I forgot to mention that I've been cruising through Scott Westerfeld's Succession novels, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. Yes, the last thing in the world I need after staying up until after midnight watching basketball is to be up another two hours reading, but that's what I've been doing. Calling them space opera doesn't really do them justice, but they're the best of the space faring science fiction books that I've read in a really long time. Scott still shows his masterful extrapolation but these books have a completely different feel to them than his earlier, also excellent novels. I have a link to his website thanks to Justine but it doesn't have anything on it right now. Maybe he's too busy writing. We'll all have to bug him about it at Wiscon.