The best (and most approachable) new space operas

Star Trek is a great series, but you expect the flagship of the Federation to be able to handle pretty much anything. I’m much more interested in how ordinary people deal with extraordinary situations. 

Michael Mammay, who like me, is former military, has a very ordinary hero in this story - Sergeant Gastovsky (“Gas” to everybody he knows). Gas’s one superpower is he knows everybody and can make a deal with anybody.

The Misfit Soldier is very enjoyable. The first half of the book is basically the plot of the movie Kelly's Heroes which is a WWII heist movie. It’s well-told and moves quickly. The second part, also based on Mammay’s personal experiences, is how his future military deals with the aftermath.

It’s a standalone, which is also a plus.

We’ve all read and seen stories where the old hero comes out of retirement to save the day one last time. 

But what if the “hero” really wasn’t a hero, but rather the product of somebody’s marketing department?  That’s the premise of this book.

Captain Dash Drake is famous, but fame has not brought fortune. When the evil invaders he “defeated” the last time come back, he’s ready to give up. His latest trainee, girl genius Kenzie Washington, thinks her hero will save the day. Watching the two of them misunderstand each other was amusing. Also standalone. 

(You should detect a pattern on my list – I’m not fond of never-ending series.)

Full disclosure: I’m a personal friend of the author. However, her latest book, which is basically “The Thin Man in Space” is really very good.

Ms. Tesla Crane, billionaire inventor, is definitely not ordinary. But she’s stuck on a passenger liner traveling from Earth to Mars, and so much of her resources are at the wrong end of an ever-lengthening speed-of-light delay.

Besides the beauty of being stuck on a passenger ship and forced to improvise, Mary Robinette plays it straight. It is possible for the reader to determine who the killer is, provided that you don’t sample all the drink recipes provided in the chapter headings!

I’m also a personal friend of Jim C. Hines, but we became friends because I was a fan of his work. 

This book is the first of a trilogy (which is different than a never-ending series) and takes a new, different, and funny spin on the zombie apocalypse.

Earth was hit by a plague that zombie-fied those humans it didn’t kill. Then the aliens came and cured some humans, who had to join their space fleet. Mostly as janitors and other menial laborers. Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos goes from head janitor to captain of the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish.  She can barely fly the ship, but now must fight it.

Definitely a case where an ordinary person gets put in an extraordinary situation.

Fergus Ferguson is an ordinary man who just happens to be good at one thing – finding stuff. So he becomes an intergalactic repo man, and when the book starts he’s been tasked with finding a stolen starship, as one does. 

He’s also found himself wrapped up in a civil war and a possible alien invasion.

This book is a little darker than the others on the list, in that Fergus has a lot of personal baggage to deal with, the people behind the civil war aren’t nice, and it’s really hard to figure out what the aliens want. But the darkness is leavened by Fergus’s humor and strong moral code. 

It’s also book one of a (very nicely tied-up) trilogy.