Top Picks

These are my military SciFi picks of 2017, and it’s a short list, because it’s built from what I’d actually written up by the end of the year. I’ve done this before, back when I ranked my Kindle Unlimited reads from worst to best, but a lot has changed since then. I’m not on the subscription any more, so most of these were bought with real money, which makes me a harder critic. If a book cost $6.50 and left me shrugging, I’m going to say so. That’s a different relationship to a book than the one you have when it’s free, and I think it shows in the reviews below. I’d rather tell you a book was a miss than let you spend your own money on a hunch. If you want the earlier round, my military SciFi picks of 2016 are where this started.

There’s a mix here. Two books I’d happily press into your hands, a Scalzi that surprised me, one that got a firm yes and no, and one I gave up on. I’ve also put in a few older books that I keep going back to, because a year’s reading never really starts from zero. Where a book is part of a longer series, I only cover the books I’d reviewed by the end of 2017, so don’t read anything into what’s missing. Think of it as a snapshot of my shelf on the last day of the year, and a fairly honest one. A couple of these made me want to stay up late, and a couple made me check how many pages were left.

The Warp Marines

If you want military SciFi, the Warp Marines are where I’d send you first. Decisively Engaged hooks you right from the beginning. Humanity gets bombed back to the stone age by aliens, with clean bombs that heat a globe of force until it’s hot enough to melt steel, and the survivors build a fleet and a Marine corps so frightening they end up called Warp Demons. There’s no slow build up like you get in Honor Harrington. This one gets down and dirty from the first chapter, and the action only gets more frantic as it goes. I had to reread it before starting the newest book, because it had been too long since I’d seen my favorite Warp Marine friends, and it held up on a second go. The first time round it’s the pace that grabs you, and the second time you start to notice how much groundwork is laid for everything that follows. The aliens are a little flat, and a plot thread that felt like a Boxer Rebellion bugged me, but neither of those slowed me down much.

The second book is No Price Too High, and it’s the one that proved the series wasn’t a fluke. I’ve been burnt too often by authors who write a great first book and then flag in the second, and I was wary going in. I needn’t have been. The canvas goes from a single city to an entire planet, the enemy is a Starfarer nation with technology as good as ours, and there’s finally some proper starship combat, which was one of my gripes about the first book. I gave it 8.8 out of 10 and pretty much inhaled it, and it’s the book that made the series move up my list. The combat is brutal and well described, and the weapons aren’t super weapons, just gradual improvements. I also liked that it explains why Battle Mechs aren’t in prevalent use, which is sad but probably very true.

Old favorites, and a Scalzi I didn’t expect

A few older books still sit at the top of my shelf. Old Man’s War is a staple I go back to every now and then, and it’s the book that introduced me to a 75 year old signing up for a young body and a war. Troy Rising is the series I keep rereading whenever I need a pick me up, with Maple Syrup wars, a battle station built out of an asteroid and humanity triumphant. Empire of Bones is the one I wish I’d read in time for my Kindle Unlimited list, because it’s tightly paced and the characters are real. I don’t count these as 2017 picks, but I’d feel strange if I didn’t mention them. They’re also the yardstick I hold every new book up against, so if you want to know why I’m harder on some of the 2017 books than others, that’s part of it.

Then there’s The Collapsing Empire. I loved Old Man’s War, not necessarily the whole series, but definitely Book 1, and I didn’t love Red Shirts, which I thought had a brilliant concept that wasn’t executed well. So I went into the new Interdependency series a bit nervous, and I came out of it really positive. It’s basically Scalzi’s Dune, with powerful houses fighting over power and resources, an Emperox who rules from a planet called Hub, and a network of one-directional wormholes called the Flow that all routes lead through. The characters are what set it apart, and I loved Kiva’s language and acerbic wit, plus Cardenia just charmed me. My one gripe is that the Interdependency itself wouldn’t work, since humans would try to become self-sufficient on a new planet as quickly as they could, but I’m willing to give it a pass for the story. It reminded me why I keep reading him, and it’s a strong start to a new series after a stretch where I’d been worried he was losing me. If you’ve only read the Old Man’s War books, this is a good way back in.

The one with a lucky hero

The Scorched Earth is by the author of Empire of Bones, so I bought it outright now that I’m off Kindle Unlimited, and the question is whether it was worth $6.50. Without being too wishy-washy, yes and no. The idea is that the Earth is about to be bombarded by high-intensity solar radiation that acts like an EMP, and seconds before it hits, a rogue nation attacks the US, the US shoots nukes back and the whole world is screwed. Our hero Tom is a gun nut and a successful author of post-apocalyptic fiction, which means he always knows the right thing to do and has the money to buy his way out of trouble.

That’s the problem. Tom’s lucky at a gun show with an ex-army sniper, a retired IDF guy who owns a gun shop and a doctor, and he always seems to know exactly what everyone else will do. He gets the shakes after killing his first looter, then everybody’s perfectly willing to gun down anyone in their way within half an hour of the bombs dropping, which pushes belief. But the idea’s interesting, even if it feels a bit rushed, and the action sequences are the standouts that make the book. I’ll pick up book 2, though I’d like a bit more realism to their struggles. The minutiae of the different guns is a bit boring, but what they can do is interesting, and the best scenes are the ones where the group has to fight its way home with nothing but what Moshe’s shop can supply.

The one I’d skip

I’ll be honest about the last one. I’ve read a few series that start out well and then get less good over several books, and Intergalactic Wizard Scout is one of them. Richard and his wise-ass battle suit Nickelo are interesting at first, and I liked it when the book jumped from SciFi to fantasy with an elf princess, goblins and a magical talisman. But the characters become caricatures, the genius kids introduced in the second book are annoying, and I’ve been struggling with what I think is the final book for weeks. Wizard Scouts are supposed to be super soldiers who can use magic like abilities, humanity’s only bastion in an increasingly hostile universe, and that’s a great idea, but over the course of the series the writing never moves past nothing to write home about. I like it when a character levels up and takes on harder challenges, and Richard just seems stuck.

Not everything about it is bad. The phase hounds were cool, I’ll give it that, though they end up so essential to the rest of the story that it takes some of the fun out. If you’ve got the stomach for a long series that loses its way, fine, but I’d put that time into one of the books above. The series runs through Wizard Defiant, Wizard Cadet, Wizard Scout and Wizard Omega, and the one thing I’d credit it for is some unexpected personal details about Richard and his family in the third book. Still, a handful of good scenes isn’t enough to carry four books when the lead stops growing.

Which of these 2017 reads would you put at the top of your own list? Tell me in the comments.

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.