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I'm about 2/3rds through Empress of Forever by Maxwell Gladstone, which so far is the best wild-ride space opera I've read in recent memory, and narrated with fantastic character voices by Natalie Naudus. It's a bit of a slow start with a protagonist you might not like immediately because she doesn't much like herself, but once it gets going the aesthetic is Heavy Metal (the '70s/'80s magazine & movie) meets Dragonball Z, with a lesbian Mark Zuckerberg as the fish-out-of-water protagonist. The sci-fi elements run decidedly psychedelic, but the narrative overall is character-driven, subverting and mashing up archetypes in ways that create nicely fleshed-out characters (despite several characters having little or no flesh). I'll definitely be digging into more of Gladstone's work.
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