brjun

A few weeks back I asked folks on Bluesky to share their favorite space opera. I have been working on my Space Opera Reading Challenge, slowly. Very slowly. 2026 is a collecting phase, perhaps. But I love adding books to my "used books to keep an eye out for" list and I'm building an excellent collection of mass market paperbacks while they last (rest well, weary traveler). This thread also helped remind me of titles I own in ebook. My ebook collection is incredibly disorganized and spread across multiple hard drives, but after I went through this list I was able to pull out eleven digital books!

While I love text-based micro-blogging, after losing Twitter I'm a little shy about trusting it long term. I do trust Dreamwidth, though, so here is a collection of all the books people shared with me. When people mentioned series, I included the first book. If folks dropped a specific title in the series, I also included that alongside. I haven't read many of these books/authors, so cannot speak to the quality of every work! I've only read 12/76, because I came to space opera from cartoons/film/video games/YA SF instead of adult SF.

One of the most interesting things that crops up is what people categorize as "space opera". This list may be annoying if you're a stickler. I'm pretty liberal with the category; if I really want to drill down, I use the term coffeeandink shared with me ages ago, planetary romance. Of course, given the rise of romantasy, using the term "romance" to mean "adventure" is archaic enough not to be useful anymore. Ah, the sands of time! The only two I didn't put in the list, but still wanted to mention because I think they are more planetary romance (lol) than space opera: The Pern series by Anne McCaffrey and the Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. Per the reccer on the last one: just pretend they're in space. :D

All links go to bookshop.org if I could find a book/ebook option, bn.com otherwise, and some are blank because I couldn't find anything on those two. If you know of a place to purchase the books online in a physical/digital format, hit me up. Support an author today!

( To the stars! )