Here are 51 books that The Misfit Soldier fans have personally recommended if you like
The Misfit Soldier.
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I’ve been reading and enjoying science fiction since, as a kid, I rode my bicycle to the local library to read everything they had. That’s given me a broad exposure to the field from the Golden Age classics to new stuff hot off the presses. I’ve had four science fiction novels published, and in all of them I’ve used personal experiences to create as realistic a world as possible. I’ve also focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – that combination makes for better stories. I’ll leave the superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – they’ve got the budget to Blow Stuff Up Real Good!
I’m also a personal friend of Jim C. Hines, but we became friends because I was a fan of his work.
This book is the first of a trilogy (which is different than a never-ending series) and takes a new, different, and funny spin on the zombie apocalypse.
Earth was hit by a plague that zombie-fied those humans it didn’t kill. Then the aliens came and cured some humans, who had to join their space fleet. Mostly as janitors and other menial laborers. Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos goes from head janitor to captain of the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish. She can barely fly the ship, but now must fight it.
Definitely a case where an ordinary person gets put in an extraordinary situation.
The Krakau came to invite Earth into an alliance of sentient species, only to find that plague had turned humanity into shambling, near-unstoppable animals. A century later a bioweapon wipes out the Krakau command crew and reverts the rest of the humans to their feral state - only Marion 'Mops' Adamopoulos and her Shipboard Hygiene and Sanitation team on board the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish are left with their minds intact. They stumble onto a conspiracy born from the truth of what happened on Earth all those years ago.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’m a woman in a technology field dominated by men, a person with both mental and physical problems, and I’ve studied a dozen different martial arts. I’m a mean shot with a bow and love to hurl axes and spears. None of these things are contradictory. They’re just different aspects of me. Real people don’t fit in boxes and neither should good characters. My world is filled with my Hispanic grandkids, my bi daughter, my gay foster brother, my friends and family and people I love that don’t fit the Captain Awesome stereotype. Remember that we, too, can be heroes.
My mother has a service dog, and I’ve inherited a disability or two. The heroine in The Spare Man didn’t let her dog or her physical limitations stop her. She even used them to her advantage when she could.
I also loved how the book was an old-school Nick and Nora style murder mystery told in the far future on a space cruise ship. The author mixed those genres like she was mixing a tasty cocktail.
It was glorious fun from first page to last. And like all the stories on my list, it showed how much a hero can shine, no matter what gender or lack of gender she is, no matter how big or how small, what sort of personality or capability she has. It might be more of a mark of courage for a hero to find a friend than storm a castle, but that’s okay because…
Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal blends her no-nonsense approach to life in space with her talent for creating glittering high-society in this stylish SF mystery, The Spare Man.
Tesla Crane, a brilliant inventor and an heiress, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between the Moon and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and the festering chowderheads who run security have the audacity to arrest her spouse. Armed with banter, martinis and her small service dog, Tesla is determined to solve the crime so that the…
I’ve been reading and enjoying science fiction since, as a kid, I rode my bicycle to the local library to read everything they had. That’s given me a broad exposure to the field from the Golden Age classics to new stuff hot off the presses. I’ve had four science fiction novels published, and in all of them I’ve used personal experiences to create as realistic a world as possible. I’ve also focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – that combination makes for better stories. I’ll leave the superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – they’ve got the budget to Blow Stuff Up Real Good!
We’ve all read and seen stories where the old hero comes out of retirement to save the day one last time.
But what if the “hero” really wasn’t a hero, but rather the product of somebody’s marketing department? That’s the premise of this book.
Captain Dash Drake is famous, but fame has not brought fortune. When the evil invaders he “defeated” the last time come back, he’s ready to give up. His latest trainee, girl genius Kenzie Washington, thinks her hero will save the day. Watching the two of them misunderstand each other was amusing. Also standalone.
(You should detect a pattern on my list – I’m not fond of never-ending series.)
Kenzie Washington, fourteen-year-old girl genius, signs up for a two-week tour as a cadet on the spaceship of her idol, Captain Dash Drake. Too bad Dash, who once saved the galaxy from the evil Forgers, is a broke loser and much less than meets the eye. But when an intergalactic evil appears and launches an attack, Dash, Kenzie, and the ship’s crew escape, making them the next target. On the run and low on gas, Dash and Kenzie encounter cannibal space-pirates, catastrophic equipment failure, and a cyborg who’s kind of a jerk. Kenzie is determined to discover the bad guys’…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I’ve been reading and enjoying science fiction since, as a kid, I rode my bicycle to the local library to read everything they had. That’s given me a broad exposure to the field from the Golden Age classics to new stuff hot off the presses. I’ve had four science fiction novels published, and in all of them I’ve used personal experiences to create as realistic a world as possible. I’ve also focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – that combination makes for better stories. I’ll leave the superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – they’ve got the budget to Blow Stuff Up Real Good!
Fergus Ferguson is an ordinary man who just happens to be good at one thing – finding stuff. So he becomes an intergalactic repo man, and when the book starts he’s been tasked with finding a stolen starship, as one does.
He’s also found himself wrapped up in a civil war and a possible alien invasion.
This book is a little darker than the others on the list, in that Fergus has a lot of personal baggage to deal with, the people behind the civil war aren’t nice, and it’s really hard to figure out what the aliens want. But the darkness is leavened by Fergus’s humor and strong moral code.
It’s also book one of a (very nicely tied-up) trilogy.
From Hugo Award-winning debut author Suzanne Palmer comes an action-packed sci-fi caper starring Fergus Ferguson, interstellar repo man and professional finder
Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.
His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia's Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He'll slip in, decode the ship's compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.
Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a backwater deep space colony called…
I was introduced to the paranormal and unknown by my father. He was open to all possibilities. I loved being shocked, awed, and traumatized by the depths of dystopia and the heights of Utopian Imagination! I think, because we all live somewhere in between, flowing up and down as life experiences us, riding us ever onward!
I love not knowing anything about a book and finding myself turning from page to page, ever more excited to be a part of the adventure.
This alternate end of life leaves me wondering, why not? Though I look forward to a peaceful Galactic future, this one sure is fun (from the reader's perspective)!
Perfect for an entry-level sci-fi reader and the ideal addition to a veteran fan’s collection, John Scalzi's Old Man’s War will take audiences on a heart-stopping adventure into the far corners of the universe.
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.
The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.
I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction and by Biblical Scripture. That may seem dichotomous to some, but not to me. I have a passion for science and for Scripture because both bring understanding about our world from the microcosm to the macrocosm. My writings are a mixture of science and mystery with a science fiction feel and a Christian perspective. I like stories that show how truth arises even from the dark, confusing, and ambiguity of life to help one discover something about God they may not have considered before, and at the same time enjoy a fun, fast-paced, and exciting journey as they read.
This first came out just a few months prior to the first movie in 1977 and I still remember sitting in my dorm room reading every word with great expectation of how it would look in the coming movie. I had the same feeling reading it as I did when I first read Dune. A totally different story, but great world building.
Luke Skywalker dreamed of adventures out among the stars and alien worlds. But when he intercepted a message from a beautiful captive princess, he got more than he had bargained for—and that was how the adventure of his life began. . . .
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I always felt torn between the future and the past. I've been fascinated with space, aliens, and technology since I could remember. When I was too young to write, I could spend long hours drawing alien worlds, plants, and creatures. These hobbies from my childhood shaped my current passion for futuristic subjects, but the events from ancient and modern history still remain an important inspiration for my books. My country, Poland, experienced many wars, and history is a necessary subject at school. Historical books and documentaries let me discover and analyse how our society evolved and what mistakes did it make, so I can use this knowledge in my military sci-fi novels.
I’m too clumsy to play games, so I explored the Halo universe through books and animated series. Fans’ opinions on this book are quite divided, but I found it really interesting.
The characters have a deeper development here, and that lets me get personally involved in this story. All sides of the conflict have something to say here. I would recommend this novel to everyone who wants to explore the Halo universe because it really helped me understand the essential aspects of it: alien races, the basic conflicts and technology.
The New York Times bestseller—part of the expanded universe based on the award-winning video game series Halo!
2524. Harvest is a peaceful, prosperous farming colony on the very edge of human-controlled space. But humanity has unknowingly trespassed on holy ground—straying into the path of the aggressive, theocratic empire known as the Covenant. What begins as a chance encounter between an alien privateer and a human freighter soon catapults all of mankind into a struggle for its very existence.
But humanity is also currently locked in a bitter civil war of its own: the Insurrection. With resources strained to the breaking…
As an avid explorer having thrice traveled around the world, living and working in over 40 countries, my inspirations as so originally science fiction have found grounding. I looked to level my imagination in the real world and filtered out the impossible from the unnecessary on a path to utopia. Sharing our ideas, exposing misgivings too, all contribute to a shared realization of human potential. This is much of the reason for who I am as a founder of business platforms I designed to achieve things that I envisage as helpful, necessary, and constructive contributions to our world. Those software endeavours underway in 2022, and a longtime coming still, are Horoscorpio and De Democracy.
The biggest challenge to setting out a worldview within a universe is describing the detail about entities that imbues the feelings associated with living as those entities within it. Banks manages the sensation of living beings masterfully, where they are so alien and so abstract your pure imagination is put to the test. What would life be like for you as a jelly blob that flies around a gas giant? Pretty damn good thanks to Iain, and it's something I tackled in my book too with not nearly as much success it seems, at least yet.
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.
The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars.
Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of -…
I care about military SFF because it has the potential to contribute to a just and prosperous society by building bridges of understanding between military professionals and civilians. I've never served in the military, but I taught operations and strategy to US Army officers for six years, after which I went to Abu Dhabi as one of the founding faculty members of the UAE National Defense College. I wrote a book, How Militaries Learn, which is one of the few academic books on civil-military relations to use large-n statistical analysis. I’ve lived in ten countries and I speak four languages, including Arabic.
Mammay, who served multiple tours in Iraq, gives us a completely different kind of military SFF story. Planetsideis a murder mystery set in a (space) combat zone, but I love this book because Mammay captures the mannerisms and culture of the military so exquisitely. Every detail is spot on, matching everything I’ve experienced interacting with military officers and enlisted personnel from armed forces around the world. This book is also an absolute page-turner, and it comes together at the end in a way that readers will not expect. And readers need not worry—this murder mystery also has plenty of combat for warfare geeks. For readers that want a window into how the military really works (and not just how it fights), this story is perfect.
"Planetside is a smart and fast-paced blend of mystery and boots-in-the-dirt military SF that reads like a high-speed collision between Courage Under Fire and Heart of Darkness." - Marko Kloos, bestselling author of the Frontline series
A seasoned military officer uncovers a deadly conspiracy on a distant, war-torn planet...
War heroes aren't usually called out of semi-retirement and sent to the far reaches of the galaxy for a routine investigation. So when Colonel Carl Butler answers the call from an old and powerful friend, he knows it's something big-and he's not being told the whole story. A high councilor's son…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I have wanted to live on a spaceship since I was eight years old, watching reruns of Star Trek on the local UHF channel. At eight, I couldn’t have told you why. The Enterprise, by the twin miracles of sci-fi tech and TV budget, has the same gravity, air, and people (mostly) we have right here on Earth. Later, I came to understand the appeal: on the Enterprise, the only true enemy is space itself, unfeeling and impersonal in its hostility. The only hate in space is what we bring with us, and the silent, empty gulfs between worlds remind us that we can choose to leave it behind.
AI has been coming for my day job for a while now, so I was honestly conflicted when I heard that the talented Megan E. O'Keefe wrote a book about a rogue machine intelligence controlling a deserted spaceship. However, the first few chapters of this spooky, thoughtful, riveting novel made me think again. After finishing… well, I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s just say the themes rang very, very true to someone on the sharp end of the AI revolution.
Storytelling like this embodies the best of science fiction: using a futuristic setting to explore the issues most relevant to the present. That’s why I’m a science fiction fan, and it’s why I adore this book.
NOMINATED FOR THE PHILIP K. DICK AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL * Dazzling space battles, intergalactic politics, and rogue AI collide in Velocity Weapon, the first book in this epic space opera trilogy by award-winning author Megan O'Keefe. Sanda and Biran Greeve were siblings destined for greatness. A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction. However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda loses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding…
