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Something similar to Foundation series or The Collapsing Empire. If anyone can recommend something similar (theme) I'd appreciate it.

 Knight wrote:
Something similar to Foundation series or The Collapsing Empire. If anyone can recommend something similar (theme) I'd appreciate it.

Dread Empire's Fall is a fun trilogy with an old space opera feel and modern prose style. The first book is The Praxis. The Empire's motto is something like, "Everything worth knowing is known."

The Mote in God's Eye is set in a Second Empire rising from the ashes type of setting, although it's mostly about the freaky aliens.

The Lost Fleet series is a space combat series about 100 years into a war that everyone's losing.

If the theme you are most interested in is life in the wake of collapse of empire, there are a lot of great ones that blur the line with fantasy, like Tales of the Dying Earth, Gene Wolfe's similar series, and Viriconium. Even the Dark tTower series fits, although it is far more in the fantasy side.

The Amtrak series might be worth trying to find.

Chung Ko series by David Wingrove is pretty epic and lots of interesting characters and twists.

Chung Kuo is primarily set 200 years in the future in mile-high, continent-spanning cities made of a super-plastic called 'ice'. Housing a global population of 40 billion, the cities are divided into 300 levels and success and prestige is measured by how far above the ground one lives. Some – in the Above – live in great comfort. Others – in the Lowers – live in squalor, whilst at the bottom of the pile is 'Below the Net', a place where the criminal element is exiled and left to rot. Beneath the cities lie the ruins of old Earth – the Clay – a lightless, stygian hell in which, astonishingly, humans still exist. These divisions are known as 'the world of levels'.

In addition to the world of levels, there are the great meat-animal pens and sprawling, vast plantations to feed the population. There is also activity beyond Earth. The ruling classes – who base their rule on the customs and fashions of imperial China – maintain traditional palaces and courts both on Earth and in geostationary orbit. There are also Martian research bases and the outer colonies, with their mining planets.

At the very heart of Chung Kuo is the 'War of Two Directions' — a struggle for the destiny of Mankind and the clash of two different ideologies. For the planet's hereditary rulers, the T'angs, the goal is stability and security, at the expense of individual freedoms if necessary, while a commercially orientated faction desires change and the uncharted challenge of the new — even though loosening constraints on an over-populated planet could be lethal. Political tensions between the two factions lead to assassination, biological and nano-technological terrorism, and ultimately to war and the outright destruction of whole cities.

The story is told through the eyes of a wide variety of characters from all levels of society: Triad bosses and assassins, emperors and artists, courtesans and soldiers, scientists and thieves, terrorists and princes. By the end of the series the dramatis personae total several hundred characters — most of them dead by that point in the storyline.

Sounds interesting, how many books does the story play out over?

 AndrewC wrote:
Sounds interesting, how many books does the story play out over?

I read the eight book version and really enjoyed it

although apparently he is re-doing it as twenty (!)

The Safehold series, by David Weber is somewhere between alternative history and science fiction. All of humanity was wiped out several centuries ago, except for one colony. This colony is restricted to pre-electric technology to avoid drawing the wrath of the aliens that destroyed humanity last time. But they're still out there- so they left a fail safe to remind humanity what it had lost, and what it was capable of. A robot body inhabited by a ghost that died before humanity left attempts to unify the world and reintroduce the technology necessary to fight the aliens.

It's really good, and absolutely immense. 9 books and counting.

What about Larry Nirven's Ringworld.

An old civilisation built a giant ring orbiting a star, a misfit team of alien creatures goes to investigate.

I like certain impilcations within the story, such as the collapse of advanced civilisatoins.

Some stuff I read and did enjoy:

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein
Armor by John Steakley
Ender's Game (series) by Orson Scott Card
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore (yeah, it's a comic, but imo it's one of the best dystopian/SF stories there is)
Do Androids dream of electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Dystopian)

You can never go wrong with the books by Neal Asher, His books are always solid and paints a good picture of the universe

Is it like Foundation? I don't really know, but I liked Foundation and I like this:

Neverness, by David Zindell
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/nevern.htm

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neverness-David-Zindell-ebook/dp/B06XBCLBBP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"An epic masterwork of science fiction, Neverness is a stand-alone novel from one of the most important talents in the genre.

The universe of Neverness is intriguingly complex and filled with extraordinary beings. There are the Alaloi, whose genes have ‘backmutated’ so that they look like Neanderthals… the Order of Pilots, which reworks the laws of time and physics to slingshot its members through dense regions of ‘thickspace’… the Solid State Entity, a nebula-sized brain made up of moon-sized biocomputers…

Against this backdrop stands Mallory Ringer, the headstrong novitiate of the Order of Pilots, who, against all odds, navigates a maze of interspatial passageways to penetrate the Solid State Entity. There he makes a stunning discovery. A discovery that could unlock the secret of immortality hidden among the Alaloi."

The paperback is over 600 pages, so it should last a good while.

This is a short story in the same setting here:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/shanidar.htm

Thanks for the replies.

No love for the Uplift books? T
Very Space Opera, and good fun to read.

Niven's Known Space is also very entertaining (and contains a lot more than just the Ringworld stories).

Yeah, might as well try the classics.

Space opera? Bring on Iain M. Banks, especially Excession

Really long-term plots - try the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

Bran Dawri wrote:
No love for the Uplift books? T
Very Space Opera, and good fun to read.

Niven's Known Space is also very entertaining (and contains a lot more than just the Ringworld stories).

Uplift is good, especially the chapters from the Galactics' POVs. However, I would recommend starting with Uplift War as it's the most accessible and then moving in to Startide Rising.

Niven's short stories are really good but his Known Space novels have not aged well at all in my opinion. Ringworld was the best one that I read, but nowadays the Really Big Thing novelty just isn't there and the characters are pretty flat and even the far more interesting Good Luck Gene subplot has been explored more successfully since then.


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 Graphite wrote:
Space opera? Bring on Iain M. Banks, especially Excession

Really long-term plots - try the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

Excess ion is good.

If we are moving away from the crumbling empires theme, I'd recommend Peter F Hamilton's Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained duology solely due to the quality of the antagonist. The villainous alien/s is (are?) an instant classic

 Mr Morden wrote:

 AndrewC wrote:
Sounds interesting, how many books does the story play out over?

I read the eight book version and really enjoyed it

although apparently he is re-doing it as twenty (!)

8. That's a shame, I'm a bit burned out by Fire & Ice and still haven't completed Robert Jordans Wheel of Time. (I cant get past the first 100 pages on Memory of Light.) May have to give it a miss.

Thanks though, it sounded interesting.

Cheers

Andrew

Hanskrampf wrote:Some stuff I read and did enjoy:

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Seconded!

But make sure to read the last two books in the series - ENDYMION and THE RISE OF ENDYMION!

The first two books are very good, and the last two are even better!

Trondheim wrote:You can never go wrong with the books by Neal Asher, His books are always solid and paints a good picture of the universe

Absolutely this!

Start with GRIDLINKED and then realize there are a lot more books to follow, all awesome!

His books are all very good, especially the ones set in the 'Polity" universe...

While we're discussing sci fi written by left-wing Sots, you could also look at Ken McLeod's work:
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/ken-macleod/

There's also Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, if you want big space opera. And no-one's yet mentioned Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep.

Second on the Lost Fleet series, if you like your space combat to have good detail on how it goes down and why one side comes out on top beyond "they had better ships" this is an excellent series.

 Graphite wrote:
Space opera? Bring on Iain M. Banks, especially Excession

Really long-term plots - try the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

Both of these x1000.

The Revelation Space books by Alastair Reynolds are also great, and if the idea of blow-your-mind "deep time" stories appeals his standalone novel House of Suns is brilliant.

BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Niven's short stories are really good but his Known Space novels have not aged well at all in my opinion. Ringworld was the best one that I read, but nowadays the Really Big Thing novelty just isn't there and the characters are pretty flat and even the far more interesting Good Luck Gene subplot has been explored more successfully since then.

If we are moving away from the crumbling empires theme, I'd recommend Peter F Hamilton's Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained duology solely due to the quality of the antagonist. The villainous alien/s is (are?) an instant classic

That's true for more classic science fiction authors, Heinlein chief among them. Most of Known Space is short stories IIRC. Although Protector holds up pretty well IMO, and serves as a good intro to Ringworld, which I find works best when you're already familiar with the setting.

I couldn't get through Hamilton's first novel. It meandered too much without getting anywhere IMO.

If you like more philosophical scifi, Neal Stephenson's Anathem is very good, and he writes some decent more traditional scifi as well (Snow Crash, Seveneves) well worth the price of entry

The Ender's Game series got progressively weirder with each installment, but it was interesting. Especially in dealing with the effects of time dilation.

I've picked the Lost Fleet. If I'd describe it, it'd be a light blend between Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda and Battlestar Galactice. It's been enjoyable reading.

I like the LOST FLEET series, but it does end up getting very "same-y" by the middle books.

Ends well though, and sets off in an interesting direction too...