It doesn’t mind humans, but it would rather be left alone to binge-watch hours of soap operas that it pulls from local data nets. The cyborg is secretly free, and yearns to leave the humans under its protection. In Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red, we meet an expedition on a distant world that finds itself under attack, and which is saved by their SecUnit, a cyborg that calls itself Murderbot. Image: Tor The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells

With The Mandalorian season 2 out on Disney Plus, I’ve found myself reaching for books that remind me of that big, gritty world that is Star Wars, where spaceships run from port to port, where there’s a big, evil Empire to resist, and adventure to be had. The sheer scale and size of the Star Wars franchise means that there’s something for everyone. Looking at the Expanded Universe, there are even more experiments, from pulp homages (as seen in Matthew Stover’s Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor) to weird cyberpunk (Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi), to straight-up military sci-fi (Michael A. But then there’s the dirty Western aspect of the world that defines The Mandalorian, the brutal war stories that we saw in The Clone Wars, or the heist film that we saw with Ron Howard’s Solo. It’s set in a massive, mythical space universe that we’ve seen with big space-opera worlds like that of Frank Herbert’s Dune or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, which span epic distances and time periods. The film pulled from books and comic books, as well as Japanese samurai thrillers and war films.Īs a result, the larger Star Wars franchise is a bit of a hodgepodge of genres, all blended together. When Star Wars first hit theaters back in 1977, it was clear to a number of science fiction fans that George Lucas had gone far and wide for inspiration to build his world.

Best space opera books 2020