Hacker News Books

"Live Free or Die" by John Ringo, and the rest of the "Troy Rising" series.

"People generally didn't buy something in grocery stores that was dinged, scratched or otherwise marred. They'd eat stuff that had so little nutrition that they might as well eat the box but woe-betide if the box was crushed."

-- John Ringo, "Live Free or Die"

Right now I'm doing my annual re-listen to John Ringo's "maple syrup trilogy" (next I'll do my annual re-listen of The Martian, narrated by R. C. Bray not Huwill Huwheaton) https://www.goodreads.com/series/51166-troy-rising

It's a really fun series, basically an alien race appears in the system and installs a gate to open up trade with the system. It has some really neat ideas in it and some good challenges they work through from fuel to interstellar war, with the primary character being your run of the mill guy with tech industry experience working in a rural community fighting his way to being fantastically wealthy and arguably the primary defender of human space.

Book 1: Live Free or Die:

>First Contact Was Friendly

>When aliens trundled a gate to other worlds into the solar system, the world reacted with awe, hope and fear. But the first aliens to come through, the Glatun, were peaceful traders and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

>Who Controls the Orbitals, Controls the World

They're a good read, but the narrator makes them quite a good listen. I've actually bought other author's entire series purely because Mark Boyett has narrated them.

Mark Boyett, R.C. Bray, and Luke Daniels are some great narrators and all do a lot of narration in the hard science fiction space. They make the audio versions of books far superior to reading it yourself, at last in my opinion.

Daemon and the sequel Freedom TM by Daniel Suarez are also a fun read. It uses near-future, or even at the time experimental tech, to weave a mostly believable near-future scenario.

Daemon:

>When the obituary of legendary computer game architect Matthew Sobol appears online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events that begins to unravel our interconnected world. This daemon reads news headlines, recruits human followers, and orders assassinations. With Sobol’s secrets buried with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed, it’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to stop a self-replicating virtual killer before it achieves its ultimate purpose - one that goes far beyond anything Sebeck could have imagined....