I round up my military SciFi picks of 2016, drawing on what I’d reviewed on the blog by the end of that year: Flagship, Steel World, Warlords Invasion, the Slaver Wars books, Renegade and The Silver Ships. I also bring forward the earlier favorites I’d still hand to a friend, like the Saiph books, Steel Breach and Empire of Bones.
Flagship is the one I’d start with, Warlords Invasion is the one I devoured in a sitting, and the third Slaver Wars book is the one you can skip.
These are my military SciFi picks of 2016, built entirely from books I’d already written about on the blog by the end of the year. It isn’t a list of the genre’s classics, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s the stuff I actually picked up, mostly cheap or free, and whether I’d tell you to do the same. Last year I put together a Kindle Unlimited list ranked from worst to best, and this one works differently. It’s shorter, the order is more of a feeling than a score, and some of the books on it aren’t from a subscription at all.
If you’ve read anything else on here you know what I go for. I like big fleet battles, I like characters who can get things wrong, and I like technology that makes some kind of sense even when it’s made up. I also have very little patience for a book that hasn’t gone anywhere by chapter ten, which comes up a couple of times below. Some of these started slowly and earned it, and one just didn’t, so I’ll tell you which is which. There’s no need to read them all, and honestly you shouldn’t. I’m a sucker for the Master of Orion kind of story, the ones where whole fleets collide and you can feel the numbers, so you’ll see that bias show up more than once. If your taste runs toward lone heroes and duels, you’ll want to skim for the books where that’s true.
The one I’d start with
Flagship: A Captain’s Crucible is the book from this stretch I loved most, and my review opens with those exact words. What got me is that the science and the technology simply make sense. Ships use planets and other satellites for slingshot speed boosts instead of some magic sub-light drive, the bridge doesn’t have to look like the Enterprise because everything can be virtual, and the weapons are a simple extension of what we’ve got now. The marines are full of robots and cyborgs, and the book manages all of this with very little jargon.
The story’s a good one too. Captain Jonathan Dallas leads a small task force on a critical mission against the Sino Korean forces, until a research vessel under his command disappears and he finds a much more serious threat. Everyone above him thinks the ships that took it are just SK forces in a disguise they haven’t seen before, and Dallas knows better. It isn’t one of those massive fleet battle books that I’m so fond of, since the biggest fight has about half a dozen ships on each side, but it’s well portrayed. Dallas is believable and so are his motivations.
The other book I’d put near the top is Steel World, the first of the Undying Mercenaries. Earth gets contacted by the Galactics and told every planet has to supply one trade good nobody else can copy, and ours turns out to be mercenaries. I’d like to think humanity can offer more than soldiers, but the story’s gritty and engaging anyway, and it has a realism that reminds me of pulp SciFi. What makes it special is a machine that recreates a fallen mercenary as a new body with all the old memories, and the book gives that just the right amount of detail. James McGill goes from a callow youth to a man as he joins Legion Varus, and the dinosaurs rushing the wall made me feel like a tasty snack. I’d been close to giving up on the author after Swarm, so I’m really glad I didn’t.
Carried over from 2015
A few of the books I’d call my favorites predate this list, and I’d be shortchanging you if I left them off. The Saiph books, starting with Discovery of the Saiph, are still the series I’d tell you to pick up first, because the characters are real people who make mistakes. Steel Breach is the trench warfare one, and it takes the genre somewhere I didn’t expect. Space Carrier Avalon is what a legacy ship story looks like when somebody takes it seriously, with a captain who isn’t a broken down has-been.
There’s also the author I fell for with his first book. Empire of Bones has everything you could want in military SciFi and then some, with a super tight pace and characters who aren’t two dimensional. I’d have put it on my Kindle Unlimited list if I’d read it in time. The setup is a classic: the Terran Empire falls in a no holds barred rebellion that kills trillions, and the last Emperor’s son flees to a distant planet called Avalon, where his descendants settle. Its sequel Veil of Shadows didn’t surprise me as much, mostly because I knew what to expect by then, but I’d still call it a good, engaging read if you liked the Saiph books, even with the crew no closer to finding a way home and short a ship after rescuing a princess the Pale Ones turned into a superweapon. And if you want to see where my head was at, The Shiva Option is the book that gave me the Master of Orion itch I’m always trying to scratch.
Big battles and bigger numbers
Warlords Invasion is the closest thing to a fleet battle fix on the list. Humanity has an empire spanning tens of thousands of light years and trillions of souls, and it gets humbled almost at once by an invader with ships and weapons far in advance of its own. Small hunter-killers beat Dreadnoughts, and the climax has 5,000 human ships taking on about 2,000 of theirs, which sounds easy until you remember the aliens’ tech. I devoured it in one sitting, and I really don’t have a negative to point to. The characters are interesting, the enemy’s motives turn out to be more than they first look, and the pace is excellent. There are a few typos and the odd sentence that doesn’t make sense, and I’d still give it a go.
The Slaver Wars series is what you get when you cross Battlestar Galactica with Stargate. It begins as a standard military SciFi story much like the Saiph books and Avalon, then turns into a flight from a rampaging horde to a long lost sanctuary called Earth. Book two, Moon Wreck, takes you in a different direction altogether, with private industry finding the hulk of a destroyed ship from the Federation of Humanity, and the survivors of that first flight turn out to have been wiped out by a flu virus, à la War of the Worlds. Book three is the weakest, since the plot to take over the first human interstellar ship doesn’t make sense, and you could skip it. The fourth, First Strike, is where the real action starts, with plenty of space battles and humans giving both the Hocklyns and the AIs the finger. Overall it’s a good, fun read.
Slow starters worth the wait
My rule is that a book gets about a quarter before I start looking for the exit, and Renegade nearly used it up. It felt like plodding through the first half of the book, even with a galaxy spanning conspiracy in the opening chapters. Then it picked up dramatically, the two main characters took over the latter half, and the ship to ship and hand to hand combat were awesome. The Hack Saws, rogue AIs that every species in the galaxy attacks on sight, are a great touch. I wanted more of the battles it didn’t tell us about, and I almost wish it had been book four or five of the series.
At the other end of the scale is The Silver Ships, which doesn’t need to earn anything. It’s a cute, sweet story with an infallible hero, the smartest and strongest person in any room, and it’s engaging almost from the start. Don’t go in expecting amazing writing, new technology or big military battles, because you won’t find them. I’d hand it to someone who finds most military SciFi too grim.
The books I’m waiting on come from this list too. I’ll be picking up the next Slaver Wars book as soon as I can, since I want to see how humanity eventually kicks the Hocklyns and their overlords back to the center of the universe. I’d also read any sequel to Warlords Invasion in a heartbeat, as long as the author doesn’t hand humanity a hidden superweapon and lets them fight their way to parity instead. And I’m still hoping the Spiral Wars keep up the pace now that the action has started, because I’d really be disappointed if things slowed down again.