The Quiet War

For some reason, the New Space Opera seems to have been particularly successful with British writers. Just look at names like Banks and Reynolds, Hamilton and Baxter, not to mention Ken MacLeod and Gwyneth Jones, and Paul McAuley is another who has made some stunning contributions to the genre. Again, any of a number of his books could have merited a place on this list, but we've gone for the Quiet War sequence. The quartet, which consists of The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun, In the Mouth of the Whale and Evening's Empires, is reminiscent in a way of James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, in that it starts with conflict in the solar system and then expands out. Humans have expanded out into the solar system, but now there is a threat of war between Earth and the outer planets. Despite every effort to prevent conflict, fighting breaks out and Earth's superior power soon wins, but at great cost to its ecosphere, while the people of the outer planets retreat further from the sun and start to develop forms of posthumanity. The third novel suddenly shifts thousands of years into the future and out to the Fomalhaut system already colonised by refugees from the Quiet War, but they carry with them their propensity for war. And in the final volume, the focus returns to the solar system, even further in the future, where humanity's colonising efforts are slowly coming apart.   This is a powerful and moving series that gives perhaps the most vivid and convincing account to date of what it would actually be like to live on other moons and planets in our solar system.