A new ambassador arrives at the city of Teixcalaan, intent on investigating the sudden death of their predecessor. It’s a coming-of-age tale rooted in African culture, which is continued in two other novellas.įor people looking for full-blown novels, there is Arkady Martine’s “A Memory Called Empire” (2019). Like “Dune,” “Binti” has a young protagonist traveling from one distant corner of the galaxy to another, while undergoing a great personal transformation. Therefore, I’m not going big, but small, and recommending “Binti” (2015), a novella by Nnedi Okorafor. Although the obvious recommendation is to plow through the many volumes of the Dune series itself, newbies are sometimes fearful of being thrown into the deep end of the pool (the six Dune books penned by Frank Herbert span some 900,000 words). Silvia: Because of the success of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” adaptation, many people have been asking me for books that resemble the movie. Let’s talk about some of our favorites in this action-packed genre. “Doc” Smith and Edmond “The World Wrecker” Hamilton were dreaming up sweeping space adventures. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” may seem like the most epic of these epics, but before him, writers such as E.E. Science fiction writers (and readers) seem to never get enough of big spaceships, big galactic empires or giant worms.

Binti/Dune Photo: Tordotcom/Tor - handout, HandoutĪh, the space opera! That “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn,” as science fiction author Wilson Tucker memorably put it when he coined the term in 1941.

Great space opera books