I just finished reading Legion in Exile, book 2 of the Imperium of Terra series by Evan Currie.
In terms of writing craft it’s fairly average, but it does scratch my space opera military sci-fi itch. The setting is somewhat unusual for the genre since it’s very much into about the world after an environmental collapse, whereas English-language military sci-fi writers tend toward various flavours of right wing (from liberal centre-right to full nutjob) and would be hostile against anything that smacks of environmentalism.
But you see, centuries ago various groups of tech libertarians looted Earth and escaped to the stars, leaving the poors to choke to death on a polluted planet. A strongman seized power from the collapsing governments of Earth, enthroned himself as Emperor of Terra, and brutally placed the planet on a crash course to repair the environment. In the present day of the series, Earth is an absolute monarchy ruled by an Empress with a global aristocracy under her governing the masses. The environment is on the mend but is still nowhere near what it was before things went to hell, and the descendants of the space colonists laugh at Earth for being backward yokels. However, most of Earth’s citizens have been nursing a centuries-long grudge against the space diaspora and are itching for revenge.
So book 1 starts and it turns out the Empress wants to resurrect democracy and give commoners a voice in government again. However, the nobles and the military object to this idea and enact a coup d’etat, killing the Empress and massacring her most loyal troops. The protagonist is a rookie in the Empress’ legion assigned to protect her heir, so he fights his way off Earth with the princess in tow and they escape to look for support among the space diaspora.
The plot itself is pretty standard space opera – political intrigue, aristocrats in space, battleships blowing up, etc. It’s kind of weird that an absolute monarch should try to just plop democracy back after like 400 years of their family being in charge, but the books absolutely claim that the royal family’s founder actually meant it when he said he was only abrogating democracy “for the duration of the emergency” and that somehow his descendants also kept this commitment to a defunct political ideology over the generations.
Anyway, the environmental collapse thing was the main thing this series has that made it stand out for me. The rest of it is the kind of quality that you can expect from a military sci-fi space opera self-published on Amazon. It’s okay if you’re into that kind of thing.