This is open to indie too–there’s a lot more great indie work out there than people talk about.
I think for me, I’ve really loved Gideon the Ninth. It’s such a FUN book, and I think it’s the first science fiction book I’ve encountered that’s also fantasy but also set in “our future”.
(Star Wars doesn’t count. It’s in a galaxy far, far away after all.)
The two sequels are great too. The most recent one, Nona the Ninth, kinda put to rest my fears that the author couldn’t write a gentler, kinder viewpoint or world. (The first two books are kinda grimdark in some ways. Like–everything’s shit then we all die, then our corpses get raised from the dead and used in necromancer fights. Nona shows us a more hopeful world.)
You know, I’ve heard “LitRPG” has become a thing in indie circles, but I’ve never read it before.
Would you consider this a good example of that subgenre as a whole?
Yes and no. Like I said I went into this series almost blind as to what it was. I thought I had discovered this whole new generation of literature (litrpg) I could dive into.
But alas, there are so many absolutey horrible books out there in the litrpg world. Dungeon crawler Carl is really the only one I could recommend. I really hate to poop on anyone’s parade who’s into it, but that’s how I feel. It’s still a youngish thing, so I keep an eye on new series. But so far nada.
Like I said before, the audio book here is the way to go here.