read the earlier Polity novels...hmm...
In some of the books I've read so far, Asher does okay with backfilling some details if you skipped previous novels. But there is definitely a whole lot of backstory you might be missing on Orlandine, the Jain, the Prador, and the complexities of... everything. There are long-running plots within plots, and more than a couple conspiracies.
FWIW: this is the reading order I'm now using: https://www.readingorders.info/the-neal-ashers-polity-universe-reading-order/
Ha, I have some more books to request from the library!