I’ve been in love with science fiction since I watched Star Wars for the first time at the age of seven, and haven’t looked back since. Besides being a voracious lifelong reader, I’ve written several dozen science fiction books myself, and my favorite sub-genre is space opera. I’ve read most of the Hugo and Nebula-winning novels, as well as several that those awards have overlooked, and my stories have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines including Again, Hazardous Imaginings,After Dinner Conversation, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology.
Dune is, in my opinion, the most perfect science fiction novel ever written. The world-building accomplishes the rare feat of feeling immensely complex, impressively alien, and also uncannily believable. If we could take a time machine twenty thousand years into our future, we would probably find a galactic empire very much like the one in Dune.
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
While the Foundation novels feel a bit dated now, Asimov’s vision of a sweeping galactic empire has influenced everything from Star Wars (Coruscant is basically a rip-off of Trantor) to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The series chronicles the fall of the old empire and the rise of a new one, and raises questions of fate vs. free will, historical inevitability, and the impact that individuals can have on the course of events much larger than themselves.
The first novel in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series
THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION, NOW STREAMING • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings…
David Weber’s Honorverse is what Star Trek wants to be when it grows up, and the first novel, On Basilisk Station, is a wonderful place to start. It introduces the main character, Honor Harrington, at an early part (but not the beginning) of her military career, and introduces both the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its primary antagonists (at least for the earlier books in the series), especially the Republic of Haven.
The Vorkosigan Saga is one of my favorite science fiction series of all time, not just because of Bujold’s wonderful insights into human nature, but because of all of the exciting intrigue and twists and turns. Most people’s favorite part about these books is the charisma, charm, and intelligence of Miles Vorkosigan, the series’ primary antagonist, but I actually think that Shards of Honor is the best place to start. It introduces Miles’s parents and shows how the unlikely couple got together, with a great deal of adventure thrown into the mix.
When Cordelia Naismith and her survey crew are attacked by a renegade group from Barrayar, she is taken prisoner by Aral Vorkosigan, commander of the Barrayan ship that has been taken over by an ambitious and ruthless crew member. Aral and Cordelia s
Shards of Honor and Barrayar form a duology within the wider Vorkosigan Saga, and starting with them both is the best way to become acquainted with the wider series universe and with the origins of Miles Vorkosigan. All of the later books refer back to events that happen in Barrayar, and one of the core conflicts of the novel is the struggle between the conservative isolationists who don’t want to integrate with the rest of the galaxy, and the liberal reformists who do. The political intrigue is extremely well done, and the adventure is superb.
Sick of combat and betrayal, Cordelia Vorkosigan is ready to settle down to a quiet life. But when the Emperor dies, her husband Aral becomes guardian of the infant heir to the imperial throne of Barrayar and the target of high-tech assassins in a dy
Deep in the Far Outworlds, a derelict space station holds the bones of a long-dead people—and a beautiful young woman locked in cryofreeze. When the star-wandering brothers Isaac and Aaron Deltana find the sleeping girl, they soon realize they're her only hope for rescue. With no way to revive her, they set a course for the New Pleiades. After a series of brutal civil wars, the Gaian Empire has turned its sights outward. A frontier war is on the verge of breaking out, and the brothers are about to be caught in the middle of it.
They both harbor a secret. Somewhere in the Outworlds is another derelict station—one that they used to call home. That secret will either bind them together or draw them apart.
Americans love their Constitution. In seventeen-year-old Liberty Bell’s era it has become a myth. Centuries after the Great Blackout obliterates the world's digitized information, America's history is forgotten. Only confused legends remain, written in "The Americana," a book depicting a golden age where famous Americans from different eras existed together.
Raised on stories from The Americana, Liberty Bell joins secret agent Antonio Ice on a quest for her country. But in the Old Forest, forgotten technologies are reawakening. Figures such as Albert Einstein, Harriet Tubman, and Thomas Jefferson are coming to life. Will the American continent return to the freedom…
