It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, and I’ve read a ton of books, so i’ll be more brief talking about them. However, a few words first about Simon Green and the stuff he wrote. I’ve read most of his books, and I like every one of them, enough to reccomend them.
You have the Hawk and Fisher series, dark, gritty whodunnit mysteries in a medieval fantasy-ish world, part of the bigger Forest Kingdom series, that are fantasy with a twist. Then there is the Nightside, stories about John Taylor, a private investigator in a hidden area of London where magic, technology, old and new gods, time travellers, angels, demons and basically everything else that is nasty congregates. The Secret History series are a take on James Bond meeting fantasy, acting as a sort of framework for his other series, since you encounter characters from the Deathstalker universe, the Nightside, and the Forest Kingdom.
And then there’s the Deathstalker series, a universe where a decadent human star empire is being ruled by a paranoid empress (aptly named the Iron Bitch), and comes under threat both from the outside by various alien civilizations, and from the inside by a rebellion combining espers, clones and other malcontents.
The series is bloody, over the top, very well written, and a parody of the 1950′s Sci-fi. Basically anything goes, nothing is too improbable, and blood flows everywhere. It’s space opera at it’s best, and it spans thousands of pages. The characters are well written, well defined, and this extends even to the secondary ones. Action scenes abound, whether it be fights in the arena, sieges, combat in narrow tunnels or against any of the rather weird alien races.
So i highly recommend picking this up, if you like a good, long story.
On to the first book, which is actually a prequel. It is composed of three short novels, that introduce some of the places and locations encountered in the main series.
The first novel is Mistworld, a story about a string of murders on the only rebel planet left in the empire. The second, Ghostworld, introduces the captain John Silence and involves the haunted world of Unseeli, a traitorous investigator, and an empire outpost that is no longer communicating, despite the fact that it should be able to withstand a small war. The third story, Hellworld, deals with an expedition sent to investigate a newly discovered planet prior to the real colonists arriving. However, things quickly turn from bad to worse to hell.
The three stories seem to be in an ascending order of weirdness. Mistworld seems like a fairly normal sci-fi ish tale, then Ghostworld seems a bit bizzare towards the end, and in Hellworld Green just lets his imagination run free. Fun fun fun 
Deathstalker, the first actual book of the cycle, introduces Owen Deathstalker, reluctant heir to one of the most feared and revered names in the galaxy is happily being a historian on his planet, enjoying his mistress, good food and wine, when all of a sudden he finds himself outlawed and everyone (including the aforementioned mistress that also was a spy) tries to kill him. These events end up making him the unlikely head of a rebellion against Empress Lionstone herself.
Along the way we encounter things such as a long thought dead but alive ancestor, an underground movement composed of clones, espers and tech rebels, nobles, gladiators, noble gladiators, cyborgs, the mythical world of cyborgs, mythical Wolfen (genetically modified human soldiers), Vampyrs (more modified human soldiers), a villain that’s almost Darth Vader, an alien built labyrinth that mutates people, and who knows what else. There’s space battles, narrow escapes, treachery, noble deeds, love, villains, heroes, blood, plot twists, surprises and cookies. Naah, sorry, no cookies. It’s a space opera on an epic scale, that never stops.
This is the second book of the cycle, and the rebellion against Empress progresses, with the various factions in the empire tentatively uniting. The imperial capital planet is attacked by insectoid aliens after the rebels disabled the security systems in a strike against the tax collection agency.
The Wolfe family continues with it’s plans to build the new super fast star drive. Owen and the rest of the group slowly discover that the maze changed them more than they thought, and they are not the only ones, as Silence and investigator Frost find out (great couple by the way. thoroughly enjoyed reading their parts).Everything progresses nicely towards an ending on a planet where each season lasts one day, where pollution exterminated all the surface life forms, where rebels live in tunnels and have to deal both the with the imperial forces on the surface and the local fauna that retreated towards the deep caves and that is, understandably, somewhat hungry.
Next post, we are off to the last years of the Roman republic, as we meet the precursor of modern private investigators, Gordianus the Finder.
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