All of Nuttall’s stuff is great, and most of it fits the bill quite admirably.
I was just going to recommend the Vorkosigan books.
Glen Cook’s Starfishers Trilogy (Shadowline, Starfishers, and Star’s End) plus (in the same universe but earlier) Passage at Arms. There’s also The Dragon Never Sleeps.
I enjoyed the Into the Black series (so far…it’s up to book 4). There is also the Lost Fleet series, which is pretty classic scifi space opera. I haven’t enjoyed the second series so much, but the first one was pretty good. Classic space opera you might try the RCN/Daniel Leary series (the later books weren’t as good though not terrible…If Honor Harrington is H. Hornblower, then Daniel Leary is probably Jack Aubrey). There is a relatively new series out (only 2 books so far) that I think is really good by H. Paul Honsinger To Honor You Call Us that I think is worth looking into. Also the Star Force series is not terrible…some of the books were actually enjoyable, though it’s kind of an odd series.
I liked the cheesy The Helmsman Saga by Bill Baldwin. link to title list
I also liked the John Grimes Saga by Bertram Chandler.
-1 vote on that. All of the nano stuff is basically magic, not to mention the cryo engines, etc. It’s also a hopeless losing battle. I found “Pushing Ice” to be flawed but much less flawed than the Revelation Space books.
For big battles between fleets of starships, check out the Honor Harrington series books, created by David Weber. As the series goes on, the battles get bigger and bigger, and there is a fair amount of ‘plausible’ science thrown in with the fighting.
I was going to suggest him, including his David Falklyn stories.
Granted, the Bolo books are mostly about large land machines but several of the stories deal with bolos mounted to ships and involved in epic space battles. Great stuff.
And you’d probably like the Culture books. Not really Space Opera but a lot of the elements are there. Use of Weapons in particular has some battles.
Those are fun! Nicholas Van Rijn is a wonderfully Falstaffian character. Bigger than life (physically as well as dramatically,) deucedly clever, and with an “accent” of sorts that puts Hercule Poirot right to shame. A great combination of hard science fiction, economic theory, rollicking adventure, and blunt comedy.
In the books with Van Rijn, Falkayn is the “straight man.” In his own books and stories, he is a more conventional protagonist.
Both are good! Anderson was a genius.
(I got to meet him once at a convention. Charming man! Best manners of any pro sf writer ever!)
Cool!
Che using a blast cannon strapped to Adzel’s back in a rescue of Falklyn is one of my favorite scenes.
And yes, there is an Imperial Navy as well as the League’s private navy, rather like the Honorable East India Company’s Bombay Marine, and space battles.
To each their own–I liked them all. I agree that you are only going to get so far on the Mohs scale with space opera, but at least Reynolds mostly avoids things that outright contradict known physics. When the characters do try to break physical law… bad things happen to them (FTL experiments, cryoarithmetic engines, etc.). Even the nanotech is in a pretty degraded state.
I’d say the sublight, relativistic travel alone is enough to put the Reynolds books pretty far along the hard SF axis. Warp drives are “easy mode” for SF.
Yes, the sublight engines do make it potentially in the “hard SF” category. Except for the power source (in fact, all of the power sources are a bit mysterious). Oh and the messages from the future.
But it’s true that most of my dislike for the books is based on the characters. It’s pretty rare that I flat out drop a book before finishing it, but I couldn’t even skim Absolution Gap. I’d say Revelation Space is mostly worth reading, except that it gets you invested in a bleak and nasty universe in which I was actually rooting for the “bad” guys to wipe out humanity.
For space opera, try the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison.
IIRC the Stainless Steel Rat didn’t trade heavily in war and deep space battles. But for a hilarious parody of the early space operas featuring war and deep space battles, you can’t beat Harrison’sStar Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
Fairly hard, but not rigid per most SF purist’s preferences. Some space opera elements (like the various Man-Kzin wars).
I dunno. I just like Niven.
I just saw a new Joe Abercrombie in the book store today: Half a King. It’s the first of a new trilogy, “The Shattered Sea”.
Hmmm. Maybe James Schmitz’s Agent of Vega and Other Stories?
And the rest of the suggestions by everybody else in the thread =) However I popped in to mention that Baen Books has a free library and any of their ebooks can be sampled for at least a couple chapters online [and as I recall, everything they publish in solid form they also put out in ebook form.]