Hey Y’all. To promote my book and connect with audiences better, I’m going to be doing top X number posts leading up to April 10th when Armored Warrior Panzerter releases on Amazon. So to start, here are my top 10 Favorite SciFi settings.
10. Star Trek
10. Star Trek -Star Trek comes in the bottom purely because I only recently came to appreciate it. DS9 stands out as probably my favorite out of the franchise and it’s got a pretty loyal fandom. I mean, The Lower Decks happened and they’re still around.
9. Star Wars Legends
Yep, everything from Dark Empire, to the old Thrawn Trilogy, to the New Jedi order series. If there’s anything this continuity mastered it was using incomparable threats to overcome power scaling. So you beat the Emperor? Now deal with the best strategist the Empire ever had. Beat Thrawn? Now Palpatine is back, younger, stronger, and with a goatee of evil. Beat him again? Now aliens from outside the galaxy who are so cruel and genocidal the force cut them out are trying to take over. Beat the Vong? the war corrupted your nephew and exposed issues with the government, now he’s killed your son and leading a dark side army. Did his twin fight him to death? Abeloth happens. Not everything was grade A material, but a lot of it was memorable. Particularly….
8. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Is it cheating? Not really, it’s my countdown and this particular story straddles the line between cannon and Legends. For me and my brother, these two games set the gold standard for Scifi storytelling, let alone star wars stories. It managed an original story in a familiar setting and succeeded incredibly. Still waiting on the remaster though. And don’t confuse this for that High Republic nonsense.
7. The Renegade Star Universe
I came upon the series on kindle unlimited fairly recently. I’m still about halfway through the main series, but it’s twists and turns are nice. The concept of humanity expanding so far and so wide Earth became a myth is a fascinating one and I’m glad to see it play out.
6. Dragonlance
So super cheating, because it’s 97% a fantasy universe. Except the part where the planet was moved to a different solar system and it messed up the magic system. And the genetic experiment monsters that are the Draconians. So it tangentially counts. Definitely my favorite fantasy series, but against SciFi, it’s only six.
5. Battletech
I got into this via the xbox game mechassault, a game that lacked many of the franchise’s iconic mechs, the feudalism in space, or Space AT&T (if you know, you know). It did however feature the badass mercenaries known as Wolf’s Dragoons.
4. Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove
This whack series where aliens invade in the middle of WW2 managed to accomplish three things: got me back into reading when I’d stopped for a few years, introduced me to the awesome genre of Alternate history, and showed off a practical use for the Schwerer Gustav Railroad gun. It will always be special to me dispite its goofy premise.
3. HALO
In spite of what the games have become, it doesn’t change the fact me and my younger brother bonded over the Co-op play in Halo 2. Every time a new game was announced up through Halo 4, my brother and I got hyped every year.
2. Godzilla
The 8 year old version of me wouldn’t be able to shut up about all the new movies, books, comics and anime coming out about the King of Monsters. Granted, he couldn’t shut up about movies that were over thirty years old, and got made fun of a lot. In a way adult me is getting the best of both worlds with GvK being the blockbuster everyone’s talking about while the anime Godzilla: Singular Point is a love letter to the era of movies I loved as a kid.
1. Gundam
When Gundam Wing came to the states in the early 2000’s, along with the original series, 0083 Stardust Memory, and 08th MS Team, Tiny Tyler got hooked. I constantly asked my mom if she could buy me gundam stuff, and naturally, being a 26 year old woman in 2000, had no idea what the hell I was talking about. As I got older, I began to notice things that I’d missed for the cool robots as a kid, and I liked it more.
Well there you have it! Naturaly, each of these settings is going to have some influence on how i write as my personnel philosophy is to write stories I would enjoy. Armored Warrior Panzerter will be available on Amazon April 10, 2021.