I love Neal Asher’s books, found him a long time ago in one of those “year’s best” collections of short stories from the library (though the ones with fantasy and horror were always the best, I think I read every single collection for every year and found so many good writers that way.)
They are full of action, good characters and worlds and ideas, sweeping and huge settings. Feels almost more like watching a movie to read them.
Who among us likes these action packed stories?
I really love the Culture series.
I need to get off my butt and read them. I always keep getting distracted by something else though.
My favorites are distributed around, and I tend to read in publish order so I have to power through some of the slower ones. They’re insanely good, though.
To me many of the culture books start really slow/on the boring side but then they pick up and get really good. I really like how they often describe the culture not directly but through interaction with others.
The payoff at the end of some are so fucking epic. They’re probaly my favorite book series.
Publishing order is best with any series, barring Discworld. Authors learn more about their series as they write them, and going out of order as a reader sometimes gives you answers to mysteries before you were ever introduced to a mystery.
Both full Discworld readthroughs were publish order lol. The last go round included Shepherds Crown.
And discworld has so much going on it prolly only matters for individual series. I have a cat named Eskarina and I’m sure a lot of readers barely remember her.
Discworld is the one exception for me because early Pratchett is much weaker, and he bashes one of my OTHER favorite authors which makes me frowny. And he has coherant sub-series with their own little casts of characters and it’s easy to jump in with those. (I started with Guards! Guards! and the Night Watch and went forward/backwards from there.)
Everything else though I read publish order, though.
Try Malazan. Also you can message me for a library.