Ten authors pushing space opera forward

John Birmingham is the author of Emergence, Resistance, Ascendance, After America, Without Warning, Final Impact, Designated Targets, Weapons of Choice, and other novels, as well as Leviathan, which won the National Award for Nonfiction at Australia’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts, and the novella Stalin’s Hammer: Rome. He has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, and numerous other magazines.

Birmingham's newest novel is The Cruel Stars.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged ten authors shaking up space opera, including:

Empire of Silence by Chrisopher Ruocchio

There’s a peculiar derangement that comes over many SF writers, where they suddenly start trying to squeeze a lifetime’s worth of fantasy tropes into their narrative starships. (Seriously, Peter F. Hamilton, just build another Dyson sphere and fill it it full of hostile aliens. Enough already!) But Ruocchio could mash up genres at the Olympics and have the dais to himself. He wins gold silver and bronze for the brilliant Sun Eater series, a head spinning stew of speculative future history, retrofuturist fantasy, and utterly entrancing recursive loops back through all some of the oldest memes in the history of story telling, all made new by Hadrian Marlowe, his creator-destroyer of imaginary worlds. You will lose yourself in these books and stay happily lost again and again.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Empire of Silence.

The Page 69 Test: Empire of Silence.

--Marshal Zeringue