An Orc at College

I’ve recommended this Liam Lawson series before. I love me some good xenoanthropology, and my favorite thing about this series is the “fish out of water”/”Tarzan in New York” bits where the Orc main character has to figure out all the weird cultural stuff humans (and other races) do.

Well, Book 8 is out, Trorm’s family is coming to visit, and the xenoanthropology spills out onto the front lawn in the form of fistfights and flaming maces, much to the horror of the hand-wringing and probably slightly racist HOA. Mmm mmm! Good stuff!

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Entangled Fates

A near future, proto-cyberpunk novel. As in, the main character is, through circumstances beyond his control, the first guy with a quantum linked AI in his brain. It’s kind of like he’s got “The Machine” from Person of Interest riding shotgun, only instead of being an enigmatic and vaguely creepy superintelligence, his machine decides it likes the human experience and adopts very anthropomorphic (feminine) qualities right off the bat. Corporations, governments, and organized crime antagonize, and eventually a bunch of ex-military female bodyguards are hired because they blend in better than burly dudes in suits and sunglasses. Yes, it’s a (slow burn) harem, obviously.

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Savage Ascension

There’s a lot of stories like this one, i.e., displaced hero makes good and grows his household and gets his revenge, partially by living well, but mostly with head chopping. I’m recommending this one because from among the similar books I’ve read recently, I thought this one stood out. I immediately bought the second book when I finished the first, which is a pretty good gauge of a series I think. I have a lot of orphaned Book #1’s in my library. This one is like, Isekai-lite. Instead of being from another world, the MC is a “Savage” from the north, forcibly taken to the “civilized” city where he proves that being a skilled hunter is advantageous in slave arena battles. So, it’s kind of a bummer at first, but then he finds out that if he wins, he gets to pick a wife from an assembly of female combatants, and the ruling class here has a way to combat a blight of infertility sweeping the land, so the MC is like, “I guess I’ll pick up a wife or two before I get my revenge on everyone.” So, yeah. As books of this nature go, I thought it was one of the better ones.

The Lost Fleet

This series is a little different from most of my recommendations. It’s more akin to the early Honor Harrington books, which I quite liked, for their technical fleet battles. (I’m as surprised as anyone I enjoy that stuff.)

The hook of this series is; Guy wakes up from 100 years in cryosleep to discover 1) The war he was fighting is still going on, 2) Everyone thinks he’s some mythical super-tactician cause he fought in a famous, desperate battle before jumping in his pod. 3) He kind of is, because now, after 100 years of constant war, so many people have died that advanced fleet tactics have been lost as the war chewed up all the old captains and admirals, and most warfare has devolved into “charge forward and hit them harder than they hit you.”

Something I like about this series is that it recognizes that space is stupidly huge, and when a ship that is 10 light minutes away from you does something, it takes ten minutes for you to know about it. Fleet battles held at .1 lightspeed still take hours and hours when fleets start off in distances measured in AU’s.