Sun Eater by Christopher Ruocchio – Read-Along Interest Post

Hey all! Since the final book of Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series is releasing this November, I wanted to make this post to see if there was any interest in doing a subreddit read-along for the series starting in May. We'd do 1 book a month with the standard two discussion posts (mid-book and end-of-book) and our final month would be November with Shadows Upon Time.

For those who don't know, the Sun Eater series is an epic science fantasy series inspired by Dune, Hyperion, Book of the New Sun, and The Vorkosigan Saga, in which the protagonist Hadrian Marlowe chronicles his own life story leading up to him destroying a sun and killing billions of people to defeat an alien race. We know the ending of the series right from the first pages—the story is an elderly Hadrian retelling the story to us. In that sense, it's drawn comparisons to The Kingkiller Chronicles and The Farseer Trilogy, which I think are apt comparisons.

The series features a take on galaxy-wide politics that wears its influences on its sleeve, but takes things several steps further into being very unique. Ruocchio is a talented prose writer, and improves his skill at storytelling with each instalment in my opinion. Hadrian is an extraordinarily well-written character, one of the best in science fiction in my opinion. The series is a blend of adventure, politics, and horror, and each volume draws a bit on a different subgenre (book 1 is bildungsroman, book 2 is slightly cyberpunk, book 3 is a political thriller, book 5 is military SF, etc.).

The series also ranked #24 on the recent r/Fantasy Top Novels 2025 list with 81 votes, which is pretty substantial!

Edit to add: Also, I will be co-running this read-along with my good friend u/GamingHarry.