What are the top book recommendations for 'tongue in cheek space opera'?

Owen Deathstalker, last of the infamous warrior Clan, always considered himself more of a writer than a fighter, preferring his history books to making any actual history with a sword. But books won't protect him from Her Imperial Majesty Lionstone X... Read more about Deathstalker

It gets dark out on the Rim. Strange planets and stranger people can be found on the edge of Empire, where habitable worlds are few and civilization grows thin. Beyond the Rim lies uncharted darkness,...

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In the 25th Century the British Space Empire faces the gathering menace of the evil ant-soldiers of the Ghast Empire hive, hell-bent on galactic domination and the extermination of all humanoid life. Isambard Smith is the square-jawed, courageous, an... Read more about Space Captain Smith

‘I gather there’s a problem, Smith,’ said Khan. He was a big, slow-moving man whose mouth and chins all hung downwards, giving him a sad appearance. He looked like a walrus who had swapped his tusks f...

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It's an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur's best friend has just announced that he's an alien.

After that, thing... Read more about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off ...

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A human diplomat creates an interstellar incident when he kills an alien diplomat in a most . . . unusual . . . way. To avoid war, Earth's government must find an equally unusual object: a type of sheep ("The Android's Dream"), used in the alien race... Read more about The Android's Dream

Moeller nodded absentmindedly at his assistant, who placed the schedule of today’s negotiations in front of him, and shifted again in his chair. The tissue surrounding the apparatus itched, but there’...

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'His spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction' Mail on Sunday

NAMED AS ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 MOST INSPIRING NOVELS

The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat ... Read more about The Colour of Magic

FIRE ROARED through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork. Where it licked the Wizards’ Quarter it burned blue and green and was even laced with strange sparks of the eighth color, octarine; where its o...

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A survival story for the 21st century and the international bestseller behind the major film from Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain.

I'm stranded on Mars.

I have no way to communicate with Earth.

I'm in a habitat designed to last... Read more about The Martian

For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark W...

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Harry Potter has no idea how famous he is. That's because he's being raised by his miserable aunt and uncle who are terrified Harry will learn that he's really a wizard, just as his parents were. But everything changes when Harry is summoned to atten... Read more about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or...

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Published in 1997, Neil Gaiman's darkly hypnotic first novel, Neverwhere, heralded the arrival of a major talent and became a touchstone of urban fantasy.

It is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinar... Read more about Neverwhere

SHE HAD BEEN RUNNING for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels. She was hungry, and exhausted, and more tired than a body could stand, and each successive door was...

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John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and alien races... Read more about Old Man's War

Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two. She's buried in Harris Creek Cemetery, not more than a mile down the road from where I live and where we raised our family. Getting her into th...

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2019 HUGO AWARD FINALIST, BEST NOVEL

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision in bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente's science fiction spectacle, where sentient races compete for glory in a galactic musical c... Read more about Space Opera

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was bor...

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