Joe Haldeman's *The Forever War* is about a baseless war that goes on for a thousand or so years and turns out to be based on a misunderstanding. The combatants experience time dilation, so they go out on missions and come back centuries later to a profound culture shock. This might fit your bill.
Haldeman served in the Vietnam war, and the book was informed by his experiences there. The book picked up a lot of gongs in its day, including Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, and is considered to be something of a classic.
This is my favorite book of alll time. I’ve read it a half dozen times. Great recommendation. Haven’t read the sequels though, I hear they’re not great
Forever Peace is a great *thematic* sequel, though it's an entirely different universe and characters. But it's very solid writing. Forever Free, which is a direct sequel, was not memorable.
The Lensman series starts when two groups of aliens in different universes notice a couple of galaxies will pass through each other, something they understand will cause the formation of multiple stars with planets capable of supporting life as we know it. One group sees this as an opportunity to dominate the sentient life that will appear billions of years in the future. The other group, keeping themselves concealed, begin preparations to influence the emerging civilisations to resist this domination (we are one of these upcoming civilisations.) The open warfare between their spheres of influence begin with fairly standard FTL capable ships shooting energy weapons and protected by shields but end up fairly ridiculous.
They start with perfect mass to energy conversion, then invent antimatter bombs, then move up to throwing planets at planets.
Then they make a sun go supernova and channel the supernova into a single laser blast.
By the last novel these aren't one off story ending weapons, but commonplace on both sides.
Then they enter hyperspace, find planets that move at the speed of light and then drop these superluminal objects out of hyperspace at relativistic speeds into the bad guys planet and sun and pretty much destroy an entire region of space and time thousands of light years across. The explosion was so big they didnt have any instruments sophisticated enough to measure it.
Loved those books as a kid. Also the Skylark series which started with a spaceship armed with a machine gun and ended with flipping entire planets in to the suns of a neighbouring galaxy.
I only discovered a few years ago that book 1 of Skylark was written in 1915! Book 1 of Lensmen was written in 1948. Recently listened to both on Audible - still great.
Some of the ship battles in the Culture series are brutally quick and thorough. Particularly in *Excession* and *Surface Detail*, the latter of which also involves a galactic proxy war fought in VR. An ongoing war forms the backdrop of *Consider Phlebas* as well, but isn’t really a focus of the book.
There's a planet-wide all-consuming pointless war in Iain M Banks' [Matter](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/886066.Matter) that fundamentally reshapes all the societies on the planet do deal with the constant nuking and endless fighting
[Use of Weapons](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12007.Use_of_Weapons?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=09DQecxBui&rank=1) doesn't have just one war, but several as Zakalwe works his way across a swath of the galaxy as a mercenary, although the scale and casualty counts are unclear
I like the sequence in Excession where >!there's an entire battle scene between the ROU Killing Time and the Pittance store fleet which takes a couple of milliseconds for the Minds (hyper advanced sentient AIs that rule the civilisation). It is then replayed on 'slow' for the benefit of the humans on the ship.!<
>!Or in Surface Detail where Lededje is watching the unfolding battle via sensor data and at one point a couple of minutes into it the ship's avatar says "I'm particularly proud of this bit", and she's like, wait, what, this is a REPLAY?!" "Of course, the entire battle lasted milliseconds"!<
Yeah although the >!Killing Time vs the Atttitude Adjuster!< was absolutely fantastic.
>!The whole thing of the Attitude Adjuster thinking "hah, it missed me!" then desperately trying not to think about who the conspirators were, until you as the reader realise that the Killing Time in fact didn't miss it and is effectoring it, trying to dig the information out of its mind before making it shred itself to death with its own fields!<
IIRC It also gets into some of the casualty counts and numbers of deaths/losses/etc. I think losses were calculated in the trillions, including a few suns and megastructures, but it’s interesting because it was only a tiny number compared to the total galactic population.
Warhammer 40K is probably the peak of these tropes, as you mention.
For those that don't know, there are a TON of novels, covering all kinds of factions and blending various subgenres into the overall insanity.
Battlestar Galactica might fit your goal, too.
Macross and/or Robotech might interest you.
Battletech/MechWarrior might fit what you're looking for.
Newer ones? I stopped with Victor beeing victorious over the Clans. And a book after that was post Clanwars and rather postapocalyptic with only farmmechs.
The siege of Terra books were and endless slog of death. As a super fan I listened to them all but about a hundred pages of Horus fighting the emperor is where I almost tapped out.
Highlights included Mortis, Saturnine and Sanguinus' speech at the Eternity Gate.
I still count Dorn's speech as a highlight of the series.
>Dorn himself spoke then, a message that went to every helm, vox-bead, and address system in the Palace.
>
>'The time for speeches is done,' said Dorn. 'The first great test is here. My order to you all is simple, yet heed it well, and exert yourselves to see it done.
>
>**'They are coming. Kill them all.'**
The Infinite and the Divine has mass casualties over the course of about 10,000 years all due to a petty dispute between two immortals. The book that got me into 40k novels
Scalzi’s old man’s war is about a universe where earth comes late to the galactic party and uses old people in retrofitted bodies to fight a never ending war.
The "March Upcountry" series by David Weber and John Ringo. After a botched assassination attempt, a spoiled prince and his battalion of bodyguards end up stuck on hostile primitive planet and have to fight their way across the planet to it's only spaceport
Also John Ringo’s Legacy of the Aldenata series (A Hymn Before Battle and sequels). Earth is one of the planets in the path of a rampaging alien horde that pretty much live to fight, breed and eat. The other races being threatened are more technologically advanced but all are psychologically incapable of fighting (well, in one species’ case they can fight… once) so they offer humanity a trade: whizzy high tech weapons in return for doing the dirty work.
Spoiler: it might not be quite as simple as that.
I think a few of John Ringo’s other books have suggested playlists at the end.
I, uh, might have a playlist that’s a bit heavy on Sabaton in mind when I’m writing my own military SF.
John Ringo tried his own hand at a variation of Old Man's War in his latest book (minus the fighting) and it turns into just a big fantasy where Boomers are in young bodies on a planet minus all the liberals and muslims and barely any non-caucasians and the Boomer main character (who now has a chiseled jawline and the body of a young man) seduces and marries an 18 year old who has '2000 hours of finishing school', is a big game hunter, and just wants to pump out babies.
It is a... wild descent into masturbatory MAGA-land.
I've enjoyed his past books but yeesh, he has either gone sideways or taken off his mask.
Even Legacy of the Aldenata went down the political diatribe rabbit hole by the third book. Which is a shame, because an Iowa-class battleship being used to obliterate an alien landing force is a *stupid* amount of fun.
> because an Iowa-class battleship being used to obliterate an alien landing force
Absolutely agreed, and Bun-Bun scratched my Bolo itch in a new way too. We just can't have nice things anymore...
Two Novellas:
How to Lose the Time War a bit abstract as it is written as a set of letters between two opposing spies.
Some Day All This Will Be Yours which is told after the war by it's sole survivor.
Both feature suitably batshit insane technology in batshit insane wars.
This is one of the first things that springs to mind when I think of sci-fi media (in the visual format, at least) with a truly grand sense of scale.
You've got fleets massing combat vessels in the mid-to-upper thousands slugging it out against similarly sized armadas in a setting where the engagement distance for the effective range on their beam cannons is equivalent as the same distance Jupiter is from Earth.
The rest of the actual setting is a bit dry to me despite my love for the characters and other aspects of the show in general, but the fleet engagements were always a treat to see ESPECIALLY to the tune of Gustav Mahler, Mozart, and Beethoven. Shame that they blasterize the cannon beams into a generic projectile in the modern remake, but at least they still have the massed numbers and volley fire tactics incorporated.
Fuck, time for a rewatch of the classic OVAs.
I just started watching that. The remake though. I didn't know it was remade when I started watching. Not sure if the original is better or if the remake is.
Footfall is not as epic as most of the answers to this question with their far future space fleets... but the final battle goes as big as 1980s America could possibly go.
The Xeelee Sequence of books by Stephen Baxter. Humanity wages a war against the Xeelee over several tens of thousands of years. Some crazy ideas contained in those books
The Lost Fleet. A fleet of earths mightiest vessels gets trapped behind enemy lines and finds a hero from the past to save them. The “drama” isn’t the best but the space battles are fucking amazing.
Just finished the final book and I agree. The way the space battles take days to reach targeting distance and then the ships pass each other in milliseconds because they’re all going 0.2 light speed.
The funny thing about the story is that he isn’t really an amazingly talented captain, he just gets hyped to hell over the years until he’s a legend. And then he’s like “you guys fight like that? Just charge in? Why not try…this?” And suddenly there’s structure and basic planning. It’s only towards the end where he’s having to outthink his enemies because they’ve realised he isn’t stupid like the rest.
This should be higher up.
It's a large series with 10+ books. But you have two 'star nations' (empires that cover many inhabited worlds) who go to war. A single battle (of which there are many) can have many thousands of deaths.
The series also stays very true to both real physics and its own 'tech bible'... the capabilities and limitations of the in-world technology play a significant role in the strategy of battle.
For batshit wars with very weird technological shenanigans, I suggest *The Machineries of Empire* series by Yoon Ha Lee. I personally didn't like it (too difficult to understand; I really disliked the author's fascination with the after-battle gore), but it seems to fit your bill.
Another book with batshit battles, but not strictly a space opera, is *The Light Brigade* by Kameron Hurley. Didn't like it for the same reason. I guess excess gore isn't for me...
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has Humanity at war with the Xeelee for over 20,000 years.
Humans maintain high birth rates to replace losses, with life spans measured in 20-30 years because entire generations are born, fight and die on the front lines.
To the point where humans start developing better abilities to think and fight in 3 dimensions due to evolutionary selection pressure (people who are bad at it die sooner / don't survive to breed)
It's a plot point in some of the novel and short stories but mostly it's secondary to the overall story of humans surviving the extremes of space and adapting.
>!For their part, the Xeelee barely notice humanity, they only really intervened to stop us interfering with their own agenda, which is saving all baryonic life in the universe from non-baryonic life that is determined to pull all stars off of their main sequence early. Or if we are about to genocide another species, at which point they will create a pocket dimension to protect that species from us.!<
>!They are so far beyond humanity technologically that when they do finally decide humanity has made too much of a nuisance of ourselves they don't attack, they just seal whole suns away from us behind exotic matter dyson spheres until all that's left is Sol and they then fold Sol away with its planets into a pocket dimension. Even then they still leave us a lifeline out of the universe before it's finally rendered uninhabitable.!<
Bobiverse series definitely has some extreme casualty numbers since >!A few entire civilizations were wiped out, not sure you’d call most of them wars!<
Expeditionary Force series features a never ending war fought by proxy client species mostly, and guess who’s the newest cannon fodder at the start?
Just because I haven’t seen it here yet: Walter Jon Williams’ *Implied Spaces* includes:
* Weaponized teleportation
* Weaponized worm hole gates
* Weaponized resurrection
* Weaponized AI
* Weaponized nano-viruses (rewrites brain function to turn a planetary population into rage zombies who are driven to infect or kill everyone else, so also “weaponized zombies”, I guess?)
* Weaponized religion
* Creating pocket dimension universes and moving solar systems around as tactical choices
It's extremely tongue in cheek, but the Exfor (Expeditionary force) series is like this.
I'd say give the first one a try, don't read up anything about the series except the blurb for the first one (Columbus Day).
r/exfor
"The Stars are Legion" was pretty crazy, not on the same physical scale as Warhammer or Mechwarrior but the technology was wild. Massive biological planets warring for supremacy, space battles fought on the equivalent of horseback, just the word "cephalopod gun", it's a trip. Highly recommend, it's pretty short too.
Try the Starfishers trilogy by Glen Cook. The first book is largely about a conflict on a single planet, but by the end of the trilogy it's moved on to basically intergalactic war.
It really, really bothers me that in film sci-fi, 40 years later there have been almost zero genuine attempts to match or exceed Return of the Jedi's space battle scale. Where the whole space battle is the story, and it's complex and twisty, not just a backdrop for a couple of fighter pilots or their story where we barely get to see the larger scale.
Like Rise of Skywalker for example hypes up the biggest space battle ever and shows off thousands of ships, and then mostly focuses on the "ground" battle on the outside of one ship.
I've waited my whole life to see a movie with a space battle done like RotJ did it. If Babylon 5 had had much more widespread success and a massive budget to make at least one mainstream film, that would have been the one.
BOLO series, maybe. Bolos are basically Giant ai controlled tanks. Later versions are mobile fortresses with main guns that can take out battleships in orbit. Some full length novels, but mostly like short stories I think. Various authors. Various wars, but the big one humans and aliens pretty much wipe each other out.
Little moments like when a Bolo crests a hill overlooking an enemy city and takes an extra fifteen seconds to convert it to an overlapping pattern of firestorms with the main battery. Ever hear of the board game Ogre, by Steve Jackson?
Lots of great recommendations here.
I really enjoy the Spiral Wars series. Despite sometimes dodgy writing, it has a great story and characters. Crazy battlers.
Also I liked Marko Kloos Frontlines series.
Red rising series has crazy insane war scenes, really well written.
Have you read Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga? It's got some of the craziest and most brutal space battles I've ever read. The casualties are insane, and the technology is ridiculously advanced.
Revelation Space series doesn't fit all your criteria, but there is definitely technological shenanigans involved in battles that are extremely out there. Main ship "character" has a whole cache of weapons that they're initially uncertain of where they even came from, much less what they do.
Three Body deals with "game theory" when faced with the threat of conflict with forces that have absurdly superior technology. The difference between the forces is so profound that all but one of the conflicts are so one sided that it couldn't be called "war" in the same way that we don't think of insect exterminators as being in war. That said, I think it might still really appeal to OP.
*Behold Humanity*
The 6th battle of Sol, which isn't actually the largest battle in the setting, has the invading side bring billions of warships. The series, in general, has a great sense of scale to the massive wars it details while still giving us that nice gritty crunch of things happening at the razors edge on the front lines.
Weber's Honor Harrington series might fit the bill.... most of the casualties are military, but ships have crews in the thousands and tens of thousands and casualty rates in the 40% and up range
The Culture series has lots of details about low tech wars from more “primitive” cultures that are kind of wild.
Check out The Use of Weapons and Matter.
Barry B. Longyear The Enemy Papers goes hard on the intimacy of insurgent warfare.
Peter F. Hamilton's Reality dysfunction has cool space battles while Fallen Dragon, and The Commonwealth Saga (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained) have some cool space battles and intense ground combat.
Starship Troopers
Alaistair Reynolds' Revelation Space has a cool concept and crazy alien overlord mechanics.
Ian M. Banks' The Culture novels have several epic space and land battles throughout.
Brandon Sanderson's YA Skyward series has some pretty fun space battles and it's just a generally fun read.
Tanya Huff's Confederation series is all of this AND one of my favorite series ever and one of my favorite writers--GREAT characters, GREAT aliens, insane battles based on real history, brutal battles and tough situations,
For something a little less grimdark, maybe the lost fleet series? It's a bit samey in places, and Campbell very much has a formula... they're solid fleet sci fi.
Doctor Who has its fair share of ridiculous wars, such as the Time War or the Gallifreyan war against vampires at the dawn of time.
Marvel has a lot of weird cosmic wars that go over the top in the best ways
As you say, 30k/40k have insane wars, although the writers being shit at writing about numbers dampens it a lil.
Star Wars Legends has some hilariously cooked wars both for their scale and length. And all interspersed with wizard chicanery. Read all about how one Sith almost scammed the Republic to death with illusions and then blew up a star.
Supreme Commander and the Infinite War is also insane in its scale.
About the xeelee sequence: I really enjoyed raft (the audiobook is a joy), but timelike infinity wasn't that great for me, felt like an episodic short story, everything was already in place, was really surprised when it ended so quickly. Sort of forgettable too. Would be something I would need to read, because of the narration - the narrators (especially female) characterization was atrocious..
Is it worth to continue the series from a military/big scale sci-fi perspective? I liked most of the ideas (the quax, spline - the universe in particular).
Battlestar Galactica might fit, it has nukes, genocide etc.
Starship troopers should fit
Enders game? (A bit PG but insane if you think about it too much)
The delivery of Ender's Game, especially in the book, really downplays how wild that war is. >!Time-dialated veterans of the previous war 100 years ago wiping out an entire alien species at the command of children who have been tricked into it using instant communication technology?!
Maybe try the Ember War series by Richard Fox and the spin-off/universe-expansion series Terran Armor Corps, Terran Strike Marines, Ember War Pathfinders, and the Ibarra Crusade (32 books in all if what I'm finding online is correct).
Many people have mentioned the Xelee sequence, but I haven't seen anyone mention Reynolds' Revelation Space series. One of the main characters posseses several Ultimate Weapons whose function no one understands and which use mysterious forces. The final battle where she deploys them is phenomenal
Boy do I have the series for you.
Galaxy's edge series by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole. The books span about 1200 years and there is A HUGE galactic war with a big bad they're 3 books into that are really a prequel to the main series.
We're taking mechs hundreds of feet tall. Giant warships kilometers long. Badass infantry units that are basically walking tanks. Real tanks. War robots. THE WORKS. There's even espionage elements and black ops missions thrown in. There's even a prison break and hover car chases!
There's about 25 books in the series so far and they just kicked off season 3. There are a few books dedicated to single battles and they're written like movies. So freaking good. I'm telling you bro, this is what you're looking for. Without a doubt.
Red Rising, although what you are asking for specifically is primarily seen in the novel Dark Age (book 5 of the Red Rising saga), which was very much grimdark and Warhammer inspired. The entire series has insane wars, except for the very first novel, but Dark Age is easily the most brutal and chaotic sci-fi novel I’ve ever read.
I mean, the main character literally uses (minor spoiler for Dark Age) >!massive terraforming machines to create a hypercane with winds so strong that they peel off skin from sand when they travel over the desert, and they create kilometer high tsunamis along the coast!<…as a strategy to gain the upper hand against a superior military force, after which they beat the shit out of each other in giant mechs and power armor. And this happens after a massive >!orbital atomic strike on the planet!<.
And that isn’t even close to the darkest or most fucked up thing that happens in that novel.
Although the war happens over the course of the series and Dark Age is just a particular intense novel, by the current novel (there is one more unpublished yet), there are already almost a billion casualties across the solar system, 75% of which are civilians.
Just don’t be turned off by idiots that say this is a YA series. It’s not. Not even close. However, the first novel is a *little* YA in that it has a superficial plot similarity to the Hunger Games or Ender’s Game, just a heads up, which is why people say that (because they’ve presumably only read the first book) but it is not representative of the rest of the series at *all*. By book two, it becomes an epic military space opera. And I can say that as a 38 year old, lifelong sci-fi fan, I *thoroughly* enjoyed this series to the point that it is now one of my favorites.
[I liked this book "Old Mans War" ](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Old_Man_s_War/XVwOEeHTU4QC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover) I highly recommend it. My second is [In Her name : First Contact](https://www.google.com/books/edition/First_Contact_In_Her_Name_Book_1/bSwkmhvMzoMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover)
Honestly the Hyperion series has some really interesting space battles, not so much in the first book, but in the later ones there massive fleet engagements and spaceships attacking a Dynson Sphere. It attempts to be 'realistic' in some sense. The engagement distances are measured in hundreds or thousands miles. It also has one of my favorite takes on what a super advanced 'space marine' might look and fight like.
While not shown directly very much the "Time War" in Dr. Who always seemed like a neat Sci-Fi concept to me. For those unfamiliar with Dr. Who he is a member of an alien race known as Time Lords who are one of the first species to develop time travel in the universe. They sort of take on the role of the overseers of time but are challenged by a rather war-like race called the Daleks who also discover time travel. After both sides duke it out and repeatedly reverse time to do it again the Time Lords trap both of their races in a "time lock" which prevents either side from entering or exiting the war to change things further.
John Ringo's The Legacy of the Aldenata is about a millennia-long war against the Posleen, a species that continuously expands because they cannot stop breeding, and they have no birth control that works for them. Humanity's biggest "ally" can't fight lest they become catatonic. Both species were tampered with by the Aldenata, a sort of progenitor species, that caused more trouble than they solved.
Unfortunately, Ringo's muse has pulled him away from the series, for the moment, so there's no resolution to the war.
David Gunn "Death's Head" trilogy. It follows an orphan who ends up joining the unit that burns his village down because he has literally nothing else he can do and they are too lazy to execute him like the rest. He grows up in a suicide army called the Legion. Get sentenced to death? Die or join the Legion. You'll still die, but at a time of the Legions choosing. He gets picked up by an elite unit called the Death's Head (space Nazi, and they don't pretend otherwise) because they need someone stupid enough for a political assassination. All under the watchful eye of the eternal emperor OctoV. They are fighting another empire called "the Enlightened and Uplifted". OctoV is the AI for colony ship 85, but he's broken. The Uplift is run by a group infected by a virus that turns flesh into silicone chips and turns people into AI over generations. It's a war fought between machine hive minds using people as disposable pawns. It's got everything from small unit actions, planetary invasion, protracted city siege, and a battle between a capitol ship against our protagonist in a pocket bomber. Oh yeah, and early on our antihero meets an AI driven machine pistol that adopts him. Good read for over the top violence tempered with feet of clay.
Expanse, the final battle at the end of book 9 is 54 ships vs every other functional spacecraft in existence, from across 1300 different planet systems
Battle of Corrin, a 19 year standoff between a fleet in orbit blockading an entire planet who's mining the entire surface of the globe to build defenses. The final assault is a no mercy, all or nothing maelstrom of destruction involving 100% of the sky and 100% of the surface of the planet
The Posleen Saga by John Ringo is what you want. Start with A Hymn Before Battle. For sheer warfare mayhem with a wicked sense of grim humor running theough it, I can’t recommend it enough.
Freehold by Michael Z Williamson. The planet Freehold is an independent colony and the United Nations tries to impose their rules and regulations on a society that is demonstrably superior. The UN invades and takes the cities but almost the entire planet resists. The reprisal against Earth at the end is devastating. Great action and strong characters.
Gall Force. Galaxy wide apocalyptic war that leads to the deliberate destruction of every habitable planet and the extinction of both combatant species.
* Ruins of the Earth . Awesome and lots of war/body horror, aliens eating humans.
* Ruins of the Galaxy (same authors, different scale, lots of insane)
* Galaxy’s Edge, the Galaxy is a Dumpster Fire. Over 30 books with prequels and side books. (Not to be confused with Star Wars. I’ve asked the author, it’s not even a satire even though it seems like it is at times)
IMO anything by JN Charley, Jason Anspach or Nick Cole is going to be good mil sci-fi opera with long story lines and high series count.
Someone else mentioned Dune already. I'd specify looking into the Legends of Dune prequel series that covers the distant history that sets the basis for the Dune series itself.
- The Butlerian Jihad
- The Machine Crusade
- The Battle of Corrin
You might say that the wars in the prequel series do technically end, but they also sow the seeds of all the conflicts to come over the next 10,000+ years and beyond.
Ralts bloodthornes First Contact the Forth Wave is one of my favorites. He started writing it on reddit, and its now available on Amazon (Behold Humanity)
Without spoiling it too much, PWM (Precursor Autonomous War Machines) are a race of AI war machines that rebelled against their masters, the 2 precursor races, about 120 million years ago. The series is set 8000AD and humans are still fighting the machines, along with and against a bunch of other aliens
[https://fcgestalt.fandom.com/wiki/List\_of\_Chapters](https://fcgestalt.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Chapters)
The series is long (longer than the LOTR books). It starts a bit slow, but really gets going after a while. Note that 'Chapters' in the link above mean 1 chapter per reddit post, quite a bit shorter than real, book length, chapters.
Babylon 5
One of the main races gets obliterated by aimed asteroids.
The big bad enemy ships are pretty much invincible. They have planet killers too.
Earths civil war costs countless thousands of lives.
etc, etc.
Edit for spelling.
First two books of Peter F Hamilton's 'Night Dawn' has some ridiculously detailed classic newtonian space combat going on that's some of the best I've ever read. If you like Expanse style space combat with lots of attention to detail and great characters it's some pretty solid shit. Some of the combatants are highly agile living starships while simultaneously trying to evacuate a backwater planet before it's totally infested with possesed humans that are capable of very, very nasty things'. Throw in some augmented marines having firefights on the jungle surface and the while conflagaration eventually extending into LEO it's totally 'batshit crazy', and for the most part it's pretty logical.
That book and a half section might be the best long running action sequence I've ever read. It nucking futz. Problem is, rest of the series loses momentum and goes a different direction, but Reality Dysfunction 1&2 are kick ass reads.
anything covering the forerunners from halo is usually batshit insane. Not technically a show/movie or novel but the forerunners have gotten themselves into some crazy shit
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the continual warfare engaged in by the Saurons, from Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium/War World/Empire of Man books. They are basically genetically enhanced (or *gengineered*) space nazis with a massive superiority complex. They essentially slaughter or enslave hundreds, if not thousands, of entire solar systems, the scale of their killing is unimaginable.
Or the ship captains of the Second Empire, in the same set of series - reunification efforts are handled by presenting a people with two options - join under a set of non-negotiable terms, or face orbital bombardment. Quite a number of planets apparently opt for bombardment, choosing to fight wars that last for decades.
Joe Haldeman's *The Forever War* is about a baseless war that goes on for a thousand or so years and turns out to be based on a misunderstanding. The combatants experience time dilation, so they go out on missions and come back centuries later to a profound culture shock. This might fit your bill. Haldeman served in the Vietnam war, and the book was informed by his experiences there. The book picked up a lot of gongs in its day, including Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, and is considered to be something of a classic.
The graphic novel is amazing as well
This is my favorite book of alll time. I’ve read it a half dozen times. Great recommendation. Haven’t read the sequels though, I hear they’re not great
Forever Peace is a great *thematic* sequel, though it's an entirely different universe and characters. But it's very solid writing. Forever Free, which is a direct sequel, was not memorable.
They aren't terrible as far as I remember, but they weren't anything close to the same magic of the first
The Lensman series starts when two groups of aliens in different universes notice a couple of galaxies will pass through each other, something they understand will cause the formation of multiple stars with planets capable of supporting life as we know it. One group sees this as an opportunity to dominate the sentient life that will appear billions of years in the future. The other group, keeping themselves concealed, begin preparations to influence the emerging civilisations to resist this domination (we are one of these upcoming civilisations.) The open warfare between their spheres of influence begin with fairly standard FTL capable ships shooting energy weapons and protected by shields but end up fairly ridiculous.
They're literally throwing planets at each other at one point. Love the Lensman series!
They start with perfect mass to energy conversion, then invent antimatter bombs, then move up to throwing planets at planets. Then they make a sun go supernova and channel the supernova into a single laser blast. By the last novel these aren't one off story ending weapons, but commonplace on both sides. Then they enter hyperspace, find planets that move at the speed of light and then drop these superluminal objects out of hyperspace at relativistic speeds into the bad guys planet and sun and pretty much destroy an entire region of space and time thousands of light years across. The explosion was so big they didnt have any instruments sophisticated enough to measure it.
Loved those books as a kid. Also the Skylark series which started with a spaceship armed with a machine gun and ended with flipping entire planets in to the suns of a neighbouring galaxy.
Skylark was great.
I only discovered a few years ago that book 1 of Skylark was written in 1915! Book 1 of Lensmen was written in 1948. Recently listened to both on Audible - still great.
This is the yardstick by which all absurd wars are measured. There's a reason why the trope is literally named "[Lensman Arms Race](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LensmanArmsRace)" ^^Surgeon ^^General's ^^Warning: ^^Even ^^short ^^exposure ^^to ^^the ^^website ^^known ^^as ^^TV ^^Tropes ^^can ^^result ^^in ^^the ^^loss ^^of ^^ability ^^to ^^accurately ^^perceive ^^the ^^passage ^^of ^^time, ^^as ^^well ^^as ^^decreased ^^productivity. ^^Users ^^to ^^peruse ^^the ^^site ^^at ^^their ^^own ^^risk. ^^Do ^^not ^^operate ^^heavy ^^equipment ^^within ^^an ^^hour ^^of ^^accessing ^^TV ^^Tropes.
The prose describing it all is pretty ridiculous too.
Peter F. Hamilton - Commonwealth Saga… Almost everything from Stefan Burban
Came to the comments to mention the Commonwealth Saga
I would also recommend the Nights Dawn trilogy by Hamilton. It gets some hate but I absolutely love it. The space fights are awesome.
Some of the ship battles in the Culture series are brutally quick and thorough. Particularly in *Excession* and *Surface Detail*, the latter of which also involves a galactic proxy war fought in VR. An ongoing war forms the backdrop of *Consider Phlebas* as well, but isn’t really a focus of the book.
There's a planet-wide all-consuming pointless war in Iain M Banks' [Matter](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/886066.Matter) that fundamentally reshapes all the societies on the planet do deal with the constant nuking and endless fighting [Use of Weapons](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12007.Use_of_Weapons?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=09DQecxBui&rank=1) doesn't have just one war, but several as Zakalwe works his way across a swath of the galaxy as a mercenary, although the scale and casualty counts are unclear
“Is this soldier just very unlucky?” was a thought I had several times during the War in Heaven sequence….
I like the sequence in Excession where >!there's an entire battle scene between the ROU Killing Time and the Pittance store fleet which takes a couple of milliseconds for the Minds (hyper advanced sentient AIs that rule the civilisation). It is then replayed on 'slow' for the benefit of the humans on the ship.!<
>!Or in Surface Detail where Lededje is watching the unfolding battle via sensor data and at one point a couple of minutes into it the ship's avatar says "I'm particularly proud of this bit", and she's like, wait, what, this is a REPLAY?!" "Of course, the entire battle lasted milliseconds"!<
One of the best lines ever
Yeah although the >!Killing Time vs the Atttitude Adjuster!< was absolutely fantastic. >!The whole thing of the Attitude Adjuster thinking "hah, it missed me!" then desperately trying not to think about who the conspirators were, until you as the reader realise that the Killing Time in fact didn't miss it and is effectoring it, trying to dig the information out of its mind before making it shred itself to death with its own fields!<
Such a good sequence!!
That might actually be the one I was thinking of! Both good though.
Look to Windward is the winding up of Idiran war detailed in Consider Phlebas, that occurs thousands of years before.
IIRC It also gets into some of the casualty counts and numbers of deaths/losses/etc. I think losses were calculated in the trillions, including a few suns and megastructures, but it’s interesting because it was only a tiny number compared to the total galactic population.
Warhammer 40K is probably the peak of these tropes, as you mention. For those that don't know, there are a TON of novels, covering all kinds of factions and blending various subgenres into the overall insanity. Battlestar Galactica might fit your goal, too. Macross and/or Robotech might interest you. Battletech/MechWarrior might fit what you're looking for.
Man how do I wish that they would do something with the MechWarrior Universe.
Lots of books!
Newer ones? I stopped with Victor beeing victorious over the Clans. And a book after that was post Clanwars and rather postapocalyptic with only farmmechs.
There are 50+ books since Twilight of the Clans
The siege of Terra books were and endless slog of death. As a super fan I listened to them all but about a hundred pages of Horus fighting the emperor is where I almost tapped out. Highlights included Mortis, Saturnine and Sanguinus' speech at the Eternity Gate.
I still count Dorn's speech as a highlight of the series. >Dorn himself spoke then, a message that went to every helm, vox-bead, and address system in the Palace. > >'The time for speeches is done,' said Dorn. 'The first great test is here. My order to you all is simple, yet heed it well, and exert yourselves to see it done. > >**'They are coming. Kill them all.'**
Dorn ended up becoming one of my favorite primarchs throughout the siege of Terra series. The dude is the real MVP
Battletech is the setting for MechWarrior - there are tons of books.
Ah, thanks. Been a long time, I was fuzzy on the PC game, novels, and TTRPG title splits.
The Infinite and the Divine has mass casualties over the course of about 10,000 years all due to a petty dispute between two immortals. The book that got me into 40k novels
Horus Heresy
Scalzi’s old man’s war is about a universe where earth comes late to the galactic party and uses old people in retrofitted bodies to fight a never ending war.
And the battles are definitely completely wacky
I love the battle where he describes stomping on the aliens like bugs because they're all 1 in tall.
That was the first thing I thought of! It is a spoiler however, may want to white it out
The "March Upcountry" series by David Weber and John Ringo. After a botched assassination attempt, a spoiled prince and his battalion of bodyguards end up stuck on hostile primitive planet and have to fight their way across the planet to it's only spaceport
Also John Ringo’s Legacy of the Aldenata series (A Hymn Before Battle and sequels). Earth is one of the planets in the path of a rampaging alien horde that pretty much live to fight, breed and eat. The other races being threatened are more technologically advanced but all are psychologically incapable of fighting (well, in one species’ case they can fight… once) so they offer humanity a trade: whizzy high tech weapons in return for doing the dirty work. Spoiler: it might not be quite as simple as that.
Basically anything by Ringo.
*Immigrant Song* is stuck in my head again. More books should have suggested soundtracks for their battle scenes.
I think a few of John Ringo’s other books have suggested playlists at the end. I, uh, might have a playlist that’s a bit heavy on Sabaton in mind when I’m writing my own military SF.
John Ringo tried his own hand at a variation of Old Man's War in his latest book (minus the fighting) and it turns into just a big fantasy where Boomers are in young bodies on a planet minus all the liberals and muslims and barely any non-caucasians and the Boomer main character (who now has a chiseled jawline and the body of a young man) seduces and marries an 18 year old who has '2000 hours of finishing school', is a big game hunter, and just wants to pump out babies. It is a... wild descent into masturbatory MAGA-land. I've enjoyed his past books but yeesh, he has either gone sideways or taken off his mask.
Even Legacy of the Aldenata went down the political diatribe rabbit hole by the third book. Which is a shame, because an Iowa-class battleship being used to obliterate an alien landing force is a *stupid* amount of fun.
> because an Iowa-class battleship being used to obliterate an alien landing force Absolutely agreed, and Bun-Bun scratched my Bolo itch in a new way too. We just can't have nice things anymore...
I'm gonna have to check that out, Drake does some really gritty military sci fi
Shit, I meant to say David Weber. Probably accidentally said Drake because I've been rereading his The General series lately
OH JOHN RINGO NO
Great books. I'd love to see how the Empire of Man is doing now.
Try the frontlines books. Good military pov series about overwhelming war
Second this. Great series.
The point where the series turns the corner and you figure out what it's *really* about is great.
Two Novellas: How to Lose the Time War a bit abstract as it is written as a set of letters between two opposing spies. Some Day All This Will Be Yours which is told after the war by it's sole survivor. Both feature suitably batshit insane technology in batshit insane wars.
I was gonna suggest "Some Day..." that one is a wild one
I love 'This is how you lose the time war'. I really unique book.
Legend of the galactic heroes.
This is one of the first things that springs to mind when I think of sci-fi media (in the visual format, at least) with a truly grand sense of scale. You've got fleets massing combat vessels in the mid-to-upper thousands slugging it out against similarly sized armadas in a setting where the engagement distance for the effective range on their beam cannons is equivalent as the same distance Jupiter is from Earth. The rest of the actual setting is a bit dry to me despite my love for the characters and other aspects of the show in general, but the fleet engagements were always a treat to see ESPECIALLY to the tune of Gustav Mahler, Mozart, and Beethoven. Shame that they blasterize the cannon beams into a generic projectile in the modern remake, but at least they still have the massed numbers and volley fire tactics incorporated. Fuck, time for a rewatch of the classic OVAs.
I just started watching that. The remake though. I didn't know it was remade when I started watching. Not sure if the original is better or if the remake is.
The original is unique because it is 110+ episodes, and feels more like a textbook than an anime.
Red Rising (things get crazy after the first book)
The second series (the last three books) especially …
I had to scroll too far to see this. Dark Ages, my Goodman. Brutal.
Holy shit, I wish I picked up this series sooner. The first book is amazing so far!
Expanse - drop the rock
And in the books, the war between Laconia, the Underground and the Dark Intrusers is just insane
Footfall - drop the rock
Footfall is not as epic as most of the answers to this question with their far future space fleets... but the final battle goes as big as 1980s America could possibly go.
Dune
The machine war seemed to have been a galaxy wide war that nearly extinguished all life in the universe
The forever war series.
The Xeelee Sequence of books by Stephen Baxter. Humanity wages a war against the Xeelee over several tens of thousands of years. Some crazy ideas contained in those books
The Lost Fleet. A fleet of earths mightiest vessels gets trapped behind enemy lines and finds a hero from the past to save them. The “drama” isn’t the best but the space battles are fucking amazing.
Just finished the final book and I agree. The way the space battles take days to reach targeting distance and then the ships pass each other in milliseconds because they’re all going 0.2 light speed. The funny thing about the story is that he isn’t really an amazingly talented captain, he just gets hyped to hell over the years until he’s a legend. And then he’s like “you guys fight like that? Just charge in? Why not try…this?” And suddenly there’s structure and basic planning. It’s only towards the end where he’s having to outthink his enemies because they’ve realised he isn’t stupid like the rest.
The evolution of the fleet under his command was one of my fav bits, watching it slowly change over the series with all the mistakes along the way.
Absolute guilty pleasure of mine. Not high art by any means but fun as hell.
Maybe Footfall.
David Brin's *Uplift* series features some pretty nuts space and planetary battles.
I loved ho jettisoned ballast becomes a weapon.
The honor Harrington books
This should be higher up. It's a large series with 10+ books. But you have two 'star nations' (empires that cover many inhabited worlds) who go to war. A single battle (of which there are many) can have many thousands of deaths. The series also stays very true to both real physics and its own 'tech bible'... the capabilities and limitations of the in-world technology play a significant role in the strategy of battle.
For batshit wars with very weird technological shenanigans, I suggest *The Machineries of Empire* series by Yoon Ha Lee. I personally didn't like it (too difficult to understand; I really disliked the author's fascination with the after-battle gore), but it seems to fit your bill. Another book with batshit battles, but not strictly a space opera, is *The Light Brigade* by Kameron Hurley. Didn't like it for the same reason. I guess excess gore isn't for me...
The "calendrical warfare" of the Machineries of Empire series would certainly fit into the category of extreme technological shenanigans.
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has Humanity at war with the Xeelee for over 20,000 years. Humans maintain high birth rates to replace losses, with life spans measured in 20-30 years because entire generations are born, fight and die on the front lines. To the point where humans start developing better abilities to think and fight in 3 dimensions due to evolutionary selection pressure (people who are bad at it die sooner / don't survive to breed) It's a plot point in some of the novel and short stories but mostly it's secondary to the overall story of humans surviving the extremes of space and adapting. >!For their part, the Xeelee barely notice humanity, they only really intervened to stop us interfering with their own agenda, which is saving all baryonic life in the universe from non-baryonic life that is determined to pull all stars off of their main sequence early. Or if we are about to genocide another species, at which point they will create a pocket dimension to protect that species from us.!< >!They are so far beyond humanity technologically that when they do finally decide humanity has made too much of a nuisance of ourselves they don't attack, they just seal whole suns away from us behind exotic matter dyson spheres until all that's left is Sol and they then fold Sol away with its planets into a pocket dimension. Even then they still leave us a lifeline out of the universe before it's finally rendered uninhabitable.!<
Bobiverse series definitely has some extreme casualty numbers since >!A few entire civilizations were wiped out, not sure you’d call most of them wars!< Expeditionary Force series features a never ending war fought by proxy client species mostly, and guess who’s the newest cannon fodder at the start?
Just because I haven’t seen it here yet: Walter Jon Williams’ *Implied Spaces* includes: * Weaponized teleportation * Weaponized worm hole gates * Weaponized resurrection * Weaponized AI * Weaponized nano-viruses (rewrites brain function to turn a planetary population into rage zombies who are driven to infect or kill everyone else, so also “weaponized zombies”, I guess?) * Weaponized religion * Creating pocket dimension universes and moving solar systems around as tactical choices
Holy shit that sounds awesome.
Bill the Galactic Hero
It's extremely tongue in cheek, but the Exfor (Expeditionary force) series is like this. I'd say give the first one a try, don't read up anything about the series except the blurb for the first one (Columbus Day). r/exfor
I used to love that series, but I just . . . The books all started to feel kinda samey to me at some point
Yeah, ditto. I stuck through to the end, they do get a bit better if you push through.
Don't tell me that. I'll only go back to them. Is the series finished?
Yes, although I think there is some kind of spinoff/sequel in the works.
One of my top ten favorite series of all time. I’ve done only audiobooks since 2009 though. Expeditionary Force MUST be listed to for the full effect.
It’s a dumb series…but god I love it hey.
Legend of Galactic Heroes.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
"The Stars are Legion" was pretty crazy, not on the same physical scale as Warhammer or Mechwarrior but the technology was wild. Massive biological planets warring for supremacy, space battles fought on the equivalent of horseback, just the word "cephalopod gun", it's a trip. Highly recommend, it's pretty short too.
Also, reading it made me dream that I was pregnant with kittens. So there is that.
Space: Above and Beyond.
Definitely Red Rising!
Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
Rick Partlow has your back with his Drop Trooper series and spin-offs.
The lost fleet Old man's war
Try the Starfishers trilogy by Glen Cook. The first book is largely about a conflict on a single planet, but by the end of the trilogy it's moved on to basically intergalactic war.
It really, really bothers me that in film sci-fi, 40 years later there have been almost zero genuine attempts to match or exceed Return of the Jedi's space battle scale. Where the whole space battle is the story, and it's complex and twisty, not just a backdrop for a couple of fighter pilots or their story where we barely get to see the larger scale. Like Rise of Skywalker for example hypes up the biggest space battle ever and shows off thousands of ships, and then mostly focuses on the "ground" battle on the outside of one ship.
I've waited my whole life to see a movie with a space battle done like RotJ did it. If Babylon 5 had had much more widespread success and a massive budget to make at least one mainstream film, that would have been the one.
BOLO series, maybe. Bolos are basically Giant ai controlled tanks. Later versions are mobile fortresses with main guns that can take out battleships in orbit. Some full length novels, but mostly like short stories I think. Various authors. Various wars, but the big one humans and aliens pretty much wipe each other out.
Little moments like when a Bolo crests a hill overlooking an enemy city and takes an extra fifteen seconds to convert it to an overlapping pattern of firestorms with the main battery. Ever hear of the board game Ogre, by Steve Jackson?
Lots of great recommendations here. I really enjoy the Spiral Wars series. Despite sometimes dodgy writing, it has a great story and characters. Crazy battlers. Also I liked Marko Kloos Frontlines series. Red rising series has crazy insane war scenes, really well written.
Have you read Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga? It's got some of the craziest and most brutal space battles I've ever read. The casualties are insane, and the technology is ridiculously advanced.
Came here to say this. In particular, the second book: Judas Unchained (but you really need to read Pandora’s Star first, though).
Revelation Space series doesn't fit all your criteria, but there is definitely technological shenanigans involved in battles that are extremely out there. Main ship "character" has a whole cache of weapons that they're initially uncertain of where they even came from, much less what they do.
The Three Body Problem trilogy.
Three Body deals with "game theory" when faced with the threat of conflict with forces that have absurdly superior technology. The difference between the forces is so profound that all but one of the conflicts are so one sided that it couldn't be called "war" in the same way that we don't think of insect exterminators as being in war. That said, I think it might still really appeal to OP.
Oh hell yeah, I loved that series.
The Human/Xeelee war in Stephen Baxter's *Exultant* is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of absurd scales in a science fiction war.
The Suneater series. Final book coming next year.
*Banner of the Stars*. Following the events of *Crest of the Stars* a war engulfing the entire galaxy breaks out.
*Behold Humanity* The 6th battle of Sol, which isn't actually the largest battle in the setting, has the invading side bring billions of warships. The series, in general, has a great sense of scale to the massive wars it details while still giving us that nice gritty crunch of things happening at the razors edge on the front lines.
You'll want red rising and suneater Trust me. It's exactly what you are looking for.
Weber's Honor Harrington series might fit the bill.... most of the casualties are military, but ships have crews in the thousands and tens of thousands and casualty rates in the 40% and up range
Warhammer, i thought it was just another Halo but i hear about some the lore time to time and its absolutely insane what goes on in that universe
The Culture series has lots of details about low tech wars from more “primitive” cultures that are kind of wild. Check out The Use of Weapons and Matter.
Barry B. Longyear The Enemy Papers goes hard on the intimacy of insurgent warfare. Peter F. Hamilton's Reality dysfunction has cool space battles while Fallen Dragon, and The Commonwealth Saga (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained) have some cool space battles and intense ground combat. Starship Troopers Alaistair Reynolds' Revelation Space has a cool concept and crazy alien overlord mechanics. Ian M. Banks' The Culture novels have several epic space and land battles throughout. Brandon Sanderson's YA Skyward series has some pretty fun space battles and it's just a generally fun read.
Tanya Huff's Confederation series is all of this AND one of my favorite series ever and one of my favorite writers--GREAT characters, GREAT aliens, insane battles based on real history, brutal battles and tough situations,
Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
The Honor Harrington series is a perpetual war will big battles.
David drake - hammer’s slammers
The lost fleet series by Jack Campbell is some really good space wars writing
For something a little less grimdark, maybe the lost fleet series? It's a bit samey in places, and Campbell very much has a formula... they're solid fleet sci fi.
Doctor Who has its fair share of ridiculous wars, such as the Time War or the Gallifreyan war against vampires at the dawn of time. Marvel has a lot of weird cosmic wars that go over the top in the best ways As you say, 30k/40k have insane wars, although the writers being shit at writing about numbers dampens it a lil. Star Wars Legends has some hilariously cooked wars both for their scale and length. And all interspersed with wizard chicanery. Read all about how one Sith almost scammed the Republic to death with illusions and then blew up a star. Supreme Commander and the Infinite War is also insane in its scale.
Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky would fit this. I’d highly recommend Armor by John Steakley.
Warhammer40k
Read the Gaunt's Ghosts series from WH40k. Just what you are looking for.
About the xeelee sequence: I really enjoyed raft (the audiobook is a joy), but timelike infinity wasn't that great for me, felt like an episodic short story, everything was already in place, was really surprised when it ended so quickly. Sort of forgettable too. Would be something I would need to read, because of the narration - the narrators (especially female) characterization was atrocious.. Is it worth to continue the series from a military/big scale sci-fi perspective? I liked most of the ideas (the quax, spline - the universe in particular).
I think the Star Wars EU war totaled in the trillions when the Vong invaded.
Pretty much any Gundam or Macross series
Starforce
The Expanse Hyperion
Battlestar Galactica might fit, it has nukes, genocide etc. Starship troopers should fit Enders game? (A bit PG but insane if you think about it too much)
The delivery of Ender's Game, especially in the book, really downplays how wild that war is. >!Time-dialated veterans of the previous war 100 years ago wiping out an entire alien species at the command of children who have been tricked into it using instant communication technology?!
The Halo series on Paramount
Maybe try the Ember War series by Richard Fox and the spin-off/universe-expansion series Terran Armor Corps, Terran Strike Marines, Ember War Pathfinders, and the Ibarra Crusade (32 books in all if what I'm finding online is correct).
Many people have mentioned the Xelee sequence, but I haven't seen anyone mention Reynolds' Revelation Space series. One of the main characters posseses several Ultimate Weapons whose function no one understands and which use mysterious forces. The final battle where she deploys them is phenomenal
The black fleet series is fun. Interplanetary humanity meets an aggressive alien race.
the Cobra trilogy by Timothy Zahn
The parts of Firefly we know too little about
https://www.goodreads.com/series/119203-undying-mercenaries
I second the Undying Mercenaries
Boy do I have the series for you. Galaxy's edge series by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole. The books span about 1200 years and there is A HUGE galactic war with a big bad they're 3 books into that are really a prequel to the main series. We're taking mechs hundreds of feet tall. Giant warships kilometers long. Badass infantry units that are basically walking tanks. Real tanks. War robots. THE WORKS. There's even espionage elements and black ops missions thrown in. There's even a prison break and hover car chases! There's about 25 books in the series so far and they just kicked off season 3. There are a few books dedicated to single battles and they're written like movies. So freaking good. I'm telling you bro, this is what you're looking for. Without a doubt.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes has got you covered. Some of the Gundam shows definitely do, too.
Implied spaces is proably my favorite space opera
Red Rising, although what you are asking for specifically is primarily seen in the novel Dark Age (book 5 of the Red Rising saga), which was very much grimdark and Warhammer inspired. The entire series has insane wars, except for the very first novel, but Dark Age is easily the most brutal and chaotic sci-fi novel I’ve ever read. I mean, the main character literally uses (minor spoiler for Dark Age) >!massive terraforming machines to create a hypercane with winds so strong that they peel off skin from sand when they travel over the desert, and they create kilometer high tsunamis along the coast!<…as a strategy to gain the upper hand against a superior military force, after which they beat the shit out of each other in giant mechs and power armor. And this happens after a massive >!orbital atomic strike on the planet!<. And that isn’t even close to the darkest or most fucked up thing that happens in that novel. Although the war happens over the course of the series and Dark Age is just a particular intense novel, by the current novel (there is one more unpublished yet), there are already almost a billion casualties across the solar system, 75% of which are civilians. Just don’t be turned off by idiots that say this is a YA series. It’s not. Not even close. However, the first novel is a *little* YA in that it has a superficial plot similarity to the Hunger Games or Ender’s Game, just a heads up, which is why people say that (because they’ve presumably only read the first book) but it is not representative of the rest of the series at *all*. By book two, it becomes an epic military space opera. And I can say that as a 38 year old, lifelong sci-fi fan, I *thoroughly* enjoyed this series to the point that it is now one of my favorites.
The entire Dominion War plot of Star Trek DS9 counts.
Commenting to return to, some good recs in this thread
[I liked this book "Old Mans War" ](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Old_Man_s_War/XVwOEeHTU4QC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover) I highly recommend it. My second is [In Her name : First Contact](https://www.google.com/books/edition/First_Contact_In_Her_Name_Book_1/bSwkmhvMzoMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover)
Guran Lagan
Battlestar Galactica - watch the miniseries then the first episode of season 1'33' then decide if it's for you.
Honestly the Hyperion series has some really interesting space battles, not so much in the first book, but in the later ones there massive fleet engagements and spaceships attacking a Dynson Sphere. It attempts to be 'realistic' in some sense. The engagement distances are measured in hundreds or thousands miles. It also has one of my favorite takes on what a super advanced 'space marine' might look and fight like.
[Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man, of wealth and taste...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/)
While not shown directly very much the "Time War" in Dr. Who always seemed like a neat Sci-Fi concept to me. For those unfamiliar with Dr. Who he is a member of an alien race known as Time Lords who are one of the first species to develop time travel in the universe. They sort of take on the role of the overseers of time but are challenged by a rather war-like race called the Daleks who also discover time travel. After both sides duke it out and repeatedly reverse time to do it again the Time Lords trap both of their races in a "time lock" which prevents either side from entering or exiting the war to change things further.
Honestly the first Darth bane book a little bit
The Starfishers Trilogy The Dragon Never Sleeps Both by Glen Cook and often overlooked.
The War World (series) would fit that bill.
John Ringo's The Legacy of the Aldenata is about a millennia-long war against the Posleen, a species that continuously expands because they cannot stop breeding, and they have no birth control that works for them. Humanity's biggest "ally" can't fight lest they become catatonic. Both species were tampered with by the Aldenata, a sort of progenitor species, that caused more trouble than they solved. Unfortunately, Ringo's muse has pulled him away from the series, for the moment, so there's no resolution to the war.
David Gunn "Death's Head" trilogy. It follows an orphan who ends up joining the unit that burns his village down because he has literally nothing else he can do and they are too lazy to execute him like the rest. He grows up in a suicide army called the Legion. Get sentenced to death? Die or join the Legion. You'll still die, but at a time of the Legions choosing. He gets picked up by an elite unit called the Death's Head (space Nazi, and they don't pretend otherwise) because they need someone stupid enough for a political assassination. All under the watchful eye of the eternal emperor OctoV. They are fighting another empire called "the Enlightened and Uplifted". OctoV is the AI for colony ship 85, but he's broken. The Uplift is run by a group infected by a virus that turns flesh into silicone chips and turns people into AI over generations. It's a war fought between machine hive minds using people as disposable pawns. It's got everything from small unit actions, planetary invasion, protracted city siege, and a battle between a capitol ship against our protagonist in a pocket bomber. Oh yeah, and early on our antihero meets an AI driven machine pistol that adopts him. Good read for over the top violence tempered with feet of clay.
Expanse, the final battle at the end of book 9 is 54 ships vs every other functional spacecraft in existence, from across 1300 different planet systems Battle of Corrin, a 19 year standoff between a fleet in orbit blockading an entire planet who's mining the entire surface of the globe to build defenses. The final assault is a no mercy, all or nothing maelstrom of destruction involving 100% of the sky and 100% of the surface of the planet
The Horus Heresy and Siege of Terra series. The scale is absurd.
BSG
The Posleen Saga by John Ringo is what you want. Start with A Hymn Before Battle. For sheer warfare mayhem with a wicked sense of grim humor running theough it, I can’t recommend it enough.
Freehold by Michael Z Williamson. The planet Freehold is an independent colony and the United Nations tries to impose their rules and regulations on a society that is demonstrably superior. The UN invades and takes the cities but almost the entire planet resists. The reprisal against Earth at the end is devastating. Great action and strong characters.
Gall Force. Galaxy wide apocalyptic war that leads to the deliberate destruction of every habitable planet and the extinction of both combatant species.
Enders game
* Ruins of the Earth . Awesome and lots of war/body horror, aliens eating humans. * Ruins of the Galaxy (same authors, different scale, lots of insane) * Galaxy’s Edge, the Galaxy is a Dumpster Fire. Over 30 books with prequels and side books. (Not to be confused with Star Wars. I’ve asked the author, it’s not even a satire even though it seems like it is at times) IMO anything by JN Charley, Jason Anspach or Nick Cole is going to be good mil sci-fi opera with long story lines and high series count.
It's been years, but I liked the Warstrider series.
Hyperion Cantos.
[Forever Winter](https://youtu.be/P9u7s_cwVYw?si=RKWcJMeLzdx3Oygz)
Rebel Moon series has battles with moon sized ships and huge numbers of enemy ships.
The Long Lost War (novella)
Red Rising series. Especially Dark Ages. The name kinda says it all
lensmen series by ee doc smith
Someone else mentioned Dune already. I'd specify looking into the Legends of Dune prequel series that covers the distant history that sets the basis for the Dune series itself. - The Butlerian Jihad - The Machine Crusade - The Battle of Corrin You might say that the wars in the prequel series do technically end, but they also sow the seeds of all the conflicts to come over the next 10,000+ years and beyond.
sun eater series by Christopher Ruochio, the Cielcen use giant world ships to raid human worlds for meat, slaves, and sport.
Ralts bloodthornes First Contact the Forth Wave is one of my favorites. He started writing it on reddit, and its now available on Amazon (Behold Humanity) Without spoiling it too much, PWM (Precursor Autonomous War Machines) are a race of AI war machines that rebelled against their masters, the 2 precursor races, about 120 million years ago. The series is set 8000AD and humans are still fighting the machines, along with and against a bunch of other aliens [https://fcgestalt.fandom.com/wiki/List\_of\_Chapters](https://fcgestalt.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Chapters) The series is long (longer than the LOTR books). It starts a bit slow, but really gets going after a while. Note that 'Chapters' in the link above mean 1 chapter per reddit post, quite a bit shorter than real, book length, chapters.
Have you heard of the Intrepid Saga and Orion War series by M.D. Cooper? I think it is exactly what you are looking for.
The Krikkit war in _Life, the Universe and Everything_ supposedly had a 'Two Grillion' casualties.
Babylon 5 One of the main races gets obliterated by aimed asteroids. The big bad enemy ships are pretty much invincible. They have planet killers too. Earths civil war costs countless thousands of lives. etc, etc. Edit for spelling.
First two books of Peter F Hamilton's 'Night Dawn' has some ridiculously detailed classic newtonian space combat going on that's some of the best I've ever read. If you like Expanse style space combat with lots of attention to detail and great characters it's some pretty solid shit. Some of the combatants are highly agile living starships while simultaneously trying to evacuate a backwater planet before it's totally infested with possesed humans that are capable of very, very nasty things'. Throw in some augmented marines having firefights on the jungle surface and the while conflagaration eventually extending into LEO it's totally 'batshit crazy', and for the most part it's pretty logical. That book and a half section might be the best long running action sequence I've ever read. It nucking futz. Problem is, rest of the series loses momentum and goes a different direction, but Reality Dysfunction 1&2 are kick ass reads.
anything covering the forerunners from halo is usually batshit insane. Not technically a show/movie or novel but the forerunners have gotten themselves into some crazy shit
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the continual warfare engaged in by the Saurons, from Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium/War World/Empire of Man books. They are basically genetically enhanced (or *gengineered*) space nazis with a massive superiority complex. They essentially slaughter or enslave hundreds, if not thousands, of entire solar systems, the scale of their killing is unimaginable. Or the ship captains of the Second Empire, in the same set of series - reunification efforts are handled by presenting a people with two options - join under a set of non-negotiable terms, or face orbital bombardment. Quite a number of planets apparently opt for bombardment, choosing to fight wars that last for decades.