Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and a Deepness in the Sky are both excellent. It’s one of the very, very few sci-fi novels where the hero is a computer programmer.
David Edelstein’s Multireal is another novel featuring a computer programmer. I wouldn’t consider it space opera, since, umm, there’s no space action, but it’s a good read.
Third on Peter F. Hammilton, Nights Dawn. Also his Void trilogy, which is still waiting for the third part though. Another opera recommendation could be Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos. Also by Simmons are Ilium and Olympos, that has strong ties to Homer and Shakespeare.
I am currently reading Neal Asher. Both the Polity (Agent Cormac) and the Spatterjay series. And am enjoying them quite a bit.
I’d also throw out a recommend for Jack McDevitt, specifically The Engines of God which has a premise similar to Mass Effect. What I appreciated about McDevitt’s work is that the characters were still recognizably human. Which may seem like an odd thing to say but I find a lot of hard SF spends so much time extrapolating on various nano/cyber/organic “upgrades” to people that they just come off as bizarre and alien.
If you really want to get a feel for the (sub)genre, I’d recommend David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Space Opera Renaissance, which is a giant anthology of spopera. It starts out with stuff from the 1920s, and traces the genre forward over time, giving you an introduction to most of the major figures in the field, from fancy literary people like Delany to trashy milSF people like David Weber.
If you read that book, you’ll know a lot more about space opera than you did before, and you’ll probably have 6-12 authors whose stuff you want to read a lot more of.
I see people have already mentioned Hamilton and Simmons. I’d add Alastair Reynolds (starting with “Revelation Space”) or Sean McMullen (“Souls in the Great Machine”).
Triggercut’s OP sounds like he might want to avoid anything too “Hard” (used in the “Hard SF” sense) and I think Reynolds qualifies under that banner.
Doesn’t look like David Brin has been mentioned, but I really like his Uplift books. They inspired some of the ideas in Mass Effect so you might find these a natural extension of your interest in the game.
The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith is as operatic and as epic as you’d want from a book. Then again, I loved the entire Dune series (1-6), so YMMV.
Light and fluffy and definitely not literature, but very space opera and tons of fun is the Deathstalker series. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure, but I loved them. Looks like it’s not on the Kindle, though :(
I was going to suggest the David Brin Uplift series too, since it was clearly one of the primary inspirations for Mass Effect, but someone else already did. If you do go for those, I would honestly just skip the first book (Sundiver), and maybe go back to it later. I think it was written much earlier than the others, it’s really not as good, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the main story arc of the series.
Lots of good suggestions in here. Anyone know of any of these being particularly well done in audiobook format? I tend to “read” mostly by audio during commutes these days, and it’s hard to find reviews specifically for the audio versions.
I know you’re asking for reading, but I’ll still recommend Seasons 4 thru 7 of Deep Space Nine. The nicest thing I can say about it is it avoids a lot of the things I dislike about modern Trek and kicked some serious ass.
My favorites have already been mentioned, but maybe you’re choosing books by votes, so I’d like to echo the recommendations of Banks and Vinge; in my opinion, both write enjoyable, exciting novels with interesting premises, compelling characters, and amazing settings. Brin’s Uplift series was also really good (although I haven’t read that in a long time). Lord of Light is amazingly awesome, but I think it’s only borderline science fiction (although everyone should read it anyway).
I agree with almost everything in krazykrok’s post, too.
Also, if you’re choosing books by vote, let me vote against Ringworld (which was good for the first 2/3 or so, then not, and the sequels to which were in my opinion terrible), Snowcrash, and “Souls in the Great Machine” (which is one of the worst books I have ever finished reading).
I would not recommend Hamilton, especially for someone new the genre. It is filled with pseudo-techy stuff and frankly I just found parts of it pretty dry. There is interesting stuff in there and ultimately I enjoyed them, but the books so long the awesomeness is kinda diluted.
A few random Space Opera books I liked, maybe I’ll tune the recommendations later with more info:
Samuel R. Delany: Babel-17, Nova – 1960s space opera that feels amazingly modern.
Stross: Singularity Sky – brings the singularity to space opera genre.
Vinge: Fire Upon the Deep, or maybe skip to the more Opera-y “Deepness in the sky”
Iain M Banks is good across the board.
Forever War is great for going old-school.
Edit: Can’t believe I forgot the Miles Vorkosigan books. That’s super light, more like Star Wars than most of the books in the thread, but GREAT stuff. Top of the list. If you read them chronologically, the very first book (Cordelias’s Honor) is one of the weakest, just keep going.
Has nobody mentioned C.J. Cherryh yet?
Oh, and I recommend buying the Honor Harrington (first one is On Basilisk Station) books one at a time and reading them until it becomes a chore and you don’t want to finish the book. This will happen at some point in the middle of the series. They do not get better. You can stop there. But they’re pretty decent until that point.
When someone says “Space Opera”, the first thing that pops into my head is the Lensmen books. Not sure how that works as an introduction to the genre, though! Fairly light reading with a very “lolphysics” attitude.
The way I’m approaching the question for recommendations is: all space opera is science fiction, but all science fiction (even if it involves galaxy-spanning empires and lots of space travel) is not space opera. I don’t really have a good way to explain the difference, other than space opera is epic-y. To me, a lot of recommendations in this thread lack that quality, despite being very excellent.
From a different direction, Donaldson’s Gap books are a good suggestion, since they are a retelling of Wagner. I liked the series, but I also recognize it can be a brutal read and not for everyone.
The greatest space operas are from E.E. “Doc” Smith, both the Lensman series and the Skylark series. They are great because each book has the protagonists dealing with the most powerful beings ever encountered, and using the most powerful weapons ever invented, until the next book where we find the previous book’s enemies were chump mooks for the real enemies, and the egghead guy comes up with new most powerful weapons in the universe (or the protagonist explores his lens in new ways and discovers even greater powers.
I kind of like the Skylark series more, because they keep rebuilding their spaceship.
I wouldn’t recommend the Lensman series to any modern reader new to the genre. It will make flat characters in other books look pretty deep, though.
I don’t have any books to add to the recommendations, but lately I’ve discovered the Atomic Rockets website, which I think will appeal to any fan of science fiction.
Actually, the Lensman books were also the same things that popped into my head when I saw the thread title, but I tend to agree that it’s hard to suggest them as good candidates for starting out your sci-fi reading pastime. It’s more of interest if you read a lot of great stuff and want to see how things got started.
I personally absolutely love these books as an artifact of pre-Star Wars and Trek fiction. If you do decide to read them, just bear in mind that they are very much products of their time. Not just in terms of the science, which I actually thought was pretty forward-thinking considering they were written in the '40s, but rather in the characters and their ways of thinking. I love that in one of the books a character comes back from a few hard weeks of infiltrating an enemy’s operation and can’t wait for a good steak and a smoke. There’s a very ‘Now see here, you alien troublemaker! I’m going to give you such a walloping!’ feel about all this that I find very amusing, but your mileage will most definitely vary with your patience for that kind of thing.
Lots of good recommendations here. I would recommend starting with Ender’s Game and continue on, although the series gets radically different. Card eventually doubles back to the events in the first book in the next series.
Weber’s Honorverse is a fun, easy read. It’s worth pickup up the first book.
If you want to tempt your senses a bit more with a bit of ‘cyber pulp’, check out Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan.