SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

I realized today as I was reading that I wish I could read a military sci-fi novel starring a fighter pilot with all the excitement of dogfights and the like that would entail. Anything out there?

I don't have any ideas but I'm very, very interested in what everyone else offers up :)

I asked this exact question about a year and a half ago. Turns out there's not much out there, but you can mine that thread.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I highly recommend the short story "Damage." You can read it for free here: http://www.tor.com/2017/05/17/damage/

The first Mageworlds novel The Price of the Stars is more Millennium Falcon than starfighter, but it's definitely in the ballpark. Very similar to Star Wars. (Timothy Zahn seems to have borrowed some things from this series.)

I ended up reading some fighter pilot memoirs and technothrillers to get my fix, which didn't work.

Speaking of Star Wars, there are a whole slew of X-Wing books, but I haven't read any of them. I may have to revisit that since I quite enjoyed Rogue One, which rekindled my interest in SW.

The TV Tropes entry: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...

You could try the Odyssey One series by Evan Currie which is a fun military SF story with a former WWIII fighter pilot as the MC.

Thanks for the other tread link. I find it kind of shocking there aren't more options out there. I think the one explanation offered- that it would have to break or ignore physics- makes sense but I'd still imagine enough people (like me) would be interested in the story to allow for those things.

As an aspiring author, I can't help but lock my lips. Perhaps a series is in order! ;). But seriously I'm very surprised by this and want to read some. Maybe I'll try my hand at it too.

Another series that has this type of fighter ship in space is Earth Strike by Ian Douglas.

This isn't a recommendation (because I haven't read it) but Yukikaze is on my to-read list. From the reviews, though, it looks like it's not actually very action-focused.

The X-Wing series by Michael Stackpole is very good. He did a lot of interviews with fighter pilots and research to make that aspect of the series as authentic as possible.

Yukikaze was decent but not really what I am looking for more of. It was very introspective and, frankly, strange.

"Yukikaze" worked better as an anime, which I really liked. But books, hmm...I see the "X-wing" series is already up here (some of which are quite good, especially the 'wraith squadron' subseries) there's also a lot of them, so what else is there? "Ender's Game" only sort of half fits...

You could see if any of the books in the "Macross" series work - there's definitely sci-fi dogfighting involved.

I bought a used copy of R. M. Meluch's The Queen's Squadron from AbeBooks yesterday because it came up in a search of starfighter books. I've enjoyed her other books and it was only $4 with free shipping. Other stores have similar deals there.

I think her Tour of the Merrimack series is still going, so I'm not sure why her older books aren't still available.