Space Opera Fans discussion

Quite a few space opera stories involve pirates. What’s one of your favorites? I’ll start us off with Sassinak by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon.

Sassinak is one of my favorite books.
Many, many pirates in Born of Legend by Sherrilyn Kenyon.

edit: If privateers count Elizabeth Moon Vatta's War series.

There's one book in the Honor Harrington series in which Honor and her team spend a lot of time fighting pirates in Silesia. I think it's War of Honor, but I could be wrong.

Lots of pirates to fight in the series that starts with Take the Star Road by Peter Grant.

There’s pirates in The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz too.

One of my favorites is the Niven short story “Borderland of Sol”. The tech in the Known Space universe precludes space piracy... until someone figures out a way to do it. The pirate is Julian Forward who is clearly based on Robert L. Forward, the physicist who wrote Dragon's Egg.

The Ninth Circle in R.M. Meluch’s Tour of the Merrimack is all about space pirates.

Bonus: Mark Watney, aka The Martian, is *technically* a space pirate. Arr! https://youtu.be/AkQQhhdwAOU

That’s cool about Mark Watney!

I’d class the bad guys in A Galaxy Unknown by Thomas DePrima as pirates, although they would also fit as organized crime. Typical pirates don’t work in such large numbers.

Neil R. Jones' novel The Citadel in Space, part of his Durna Rangue series, features prates. Interestingly the pirates citadel is Earth.

I know it's not yet finished but Sweep of the Blade by Ilona Andrews has pirates as major plot element. Since the pirates are some of the alien vampires readers have been referring to them as vampirates.

Published in 1962 Raiders from the Rings by Alan E. Nourse. The Raiders/pirates are the good guys. Descendants of those who manned the heavily armed orbital space stations and who refused the orders to bombard enemy countries on earth. Instead they banded together and are exiled. To survive they raid earth and earth spaceships.

When I was reading futuristic romance, I enjoyed The Skypirate.

Oh no. This thread will so much to by TBR pile... :)

Kind of sort of, the "Tales of the Ketty Jay" quartet by Chris Wooding.

Pretty much a Steampunk take on "Firefly"/"Serenity", and just as fun.

I've recently read Alastair Reynold's Revenger, which has a lot of space pirate tropes: ships with solar sails, buried treasure, etc. A lot of reviewers have taken it to be YA, but I'm not so sure as it's quite gruesome in places. There's already a sequel on the way.

Steph wrote: "A lot of reviewers have taken it to be YA, but I'm not so sure as it's quite gruesome in places. ..."

YA can be gruesome. I think YA is more about the characters' ages, and maybe the writing level, than it is the content.

This one is fun and would count as pirates: Two Bottles of Wine with a War God by Blaze Ward. Scout ship is disabled far behind enemy lines and has to limp home, but doesn’t have enough food, etc to make it. Turns pirate, which is tricky due to having very little in the way of ship to ship weapons because it’s a scout ship.

CORRECTION:
Amazon apparently delivered the wrong book. What I’ve been reading matches the description of Queen Anne's Revenge, and doesn’t match what I had purchased. QAR is due out next month.

Since this is the theme for February's BOTM, some of the books above should be posted in that thread. It's a bit thin at the moment.