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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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[-] JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[-] elephantium@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

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...

[-] JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

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/

[-] elephantium@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Ha, I have some more books to request from the library!

this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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