Recommend me some books please!

I've been reading Sci Fi for a looong time , I can recommend more than a few "galactic empire" books:

Peter F. Hamilton
almost all of his books (the one's I've read) seem to deal with Galactic Empires

Series: The Reality Dysfunction (really excellent read)
Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained
Fallen Dragon

Series: The Damned by Alan Dean Foster
(A Call to Arms, The False Mirror, Spoils of War)

Christopher B. Rowley: War for Eternity, The Black Ship, and Starhammer

Jack L. Chalker's Well of Souls series

Classics: Asimov's classic Federation series, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, Frank Herbert's Dune (series)

I'll add any more I think of, these are my favorites.

Hmm...

Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein, was the first thing that popped into my head. I'd also recommend Timothy Zahn's Thrawn and Conquerors trilogies, since his books are well-written, fairly fast-paced, and the big battles in his stories are just the right size to "feel" big without becoming too impersonal to be exciting.

If you care more about scope than actual quality, you can try John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata series. While nobody will ever accuse him of being a good writer, his tendency to get carried away means that battles can get REAL big REAL fast.

Starship Troopers rules! The second movie was a disgrace, and you should NEVER watch it.

I was going to recommend that and Dune, but you've already done that for me popcorn. Thanks for stealing my thunder! lol

I also have an affinity for galactic struggles, i'll have to check some of those books out myself

P.S. Its Galactic CIVILIZATIONS: Dark Avatar, not Empires. I decided to correct you before you get chewed out by an irrate forum-goer.

Check out the "Hourus Heresy" books series based on the Warhammer 40k universe. Epic Space opera on a mytholigical scale. Primarchs, power armour, warp demons and Dreadnoughts. 'nuff said.

WWW Link

While the books aren't spectacular, I recently read the Halo trilogy (and am now reading Ghosts of Onyx) and they are pretty darn good, not many epic space battles, but they are fairly fast reads and fun to boot.

I have always been a fan of the Battletech line of books. They are set in the same universe as the Mechwarrior games. Has, in my opinion, a great story line that runs through many authors and lots of books (I especially like the Twilight of the Clans books and the Fed-Com civil war) though it lacks the 'galactic struggle' that you are after. Also, may be hard to decide where to start reading them, as they tend to build off of each other.

Hm, can't edit my earlier, so:

its Asimov's Foundation series, not Federation, solly

Another great book is David Brin's The Uplift War. There's others in that series, including Startide Rising, but they're not nearly as good. One of the newly-uplifted species in the book are chimps, and they're fun .

More classics: Larry Niven's "Known Space" books. There's a lot of 'em. Alan Dean Foster's version of that includes the Flinx series, and his civilizations are called the Commonwealth.

If you like hi-tech Sci Fi Space Opera, probably my top pick is Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series. I think its the best I've ever seen in that genre, they're really killer reads.

Depends on what you want for "large" battles. But the David Weber "Honor Harrington" series starts at the prelude of a war between 2 star nations and the battle in the newest book was very serious.

He also wrote an older series starting with Mutiny Moon which I liked.

You might also like Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, e.g. Excession or The Player of Games. He doesn't always spend a lot of time on detailing large-scale battles, but he's always got a very big picture in mind.

For interstellar warfare try these series,
By David Weber and Steve White:
Insurrection
Crusade
In Death Ground
The Shiva Option

Also Legion of the Damned And the follow on in the same series by William K. Deitz
I gave my teenager a couple books out of this series and he now has purchased all of them.

There was two movies?

The book is much better than the first movie. The sequel is unwatchable for me, but schlock tolerance varies widely--I can't watch Babylon 5, but I can stomach Stargate SG-1.

If you want a whole different kind of bad guys--bad guys that make most of the other sci-fi bad guys look kind of timid and whimpy--go with Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series.

To get it started off right, you might as well begin with his prequel to all the others, Bersker Prime. You might not view humanity quite so unsympathetically after you read some of those books.

StarHammer is an oldie but a goody.

David Brin's original Uplift works were great--StarTide Rising (won a Hugo, I think) and The Uplift War both are amazing, although as the storyline advances, the subsequent books aren't quite as good.

Asimov's Foundation series is viewed by many as the best science fiction series ever written, although it's more about personal narratives within the struggle of huge powers, and there are virtually no fleet battles.

Another great read for a bit more action is Vernor Vinge--A Fire on the Deep and its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, are both amazing reads with a major epic feel to them. Only limited fleet-to-fleet combat scenes, but well developed and VERY suspenseful. And these feature other, chillingly different kinds of bad guys as well...

Thanks for all the suggestions! Going to check them out. Will make playing GC-DA even more fun!

Varies indeed. I never liked Stargate and found it much more "schlocky" than Bab5. To me, however, schlock implies camp, but Webster's declares it to mean "shoddy, of low quality or value".

One series that I watched had, to my mind, minimal "schlock", but was so dour and depressing that I didn't like it much - Space Above and Beyond.

I freely admit that schlock can be an eye-of-the-beholder thing and depends on the show elements that most often catch your attention. I have a friend who abandons a show pretty much the first time he spots a major continuity or plot logic violation. I tend to be forgiving about that stuff, to a point, but balk hard at regular awkward dialog and often develop serious aversions to actors like Bruce Box-whatsis.

Camp is indeed a whole 'nother kettle of beans, stinky to some, tasty to others. Despite how wasteful ADV is when they compile a series on DVD (10 discs for 22 45 minute episodes? Come on!), I'm starting to get into Farscape. That's dark and campy.

The topic is good sci fi books, people. Which movies "suck" and why "my tv show is better than your tv show" never goes anywhere good.

I'm not a mod, just someone who wants to hear from everyone about good literary space opera!

Bingjack, I didn't mean to begin a threadjacking here and I sometimes want to kill my TV so I'll read more.

Here's an attempt at better behavior:

Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns series
Brian Herbert and Anderson's neo-Dune books (e.g. Butlerian Jihad and Machine Crusade)

Both sets are leavened with (weak, IMO) character stuff but the grand scale war story parts are OK.