I only ever read Ender’s Game. Were any of the sequels worth it?
I agree with the suggestions so far, but would like to throw in the Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy that starts with “The Praxis”. I’m in the process of re-reading it right now, and it is quite good. However, I don’t really recommend the books after that trilogy. They’re ok, but not as solid.
I thought Speaker for the Dead was OK and Xenocide was terrible, but Fiendish Astronaut and I disagree. They are completely different than Ender’s Game, in terms of action, etc.
Rimrunners by C.J. Cherryh is a hard SF book you may like.
A tough and violent female marine, from an FTL warship that was on the losing side in a war, is stranded on a decaying space station. She joins the crew of a shady mercenary ship, fighting against her erstwhile comrades.
There’s a good section about the technical details of combat armor suits.
In the action-packed tradition of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers , David A. Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers , and her own bestselling Chanur series, C.J. Cherryh returns to the Hugo Award-winning setting of Downbelow Station and Merchanter’s Luck for hard-edged, tough-minded adventure beyond the lawless edge of interstellar culture. Here the line between space soldier and star pirate is as thin as a laser, and a lethal struggle for power can be as near as the officers’ deck.
In this world Yeager has hit bottom; she’s jobless, homeless, and starving on Thule, a nearly abandoned station in the by-passed Hinder Stars. Sleeping in toilets, killing to save her body, stealing to stay alive, she feels her hopes die… until the Loki docks. It’s a spook: a mercenary warship barely legitimated by Alliance documents as a free-lance bounty hunter and spy vessel - a ship whose captain has no qualms about signing on a “machinist” with no papers and a shady past, not to mention murder charges hanging over her head.
But escape from Thule is no refuge, for Loki is crewed by Bet Yeager’s sworn enemies. The spooks are hunting the remnant of the outlaw Earth Company fleet… fliers considered outlaws only because they lost a war… fliers from the fleet that Bet Yeager has loyally served her whole life. Now, trapped aboard a tin can in deep space, where a single wrong word might give her away, Yeager must seek and destroy her old comrades without arousing the suspicions of her crewmates.
From another review on Tor.com:
Rimrunners (1989) is a book that you can only read with your heart in your mouth. It’s the book that got the Locus review that encapsulates the experience of reading Cherryh “never a dull moment and rarely a safe one.”
Rimrunners keeps changing scale, there’s the people of the lowerdecks and then there are also the officers. There’s the war between the officers, with Bet and the others caught up in that, and then suddenly the wider war between the stars comes back to bite. It’s as tense and nail-biting as anything possibly could be.
When all is said and done, this is a character book. All the characters are great, and the best of them is Bet, going on doggedly trying. She herself is a rimrunner, taking her chances out on the rim, and so is NG, the engineer she befriends, and so of course is the Loki. It’s the story of someone who belongs nowhere finding a place to fit in, and someone who knows how to kill finding something worth protecting.
Hamilton is very good and I second the recommendation.
If somebody wants to check out Hamilton, I’d recommend Fallen Dragon. Unlike most of Hamilton’s work, it’s a stand-alone novel. No sense jumping in with one of his multi-volume series until you know if you like his work.
I consider Forever War, Starship Troopers, Old Man’s War, and Bill the Galactic Hero (Harry Harrison) to be a set of required reading for anyone getting into hard SF.
Others to consider include Armor (Steakley), the Altered Carbon series (Richard Morgan), and a bunch more that are at home on my bookshelf and I can’t remember atm.
Not that this isn’t a nicely diverse group to ask, but any of the SF forums will get you even more!
At the risk of hijacking a bit, if you like the whole gritty military interaction between soldiers stuff a-la Starship Troopers, Old Man’s War and Forever War, and aren’t as interested specifically in the science-fictional aspects, you might really like the “Black Company” series by Glen Cook. It’s fantasy, but not really swords and sorcerers exactly; it’s military fiction set in a mercenary unit in a fantasy world.
So if you’re more interested in the science-fiction parts, ignore the recommendation. But if you’re more into the military/soldiers interacting part, then it’s right up your alley.
Man, this is a fantastic thread! Thanks to everyone for helping me out here.
I used to get tons of reading in on my commute to work. Now that I’m working from home for months, and for months to come, I can barely finish a book before it has to go back to the e-library. That said, I will (slowly) work my way through as many of these as I can.
If military SF is your thing. check out the works of Christopher Nuttall. Available on Kindle Unlimited for free, and not all that expensive otherwise. They’ll never win a Hugo, but for filling a daily commute or something like that they’re great.
I love Hamilton but not sure he fits the OPs criteria.
If we expand this to just any really good sci-fi this will become a long thread. 
Yes. In my haste, I did exactly that. Thanks.
I have not read that. Would you recommend it? (really asking…I am jonesing for a good sci-fi series and I like almost all types of sci-fi…almost).
I enjoyed it quite a lot. So, yes definitely. This tread has me jonesing too. I get a lot of books from the paperbackswap website , so now i’m scrolling through there.
I feel a lot of Hamilton’s books have a war theme as well as a science fiction one.
Ian Douglas has written a shit ton of military sf that is fun to read.
I didn’t know Ian Douglas was a pseudonym.
Firestar series is in the broad category of “really good but not quite great”. (As is much of Flynn’s work). Have you read Kube-Mcdowell"s “Trigon Disunity” trilogy? While not as militaristic as “Forever War” it does stick closer to reality as regards relativistic effects of space travel which, to me, was one of the things that made FW work so well.