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Trading in Danger [S1]
by Elizabeth Moon (2003)

Kylara Vatta disappoints her family when she shrugs off tradition and pursues a military career. When she is expelled from the Academy in disgrace she returns home to her humiliated family, a storm of high-profile media coverage, and the gaping void of her own future. She gets a shot at redemption as captain of a Vatta Transport ship, unknowingly heading straight into a colonial war.

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Grimspace [S1]
by Ann Aguirre (2008)

As the carrier of a rare gene, Sirantha Jax has the ability to jump ships through grimspace, a talent which makes her a highly prized navigator for the Corp. Then a crash landing kills everyone on board, leaving Jax in a jail cell with no memory of the crash. But her fun's not over. A group of rogue fighters frees her... for a price. Her help in overthrowing the established order.

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Terms of Enlistment [S1]
by Marko Kloos (2013)

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy tenements, where you're restricted to two thousand calories of badly flavored soy every day. You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service.

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Fortune's Pawn [S1]
by Rachel Bach (2013)

An ambitious young mercenary gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for surprises. The Glorious Fool isn't misnamed... it likes to get into trouble, so much so that one year of security work under its captain is equal to five years everywhere else. With odds like that, she knows she's found a perfectly dangerous way to get the jump on the next part of her plan.

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The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
by Becky Chambers (2014)

A young woman looks to get away from it all by joining the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer spaceship as a file clerk. To survive its missions, she has got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs... an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe. Strong debut novel.

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The Stars Are Legion
by Kameron Hurley (2017)

Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is the only person capable of boarding a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion, which is is traveling in the seams between the stars. Zan must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion's gravity well to the very belly of the world.

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To Be Taught, If Fortunate
by Becky Chambers (2019)

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. A young woman joins a crew and sets out on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds.

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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
by Christopher Paolini (2020)

Kira Navarez dreamed of life on new worlds. Now she's awakened a nightmare. During a routine survey mission on an uncolonised planet, she finds an alien relic. At first she's delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move. As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation.

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Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir (2021)

The sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission to save the earth awakens with memory loss and nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realises that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on his tiny ship, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. Dazzling adult sci-fi.