Tulip posted:

I think more people should read Ann Leckie's space opera trilogy, Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy. Core premise is that humanity has been space faring and fractious for a while, and one polity has gotten really into "ancillaries," a tech where an AI's intelligence is distributed over a bunch of lobotomized humans, which makes them both exceptionally good at ship-crew integration and very good at infantry combat, both of which turn out to be huge military advantages, plus some advantages in general comms/organization. This has unsurprisingly enabled a genuine interstellar empire. The books are from the perspective of one of these ship AIs and focus on how this imperialism requires classes of non-citizen, the regular traumatization of all levels of citizen, and how the empire creates mechanisms of distinction (fashions, ceremonies, gender norms, etc.) to justify themselves as "civilized" as opposed to the people they've been subduing.

e: It's also still ultimately a book about spaceships and lasers.