Everything by Brin, Herbert, Simmons, PF Hamilton, Clarke, Asimov, Alastair Reynolds, SR Donaldson (Gap series – has he done any other science fiction?), James Hogan, Banks, Pohl, Niven, Niven-Pournelle (but not all of Pournelle)… uh, I’m sure there’s more.
Making my way through Stephen Baxter as we speak (just read Moonseed, now going to start Time Ships in the near future.) Greg Bear never did much for me, nor has Egan (though I’ll probably throw them in the stack in my next visit to Half-Priced Books.) I’ve also tackled Chalker’s Well of Souls books, making it through 4-5 of them before boredom set in.
Doesn’t matter to me how “hard” the science is, or how recent. I prefer tales of interstellar civilizations - it’s the rare novel that’s set in a solar system that I like (the exceptions to this rule are Michael Flynn’s Firestar series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books.) But don’t let that deter you from making a suggestion if you think the book is worth a quick write-up/link.
Elizabeth Moon’s novels; primarily interstellar merchant and/or war novels. Also Anne McCaffrey’s Ship novels, but they probably take a while to ramp up to full space opera level stuff.
I would recommend Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. It’s made up of two pairs of books. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion tell one story. Endymion and The Rise of Endymion occur much later and tell a different, but closely related, story.
Weber does a lot of military stuff, right? I’ve had the impression he’s a bit like Tom Clancy in space - a fair amount of words dedicated to weapons systems and military strategy.
Is this a fair assessment of the Harrington books?
I like Cherryh’s stuff. The most consistently spacey and operatic of her space operas are likely the Chanur novels, probably followed by the “Company Wars” period of the Alliance-Union universe.
The Foreigner are mostly pretty good as well, but with a few exceptions more ground-bound and less spacey. Also a couple are pretty weak transition novels where much to everybody’s annoyance next to nothing happens. It’s pretty operatic though ;).
Do you have a Kindle or a Kindle app? There’s a lot of space opera science fiction available for download on Kindle for very low prices. A lot of it is horrible, but then so is a lot of everything and at least it’s cheap.
Here are a few from a writer you might like:
Another very funny parody of the genre is Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. Suffice it to say they develop an interstellar drive by irradiating cheese.
Harrison is the king of sci-fi parody and comedy, IMO. Another of his series worth a read is The Stainless Steel Rat.
Keith Laumer’s Retief series is another good choice. Retief is an intergalactic diplomat surrounded by a department of dunces.
Cordwainer Smith has wonderful stuff utterly like anybody else. His most approachable is probably Norstrilia.
How about Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, a reasonably quick read for a war that spans centuries?
Philip Jose Farmer penned a fantastic opening to a series on River World, called To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Be warned, however, that the series just gets worse and worse, to the point where I wondered Farmer was playing some kind of elaborate joke to jerk around his fans.
Julian May’s Saga of the Pliocene Exiles. Great character-driven sci-fi-on-the-edge-of-fantasy about an alien race and a bunch of human time travellers wrestling for control of Earth six million years in the past.
(there are also some prequel books concerning modern day Earth rebellion against a Galactic civilisation - they’re even more space-opera, but sadly occupy a similar position in her fiction to the Star Wars prequels in Lucas’s)
Only one mention of Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith? He’s arguably THE author of Space Opera, with his Lensmen series and the Skylark series. A lot of people used to trace their love of SF and its “Sense of Wonder” to Smuith’s books. If you read them though, don’t read Triplanetary first – it gives away the game.
detop’s mention of Edmond Hamilton is spot-on, as he created many of the conventions of Space Opera, but it goes far beyond the works listed there. Read his Interstellar Patrol novels (Crashing Suns, The Star Stealers, the Comet DRivers, etc.) his Star Wolf series (made into an anime series), his Captain Future series (recently republished in hardcover. That’s the cover of Captain Future #1 you see on Leonard and Sheldon’s wall in Big Bang Theory). Hamilton went on to write for DC comics, and recycled siome of his plots for Superman and other books.
Jack Williamson’s Legion of Space series is definitely Space Opera (and probably inspired the comic book Green Lantern Corps) – The Legion of Space, The Cometeers, One Against the Legion.
Honor Harrington is Horatio Hornblower in space, if that helps give you an idea of what it’s like.
And I’ll enthusiastically join in the EE “Doc” Smith love. True, his stuff hasn’t aged well - it REALLY hasn’t aged well - but that’s half the fun. I mean, come on, who can’t love a book where the spaceship navigator whips out his slide rule? I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read them.
