Forum: Story Recommendations

The first thing that comes to mind doesn't actually fit your criteria, but you or others who read this thread might like it.

Stray Cat Strut by RavensDagger, available both on Amazon and Royal Road. It's got the snarky main character, action adventure and corporate ruled dystopia, and the main character Cat has issues but they're not deep, existential or social.

It's set in the 2050s in a crapsack cyberpunkish world where the rich control almost everything. So the real world's future, except way back in the 2020s aliens started invading. They open up dimensional portals and send in a variety of killer drones to eat people and use their biomass to build more aliens.

Good(ish) aliens are helping humanity by providing some people with artificial intelligences in their brains that reward them for killing bad aliens and saving people. Each alien is worth a certain amount of points, and points can be spent on weapons and gear that range from basically what you could buy with money if you had any all the way up to enough firepower to have won WWII singlehandedly.

Our hero Cat is a snarky lesbian who is a delight to read and who takes a "more power!" approach to most problems. Great books.

What jumps to mind is the dead tree Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard K Morgan, although I'm not sure if it's space-faring enough for you. There are multiple inhabited planets and the main character has lived on several so we get flashback scenes, but most of the action of the first and third books takes place on a single planet. Only the second is actively space-faring.

The books are Altered Carbon (2002), Broken Angels (2003), and Woken Furies (2005) if you decide to check it out. There's also a Netflix series based on the books; the first season is excellent, the second is okay.