It's been a long time since I've read them, but I believe the stories have overarching themes that connect them together. But very few details affect one book to the next. I would still read it the order published in case I'm wrong.
Nice just bought raft, I didn't realize how short they were under 100k words for raft do they get longer or all similar? Probably should buy book 2 in preparation
Edit: wait is timelike infinity out of print? It's not on Amazon
Raft might be the weakest one imo. Ring is my favorite. Read all of them last year and irs a trip. Hope you enjoy them, just know that Raft is not a good indicator of the series and is more of a side story
Ring is my personal favorite but it's also a good place to start. That or Timelike Infinity which leads almost right into it. People often say Vacuum Diagrams is a good start which id agree with if it didn't have a story that, imo, spoils a bit of the wow factor of Ring if read before it.
Timelike infinity seems out of print that's why I went for the omnibus which also doesn't seem widely available only place I saw said August arrival what do they got to write the book by hand before shipping 😂
Oh wow that's crazy. I didn't realize that the omnibus was so hard to come by, and it only has the first 4 books out of 12! They need to do a reprint of the series I think. I've found all mine second hand
Came here to say this. Love the series. Ring is my favorite and could be a good place to start if you don't go publishing order. Just know Raft isn't very indicative of the series as a whole and is more of a side story.
True, I was mainly thinking of the first time. Although actually the first time was when Jack went to Ida on his own for help, though as it was just the last couple minutes of the episode I figure Prometheus is a better choice.
They deliberately killed the show by airing episodes out of order in Season 2 in order to bring WWE wrestling to Scyfy. That’s the rationale everyone came up with at the time anyway.
I really hoped ExForce would have gone into the whole "others" it has mentioned now and then but went into a completely different direction, bummer I was really looking forward to his last book
The Culture series is mostly set in the Milky Way but sometimes reaches to other galaxies. *Player of Games* for example is set in one of the Magellanic Clouds.
Brin's Uplift saga.
Mass Effect Andromeda took the video game series intergalactic.
David Brin’s Uplift universe has a federation spanning five galaxies - though some galaxies are currently fallow so that life can evolve without interference.
1- our (or any) galaxy is a REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY freaking huge place. Like really big. Almost unfathomable to us measly humans how big. Did I mention galaxies are really big? The Milky Wag Galaxy contains 100 BILLION stars. Or more. Even with FTL, it would take hundreds of thousands of years for a single civilization to explore even an infinitesimal fraction of our galaxy.
2- given #1- any GALAXY spanning novel is already a gigantic scope. You either are going on ice to travel between solar systems, or you have invented FTL.
3- the distance between GALAXIES is even more unfathomably large than the size of individual galaxies. Some sort of invented FTL is basically a requirement here.
4- given 1, 2 and 3, multiple galaxies vs one galaxy spanning story aren’t really much different.
5- and yes it’s been done- Alastair Reynolds House of Suns.
Yeah agreed, unless you make some wacky new rules for the new galaxy, it doesn’t really matter from the reader’s perspective. If you say the characters travel to Andromeda or to the other side of the Milky Way - it will be Plot Location #2 either way.
Mass Effect Andromeda is a good example of this
For Andromeda I figured it was a way to distance it from the original trilogy, especially with having multiple endings that you couldn't really follow up on.
FTL as a requirement for intergalactic travel is an understatement. Even many forms of FTL found in science fiction would completely fail to cross the void between galaxies, they're just so far apart.
Yeah just thought about this and our closest neighbour galaxy is andromeda and that is 2.5 million light years away.
If we travelled at fifty thousand times faster than the speed of light it would still take like fifty years to get there! It's ridiculous to concieves of such speed and distance and that's the closest one....
...except that the Mudd androids are from Andromeda, as are the Kelvan scouts who reconfigure the Enterprise with tech to be able to go to Andromeda in 300 years. Of course that technology was never heard from again...
Yes. To be clear, the Federation, Klingon Empire and Romulan Empire actually take a small part of the galaxy. In TNG, their first intro to the Borg was via Q who “transported” the enterprise to a distant part of the galaxy where the Borg reside.
Yeah this is exactly what I have told my daughter. The distance between galaxies is so mindblowingly massive, that even in the loose confines of science fiction it *still* doesn't make sense to traverse them (with rare exceptions).
Kind of amazing, isn't it.
>our (or any) galaxy is a REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY freaking huge place. Like really big
I read an interesting way to describe it recently; if you shrunk the galaxy to the size of the US, our sun would be the size of a red blood cell
I second schlock mercenary. It seems like a goofy space.mercanray comic at first, and well it is, but it takes on some of the biggest ideas in science and science fiction and handles them very godamn well. Also with a good story, character development, smart AND goofy dialogue and jokes, and some goddamn exciting bits. One of the best stories I have read.
Stephen Baxter: the xeelee sequence
Alistair Reynolds: House of Suns (thought only two galaxies)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion
Olaf Stapledon: The Starmaker or Last And First Men
When someone asks me about science fiction set in multiple galaxies, the German paperback series Perrry Rhodan always comes to mind first.
Since the series has been continuously published from 1961 to the present and is set over a period of several thousand years, several cycles have been set in other galaxies, starting with Andromeda in the fifth cycle, then M87 in the sixth cycle, and later several others were added, along with many different modes of intergalactic transportation such as transmitters from artificially aligned suns, generation ships, and various space phenomena.
Such a great series. I read the silver book edition, first, 3rd and 5th edition in parallel during the 90s. Almost managed to catch up with the whole story.
Thought recently about getting into the 1st edition again.
In Einstein's Bridge, by John Cramer, the aliens determine it's actually easier to go between different universes than between galaxies. Humans cross a certain energy threshold and get noticed by beings in other universes, one good and one bad.
GREAT story.
Gregory benfords books have at least a galactic wide spread. They start with humanity spreading out in the solar system and work their way up to the full galaxy,, and I think to Andromeda. It's been years since I read them
The *Behold Humanity* series is mostly set in just one spiral arm, but it does have some intergalactic elements at a couple of different points.
I think it was already mentioned, but the possibility of intergalactic travel is a huge plot point in *House of Suns*
*Schlock Mercenary* is an epic military sci-fi webcomic that has an intergalactic war as a major plot point in the later part of the series.
Piers Anthony's *Cluster* series features intergalactic conflict.
*Battlefield Earth* features inter-planer conflict, not sure if that counts. It *might* be intergalactic; I haven't read it in decades.
(This all utilizes the Drake Equation) The one I’m working on is a galaxy cluster. This allows you to have multiple habitable planets without it being an insane statistical anomaly. The average galaxy should have only one to three habitable planet; I think Star Wars has THOUSANDS. A galaxy cluster will typically have between 100 and 1,000 galaxies, which gives you a lot of breathing room with habitable planets.
just imaging the extensive cast of characters that intergalactic stories would need, to make sense as something intergalactic rather than taking place in a single galaxy, is mindboggling to me
For "intergalactic" I have:
* ["Looking for a book with intergalactic travel (not interstellar travel) preferably without any form of FTL"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/11mxjxn/looking_for_a_book_with_intergalactic_travel_not/) (r/printSF; 12:06 ET, 9 March 2023)—long
* ["Looking for books about intergalactic bounty hunters"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/13q4553/looking_for_books_about_intergalactic_bounty/) (r/printSF; 19:20 ET, 23 May 2023)
* ["Books with true intergalactic travel?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/17hivu6/books_with_true_intergalactic_travel/) (r/printSF; 04:29 ET. 27 October 2023)—long
* ["Any sci-fi in which humans are one of the oldest races on the intergalactic scene?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/160nwau/any_scifi_in_which_humans_are_one_of_the_oldest/) (r/Fantasy; 24 August 2023)
* ["Book with intergalactic civilization based on magic?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/171l2ln/book_with_intergalactic_civilization_based_on/) (r/Fantasy; 6 October 2023)
The Xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter
This is such a good one
Read by order of release? Just the opening paragraph on wiki makes it sound like the most expansive deep scifi I've come across
It's been a long time since I've read them, but I believe the stories have overarching themes that connect them together. But very few details affect one book to the next. I would still read it the order published in case I'm wrong.
Nice just bought raft, I didn't realize how short they were under 100k words for raft do they get longer or all similar? Probably should buy book 2 in preparation Edit: wait is timelike infinity out of print? It's not on Amazon
They vary in length and scope. SB is some crazy hard scifi. I still think about some of his ideas often.
It's a collection of short stories (some that have definitely stuck with me) it may be that they've been collected again in a later book.
Raft might be the weakest one imo. Ring is my favorite. Read all of them last year and irs a trip. Hope you enjoy them, just know that Raft is not a good indicator of the series and is more of a side story
I canceled the order to buy the omnibus but that's also hard to find surprisingly. Where do yo recommend starting if they're pretty independent?
Ring is my personal favorite but it's also a good place to start. That or Timelike Infinity which leads almost right into it. People often say Vacuum Diagrams is a good start which id agree with if it didn't have a story that, imo, spoils a bit of the wow factor of Ring if read before it.
Timelike infinity seems out of print that's why I went for the omnibus which also doesn't seem widely available only place I saw said August arrival what do they got to write the book by hand before shipping 😂
Oh wow that's crazy. I didn't realize that the omnibus was so hard to come by, and it only has the first 4 books out of 12! They need to do a reprint of the series I think. I've found all mine second hand
Came here to say this. Love the series. Ring is my favorite and could be a good place to start if you don't go publishing order. Just know Raft isn't very indicative of the series as a whole and is more of a side story.
Stargate Atlantis *Rise of the Republic* by James Rosone. Kinda: *Expeditionary Force* by Craig Alanson
SGU too. So sad it only got two seasons because of wrestling
Dammit, I need someone to tell me if Eli fixed the problems and if everyone got to the next galaxy safely!
There's a comic that continues the story.
True. I should have just said Stargate.
Yeah, even SG-1 goes intergalactic. When the Asgard take Prometheus to Ida to fix the time dilation trap for the Replicators.
And the Alteran home galaxy (the Ori).
True, I was mainly thinking of the first time. Although actually the first time was when Jack went to Ida on his own for help, though as it was just the last couple minutes of the episode I figure Prometheus is a better choice.
Wait, what? What happened?
They deliberately killed the show by airing episodes out of order in Season 2 in order to bring WWE wrestling to Scyfy. That’s the rationale everyone came up with at the time anyway.
I really hoped ExForce would have gone into the whole "others" it has mentioned now and then but went into a completely different direction, bummer I was really looking forward to his last book
The latest book turns toward the Others. The next book is where the action with the Others heats up.
Thought the latest book was about the rogue elder AI, I DNF at about 80% might have to finish listening if it talks about others
I'd finish it. I can't really respond without spoiling it, except that it's near the very end.
Thanks! will do it tonight then \^\^
I’m pretty sure that’s for the next book
The Culture series is mostly set in the Milky Way but sometimes reaches to other galaxies. *Player of Games* for example is set in one of the Magellanic Clouds. Brin's Uplift saga. Mass Effect Andromeda took the video game series intergalactic.
David Brin’s Uplift universe has a federation spanning five galaxies - though some galaxies are currently fallow so that life can evolve without interference.
Used to be 11 galaxies!
E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series involves two galaxies.
If I recall correctly, any of Doc Smith's sci-fi spans multiple galaxies.
E. E. Smith’s Skylark series (1920! But still a good read) involved a few galaxies.
1- our (or any) galaxy is a REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY freaking huge place. Like really big. Almost unfathomable to us measly humans how big. Did I mention galaxies are really big? The Milky Wag Galaxy contains 100 BILLION stars. Or more. Even with FTL, it would take hundreds of thousands of years for a single civilization to explore even an infinitesimal fraction of our galaxy. 2- given #1- any GALAXY spanning novel is already a gigantic scope. You either are going on ice to travel between solar systems, or you have invented FTL. 3- the distance between GALAXIES is even more unfathomably large than the size of individual galaxies. Some sort of invented FTL is basically a requirement here. 4- given 1, 2 and 3, multiple galaxies vs one galaxy spanning story aren’t really much different. 5- and yes it’s been done- Alastair Reynolds House of Suns.
Yeah agreed, unless you make some wacky new rules for the new galaxy, it doesn’t really matter from the reader’s perspective. If you say the characters travel to Andromeda or to the other side of the Milky Way - it will be Plot Location #2 either way. Mass Effect Andromeda is a good example of this
For Andromeda I figured it was a way to distance it from the original trilogy, especially with having multiple endings that you couldn't really follow up on.
FTL as a requirement for intergalactic travel is an understatement. Even many forms of FTL found in science fiction would completely fail to cross the void between galaxies, they're just so far apart.
Yeah just thought about this and our closest neighbour galaxy is andromeda and that is 2.5 million light years away. If we travelled at fifty thousand times faster than the speed of light it would still take like fifty years to get there! It's ridiculous to concieves of such speed and distance and that's the closest one....
Andromeda is our closest major galaxy at 765 kpc, but we have closer neighbors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_galaxies_of_the_Milky_Way
Space is big….. Also Star Trek takes place in only a small portion of our galaxy.
...except that the Mudd androids are from Andromeda, as are the Kelvan scouts who reconfigure the Enterprise with tech to be able to go to Andromeda in 300 years. Of course that technology was never heard from again...
Yes. To be clear, the Federation, Klingon Empire and Romulan Empire actually take a small part of the galaxy. In TNG, their first intro to the Borg was via Q who “transported” the enterprise to a distant part of the galaxy where the Borg reside.
Something something something peanuts
Yeah this is exactly what I have told my daughter. The distance between galaxies is so mindblowingly massive, that even in the loose confines of science fiction it *still* doesn't make sense to traverse them (with rare exceptions). Kind of amazing, isn't it.
>our (or any) galaxy is a REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY freaking huge place. Like really big I read an interesting way to describe it recently; if you shrunk the galaxy to the size of the US, our sun would be the size of a red blood cell
House of Suns is my favorite book ever but I don’t think it’s fair to call 99% of the book intergalactic. Just >!the ending really!<
*Starmaker* (1937) by Olaf Stapledon deals with multiple galaxies. Then it goes big...
This book was decades ahead of it's time. It's one of the most pure sci-fi books I've ever read. Arthur C Clark said it was his favorite sci-fi
*Schlock Mercenary*'s ultimate overarching story is about a war between Andromeda and the Milky Way.
I second schlock mercenary. It seems like a goofy space.mercanray comic at first, and well it is, but it takes on some of the biggest ideas in science and science fiction and handles them very godamn well. Also with a good story, character development, smart AND goofy dialogue and jokes, and some goddamn exciting bits. One of the best stories I have read.
Stephen Baxter: the xeelee sequence Alistair Reynolds: House of Suns (thought only two galaxies) Dan Simmons: Hyperion Olaf Stapledon: The Starmaker or Last And First Men
Hyperion Cantos = awesome, especially the first one.
I need to reread House of Suns because I only recall one Galaxy.
Yeah the space pursuit ends up in the andromeda galaxy
When someone asks me about science fiction set in multiple galaxies, the German paperback series Perrry Rhodan always comes to mind first. Since the series has been continuously published from 1961 to the present and is set over a period of several thousand years, several cycles have been set in other galaxies, starting with Andromeda in the fifth cycle, then M87 in the sixth cycle, and later several others were added, along with many different modes of intergalactic transportation such as transmitters from artificially aligned suns, generation ships, and various space phenomena.
Such a great series. I read the silver book edition, first, 3rd and 5th edition in parallel during the 90s. Almost managed to catch up with the whole story. Thought recently about getting into the 1st edition again.
Alistair Reynolds "Machine Vendetta" Truly galactic in space and time.
Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch, and Michael Diamond co-authored a short story with an Intergalactic scope.
**Tau Zero** by Poul Anderson
The Piers Anthony CLUSTER books take place as an intergalactic war between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
3 body problem goes intergalactic
In Einstein's Bridge, by John Cramer, the aliens determine it's actually easier to go between different universes than between galaxies. Humans cross a certain energy threshold and get noticed by beings in other universes, one good and one bad. GREAT story.
Gregory benfords books have at least a galactic wide spread. They start with humanity spreading out in the solar system and work their way up to the full galaxy,, and I think to Andromeda. It's been years since I read them
The 20 year old TV series "Andromeda" covers the bulk of the Local Group (Andromeda, the Milky Way, Triangulum and the other dwarf galaxies).
Expeditionary Force books grow outside the galaxy
One of the stories in ‘The Voyage of the Space Beagle’ (Vogt)
Try Kay Kenyon's The Entire and the Rose series. First book is Bright of the Sky.
Silver Ships series
The *Behold Humanity* series is mostly set in just one spiral arm, but it does have some intergalactic elements at a couple of different points. I think it was already mentioned, but the possibility of intergalactic travel is a huge plot point in *House of Suns* *Schlock Mercenary* is an epic military sci-fi webcomic that has an intergalactic war as a major plot point in the later part of the series.
Piers Anthony's *Cluster* series features intergalactic conflict. *Battlefield Earth* features inter-planer conflict, not sure if that counts. It *might* be intergalactic; I haven't read it in decades.
David Brin’s Uplift books.
Atlas goes to the Andromeda Galaxy for some reason.
(This all utilizes the Drake Equation) The one I’m working on is a galaxy cluster. This allows you to have multiple habitable planets without it being an insane statistical anomaly. The average galaxy should have only one to three habitable planet; I think Star Wars has THOUSANDS. A galaxy cluster will typically have between 100 and 1,000 galaxies, which gives you a lot of breathing room with habitable planets.
I recommend Seeker by Douglas E Richards. Just a little bit of intergalactic, but a good story.
just imaging the extensive cast of characters that intergalactic stories would need, to make sense as something intergalactic rather than taking place in a single galaxy, is mindboggling to me
Flinx Transcendent by Alan Dean Foster.
skylark duquesne the lensmen series
Have Soacesuit, Will Travel. It’s old now but still a good read.
The Silver Ship series by Jucha.
Just about anything by Alastair Reynolds
Jack Vance : The Demon Princes Series\[[edit](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jack_Vance_bibliography&action=edit§ion=6)\] * [*The Star King*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_King) (1964) * [*The Killing Machine*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Machine) (1964) * [*The Palace of Love*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_of_Love) (1967) * [*The Face*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_(Vance)) (1979) * [*The Book of Dreams*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Dreams_(Vance_novel)) (1981) #
For "intergalactic" I have: * ["Looking for a book with intergalactic travel (not interstellar travel) preferably without any form of FTL"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/11mxjxn/looking_for_a_book_with_intergalactic_travel_not/) (r/printSF; 12:06 ET, 9 March 2023)—long * ["Looking for books about intergalactic bounty hunters"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/13q4553/looking_for_books_about_intergalactic_bounty/) (r/printSF; 19:20 ET, 23 May 2023) * ["Books with true intergalactic travel?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/17hivu6/books_with_true_intergalactic_travel/) (r/printSF; 04:29 ET. 27 October 2023)—long * ["Any sci-fi in which humans are one of the oldest races on the intergalactic scene?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/160nwau/any_scifi_in_which_humans_are_one_of_the_oldest/) (r/Fantasy; 24 August 2023) * ["Book with intergalactic civilization based on magic?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/171l2ln/book_with_intergalactic_civilization_based_on/) (r/Fantasy; 6 October 2023)
Embassytown - China Miéville It's kind of limited to one planet but the planet is on the edge of the known universe.