@futurebird Anything by E. E. "Doc" Smith. I keep coming back to them for comfort reading.
I am also mostly done right now on a re-read of (the first few) Jack Ryan books by Tom Clancy. The geopolitics is just so... fundamentally *wrong*. But I do keep reading them, once a decade or so. The techno parts are fun, if just as jingoistic.
I find the Lensman series tedious, but I do reread Skylark every five to ten years. Nothing about them is objectively good, but I have a soft spot for early space opera. From the ‘huh, I guess Einstein was wrong’ early in the first book as they go faster than light to the entire model of physics built around the concept of the luminiferous aether (not explicitly stated), there’s no way you could accuse it of being science fiction. Fictional science maybe. The portrayal of women is not great by modern standards but is much better than a lot of contemporary writing in similar genres. The plots are driven by enormous jumps in technology that happen for narrative reasons. There’s inconsistency in the timeline.
But they’re fun. I wouldn’t say they get on my nerves, they’re great when I just want to turn off my brain for a few hours.
