
The main character who will be taking you on the amazing journey that follows is called Paul Atreides and his whole life is about to change after he and his family are betrayed.
Space opera series#
The Dune series will have the pleasure of starting off our review of a few of the top space opera books out there and this book tells you an amazing adventure story about a character who lives on the planet called Arrakis. Make sure to check out our best space opera books list if you wish to find some of the top picks in this genre. This can include large and astonishing battles, space exploration filled with unexplainable and strange things, awesome tech, large ships, and so on. The Space Opera genre offers reading material about stories that are always set in space or at least a huge portion of the story goes on in outer space.

By the end, Zahn flips the story with an outstanding twist (which I won’t spoil here), and leaves readers with an excellent adventure in a universe that feels so much larger than its single volume contains.Space Opera is a thrilling genre to read about as it is among the favorite sub-genres of all science fiction lovers and enthusiasts. They jet across the galaxy with plenty of people on their heels. A smuggler named Jordan McKell and his alien partner Ixil are hired by a wealthy industrialist to take a starship, The Icarus, across space to Earth, and to evade an alien civilization that has an iron grip on interstellar trade: it turns out that they’ve got an experimental stardrive that could allow humanity to flourish. Zahn came to reboot the franchise back in the 1990s on the back of an already successful career as a science fiction author with books like The Blackcollar and Cobra.īut if you’re looking for a Star Wars-esque romp through space, I’d recommend his standalone novel The Icarus Hunt. Timothy Zahn is certainly well-known for his Star Wars novels, especially for creating the master tactician Grand Admiral Thrawn. Image: Spectra The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn It’s a fun, snarky series of books set in a much larger world with plenty of more stories left in it.

In the volumes that follow - Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, and the forthcoming Fugitive Telemetry - Murderbot begins to make its way out to the larger universe on its own, only to find that it has to come to the rescue of various humans as it jumps from station to station, and planet to planet. After it rescues its fellow expedition members, it discovers that there’s a deeper plot at play surrounding the planet and expedition. It doesn’t mind humans, but it would rather be left alone to binge-watch hours of soap operas that it pulls from local data nets. The cyborg is secretly free, and yearns to leave the humans under its protection. In Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red, we meet an expedition on a distant world that finds itself under attack, and which is saved by their SecUnit, a cyborg that calls itself Murderbot. Image: Tor The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells With The Mandalorian season 2 out on Disney Plus, I’ve found myself reaching for books that remind me of that big, gritty world that is Star Wars, where spaceships run from port to port, where there’s a big, evil Empire to resist, and adventure to be had.

The sheer scale and size of the Star Wars franchise means that there’s something for everyone. Looking at the Expanded Universe, there are even more experiments, from pulp homages (as seen in Matthew Stover’s Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor) to weird cyberpunk (Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi), to straight-up military sci-fi (Michael A. But then there’s the dirty Western aspect of the world that defines The Mandalorian, the brutal war stories that we saw in The Clone Wars, or the heist film that we saw with Ron Howard’s Solo. It’s set in a massive, mythical space universe that we’ve seen with big space-opera worlds like that of Frank Herbert’s Dune or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, which span epic distances and time periods. The film pulled from books and comic books, as well as Japanese samurai thrillers and war films.Īs a result, the larger Star Wars franchise is a bit of a hodgepodge of genres, all blended together. When Star Wars first hit theaters back in 1977, it was clear to a number of science fiction fans that George Lucas had gone far and wide for inspiration to build his world.
