K. J. Parker is a VERY acquired taste. He is one of my favorites and also I almost never recommend him to other people unless I have specific reason to believe his books would be up their alley. Even for people who like Machievellian asshole protagonists (I do), a lot of the earlier books suffer egregiously from extremely nonentity to outright eep handling of female characters. This has gotten much better in the recent books, but it's definitely something I suss out before I rec him. I have an extremely high tolerance for period-typical (or worse) nonsense withj sword and sorcery, but "The Scarlet Ziggurat" was genuinely good on that front, and I also have a very soft spot for pulp sword and sorcery or modern spins on it.
If you bounced off K. J. Parker, never ever EVER read John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century (sf). I love it but it is so incredibly sociopath villain protagonist, and I have to warn people about it because the YA sf novel in the same setting, Orbital Resonance, which includes a character who's related to a side character in Kaleidoscope Century, is genuinely a pretty sweet, good-natured, updated (ca. 1990s) take on a Heinlein juvenile. If you read Orbital Resonance first and go into Kaleidoscope Century, you're going to be in for a nasty shock.
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If you bounced off K. J. Parker, never ever EVER read John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century (sf). I love it but it is so incredibly sociopath villain protagonist, and I have to warn people about it because the YA sf novel in the same setting, Orbital Resonance, which includes a character who's related to a side character in Kaleidoscope Century, is genuinely a pretty sweet, good-natured, updated (ca. 1990s) take on a Heinlein juvenile. If you read Orbital Resonance first and go into Kaleidoscope Century, you're going to be in for a nasty shock.