I’ve been reading more kindle books, I’ve bought maybe 3 or 4 books in the last year.
So what have I been reading? ‘
To let you know what I like so you can see how you’d like my suggestions, I’d say that Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, SM Stirling , Eric Flint, David Drake, David Weber, Forstchen, John Ringo and, recently, Tom Kratman, BV Larson and Jack Campbell/John Hemry are my favorites in the sci-fi realm.
If you haven’t read the last two, check them out. BV Larson’s Swarm series is my favorite of his, Undying Mercenaries is pretty good too.
Campbell/Hemry’s series I like the best are The Lost Fleet, it gets bogged down in the second and third book of the second part of that series (due to the husband/wife stuff where the captain (wife) keeps giving the admiral (husband) a hard time on the bridge during operations), but overall it’s at least as good as Honor Harrington. I got pretty sick of Harrington by the 6th or 7th book and got back into it around book 10 or so. I skipped a few books in the middle of that when I last read it.
The other series of his that’s very good is Stark’s War. It’s a very good look at where we could be headed in a couple hundred years with a soldier class that doesn’t interact with civilians and everybody thinks that voting is a waste of time cuz all you do is trade one set of fuckheads for another (sound familiar?). It’s told from the POV of a sergeant.
I met Kratman when he co-authored a Posleen War book with Ringo, Yellow Eyes that’s fantastic, and his series that starts with A Desert Called Peace is very good. It’s about a future where the UN achieves their goal of getting rid of America…by getting people like me to leave Earth. Then they start to want to take over the new Earth but….meet some pushback so they get terrorists to start a war that starts with a zeppelin crashing into a tall skyscraper. It’s sorta….. familiar.
He’s the one who wrote my favorite definition of insanity/ definition of the Democratic party.
Where you do everything differently yet expect the same results.
On to the Kindle authors!
While I don’t think Taylor Anderson is primarily a kindle guy, that’s how I met him. His Destroyerman series is pretty darn good. It’s like a cross between Forstchen’s Lost Regiment series and Sliders.
There are a bunch of parallel universes that include the Earth but they developed differently. Some very similar, some very different.
The one they go to is very different, to the point of vastly different flora and fauna.
It’s a 10 or more book series and I read it all. It was a good week.
I’ve also read every book by PK Lentz, all 5 or 6 or so. His books also have the different universe thing going on, Layers he calls them.
They’re cheap, I just paid 99 cents to pre-order his next book, but very good. He’s obviously into ancient history. One book takes place in Asgard, another in ancient Greece. I first read it before reading Thucydides and I’m now re-reading his ancient Greece series (two books) and it’s funny how I understand it a lot more now. Our Hero is not in Thucydides, but many of the rest are.
I enjoyed his books as much as I’ve enjoyed just about any other author except maybe Heinlein, Niven and Pournelle (even though I wish Pournelle had finished his Janissaries series)
Glen Doucette is another author I like. His series about an immortal is up and down, but cheap and worth at least checking out. He’s not some superman/godlike guy, just some dude who was born tens of thousands of years ago and is still alive. He hasn’t been friends with Alexander the Great and Caesar and that kind of stuff, he just goes around, getting drunk and seeing what’s what. The first one is probably the best, but the rest are pretty good.
Marc Alan Edeilhet’s Stiger series is another pretty good one. As I recall, it takes place on another planet where they lost technology. Sorta like Stirling/Drake’s The General series (which is a great series), without the cool, riding dogs thing.
I’ve talked about it before, but Dennis Taylor’s We Are Legion. We Are Bob and the sequel, For We Are Many, is very good. A guy pays to have his head frozen and wakes up in the future but it’s not quite what he expected. You’ll want to be Bob.
Another series I like is Craig Alanson’s Expeditionary Force. It gets better as you go and it started pretty good.
I don’t want to write about authors I’ve read that suck, since the books usually only cost a buck or three, I’ll let you figure that out but I will touch on one.
The Eden Plague starts out….okay, but quickly gets bad. Let’s Kill Off Half Of Humanity For Some Stupid Reason bad. Let’s make the good guys into fucking vicious assholes bad. Our Hero is a moron who always does the wrong thing, which wrong thing usually results in millions of deaths. But his peeps are LOYAL!!!!!! Geez. I’d put a bullet in his head by the end of the first book because, while I don’t like most people, that doesn’t mean I want you all dead.
Well, that’s that. Your turn. Any e-book authors you like?
doubleplusundead 
$5-a-pop eBooks are a shameless addiction of mine. They only need to be popcorn-movie good for me to be happy with the purchase but there are plenty of them out there that well exceed that low bar. Judging by your list, the first author I’d point you at is C.J. Carella and his Warp Marines series–the first is Decisively Engaged. His wit is razor sharp and his prose high octane. I devoured every book in the series so far during my last vacation and am impatient for the arrival of the next book.
Since over the first half a dozen authors you listed were some of my favorites – Try some of Roger Zelazny’s stuff if you haven’t already.
Also, see if you can find any of Dean Ing’s older stuff. I haven’t seen any of his Ted Quantrill series (Wild Country, Systemic Shock, Single Combat) on Kindle though so you’d have to try and find the real paper I suppose.
Same problem with Zelazny, mostly it’s going to be dead tree reading if you can find it.
Amazon keeps suggesting CJ Carella to me but I haven’t tried him yet, thanks!
I read Zelazny and Dean Ing long ago, I didn’t list them because, while I liked them, they’re not among my favorites.
There’s a very strange guy that’s pretty interesting a hippy friend of mine turned me on to, Jack Vance.
He’s very weird but worth a read if you find his books in a used bookstore.
I see my list is heavy on military sci-fi, which is what I’ve been reading a lot of lately.
I should say that Eden Plague series is well written but the heroes were stupid people doing bad things Because It’s Necessary!
If he writes anything else I’ll check it out, but I just don’t want to read a book where I’m not rooting for anybody.
There’s a reason for that–his stuff is just drenched in the kind of panache that makes it a cut above even the better military sci-fi authors that I freely recommend like Evan Currie or Jay Allan. I actually found him because he was Moron recommended in one of their Sunday threads. I did my customary, “read the free bit and buy if I like it,” check but I didn’t even need to get through it before I knew it was a purchase. I’m happy to say that even four books in, there’s still no Scalzification present. I hate it when that shit happens.
Jay Allen was ok, Glynn Stewart was pretty good too. PK Lentz was better, he has flashes of that ‘panache’ in his books.
Scalzification. Good one.
Jack Vance was one of first authors I remember reading when I discovered modern fiction – my grandparents had 30’s collections of Kipling and Verne and Borroughs so I plowed through those, and Arabian Nights, slightly bowdlerized…. Once I found the newer fiction/fantasy I read everything I could find. I was just coming off Tolkien and Ballentine Books was publishing ‘fantasy’ authors when I discovered Vance if I recall correctly. I knew the fantasy/Sci-Fi section of the local bookstore well.
Dickson’s Dorsai novels were pretty good, though I’m dragging that from memory, I haven’t read any of his stuff for over 20 years and when I re-read Borroughs John Carter Mars stuff last year I discovered my tastes have changed with age.
The ‘harder’ realistic military/science stuff has always been high on my list. I stopped reading fiction for a while and have only started to get back into it in the last year.
Kindle has become like crack to me since they made the pc app available, but I’m cautious about starting on new authors.