8 books like Star Wars to read while you wait for The Mandalorian season 3

When war of stars When it first hit theaters in 1977, it was clear to some science fiction fans that George Lucas had looked far and wide for inspiration to build his world. The film comes from books and comics, as well as Japanese samurai thrillers and war films.

As a result, the bigger one war of stars Franchise is a jumble of genres that are all fused together. It is set in a huge, mythical space universe that we saw with great space opera worlds like Frank Herbert’s dune or Isaac Asimovs Foundation, endowmentthat span epic distances and time periods. But then there is the dirty western aspect of the world that defines The Mandalorian, the brutal war stories we’ve seen The Clone Warsor the heist movie we saw with Ron Howard solo. Looking at the expanded universe, there are even more experiments with homages to pulp (as in Matthew Stovers Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor) to weird cyberpunk (Barbara Hamblys Children of the jedi

With The Mandalorian In the second season of Disney Plus, I reached for books that reminded me of that big, dark world that is Star Wars, where spaceships run from port to port, where there is a big, bad empire to resist and experience adventure can be had.

Image: Saga Press

I feel like the cover of Mike Brooks’ debut novel Dark run captures everything I love about this science fiction style: a spaceship hovers near a huge space station, accompanied by a smaller ship that looks like a starfighter. The story has everything I wanted, too, and follows the crew of the Keiko picking up a mysterious cargo to be transported through space.

Captain Icabode Drift is used to these types of jobs. So when asked to pick up a package and deliver it to Earth, no questions are asked. Just business as usual. As you’d expect, problems do arise, and from the start, Brooks brings plenty of action to the story as we meet Drift and his diverse crew and when they deal with mercenaries, gangsters, and other residents in a variety of galactic situations.

Image: DAW

It’s impossible to think of a space opera without thinking of CJ Cherryh’s Alliance Union series. Kick off with Downbelow StationIt takes place in a universe in which, thanks to commercial space companies, humanity has grown far beyond the earth and lives not only on alien worlds, but also on space stations and interstellar freighters.

Many of these stations have detached themselves from Earth after a massive interstellar war, and as that conflict ends, Signy Mallory, Captain of the Norway, is working to move a fleet of ships from two damaged stations to Pell’s World and its station, Downbelow Station. But the war has already drained the station’s resources, and to make room for more space, its leaders are sending people to the surface of the planet where they encounter problems with the planet’s original inhabitants, the Hisa.

Image: Aspect

When humanity expands into space, their encounters with other aliens don’t always go well. In Karin Lowachee’s debut novel War childEarth wages war against an alien civilization known as striviiric-na, while also engaging in a criminal underworld that raids colonies and trades ships. When eight-year-old Jos Musey’s ship is attacked and his parents are killed, he is captured by a notorious pirate captain named Vincenzo Marcus Falcone, who wants to keep and train him as his successor.

If the station he is on is attacked and wounded, Jos is eventually captured by the Striviiric-Na and trained as an assassin who can infiltrate human systems and wreak havoc. Lowachee’s book and its sequels, Burndive and Cage bird Explore a truly fascinating universe where Jos and his colleagues exist, while also examining the high psychological costs of war and interstellar crime.

Image: Saga Press

What is One Way to Escape Student Loan Destruction? Hijack a space freighter and join a group of infamous pirates who were confiscated from a broken space station. That is RE Stearns’ premise Barbary stationwho have favourited Adda and her friend Iridian after a massive war in the solar system.

The system is now ruled by mega-corporations, and the gang of pirates the couple has gotten into have geared their spaceships for profit. There is one significant problem, however: the station they are hiding in is powered by an artificial intelligence that is deadly and keeps everyone on board trapped and barely alive. Adda is a researcher who has studied AIs and if she can convince them to let them go, they are home free.

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KB Wagers’ debut novel has a fun elevator seat: a rogue gunner named Hail Bristol discovers that she is suddenly the heiress of the massive Indian Empire. She was a member of the royal family who fled the Imperial Palace to pursue a career as a smuggler. But when her sisters are murdered, Bristol finds that she is next in line to take the throne.

Her mom sends two trackers to take her home, but home is the last place she wants to be. When she returns to the palace, she discovers that there is far more at stake than she thought: The people who murdered her sisters could also have been responsible for her father’s death years ago and that they may have come after her .

Image: Gate

In Martha Wells’ novella All systems redWe meet an expedition on a distant world that is under attack and which is saved by its SecUnit, a cyborg who calls itself Murderbot. The cyborg is secretly free and longs to leave humans under his protection. It doesn’t understanding People, but it would rather be alone watching hours of soap operas pulled from local data networks. After rescuing its fellow expedition members, it discovers that there is a deeper storyline that surrounds the planet and the expedition.

In the following volumes – Artificial state, rogue protocol, exit strategy, network effectand the one ahead Fleeting telemetry – Murderbot makes its own way into the larger universe, only to find that it must come to the rescue of different people as it jumps from station to station and from planet to planet. It’s a fun, snappy series of books that are set in a much larger world and contain many more stories.

Image: Aethon Books

In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s latest novel, artificial intelligence is tasked with monitoring a crew that has been sent to the surface of the planet Urmahon Beta to locate and rescue a UN spaceship that crashed decades ago. It’s a thankless job, and it doesn’t exactly have the best or smartest of jobs to do.

Things get complicated when the planet turns out to be not uninhabited as they thought before. There are massive, dangerous creatures that live on the surface and there is another dangerous crew that is after their crashed ship that they are grappling with. A bonus for those watching the audiobook version: FireflyNathan Fillion is the narrator.

Image: Spectra

Timothy Zahn is certainly known for his Star Wars novels, especially for creating the master tactician Grand Admiral Thrawn. Zahn came back in the 1990s after an already successful career as a science fiction writer with books like the franchise The black collar and cobra.

But if you’re looking for a Star Wars-esque romp through space, I’d recommend his stand-alone novel The Icarus Hunt. A smuggler named Jordan McKell and his alien partner Ixil are hired by a wealthy industrialist to bring a spaceship, the Icarus, to Earth via space and avoid an alien civilization that has an iron grip on interstellar trade. We have an experimental stardrive that humanity can thrive on. You are flying through the galaxy with many people on your heels. In the end, Zahn turns the story around with a stellar twist (which I won’t spoil here), leaving readers with an excellent adventure in a universe that feels so much bigger than what is contained in his only volume.