I also got into tougher SF through Atomic Rockets! And into the furry fandom, funny enough! Freefall and Erma Felna did irreversible Things to my developing brain.
aww nice! yeah i also read erma felna, it's cool how furries and hard scifi have been entwined since the beginning. it helped me overcome the stigma against furries that was so virulently bad back then. i should re-read some time, i feel like there's probably a good bit i missed when i was a teenager.
Hell yeah, Erma is also just such a freaking good story and I feel like Gallacci was really ahead of his time in a lot of ways? Both in terms of art style, subject matter, and the plot itself? Like, conflicts in the Confed play out eerily like how conflicts are actually playing out in the 21st century? (I.e. minimal actual armed contact between opposing states, but a lot of asymmetrical violence done through non-state proxy actors, from state sponsored terrorism, to sectarian politically motivated mob violence, to cyberattacks, to misinformation, to force the opponent into looking like the “bad guy”, because the goal has moved from destroying an opposing polity’s infrastructure and economy to undermining the very assumptions and axioms upon which said polity is built. And a lot of the discourse about privacy and relationships and modern careers and the unsustainability of a “line must always go up!” neoliberal military industrial economy that relies on expanding its economic hegemony feels just extremely on the nose.)