A Princess of the Aerie,
Boy, do I read schlock when I'm depressed.
This is the sequel to The Duke of Uranium, which was less annoying. The whole is set in a thoroughly settled Solar System with an array of possibly tongue-in-cheek political arrangements. Our main character is also most bearable if taken a bit tongue-in-cheek; strong, impulsive, thinks well of himself but is maybe not as bright or as trustworthy as he thinks. I enjoy King of the Khyber Rifles with that feeling; I shouldn't object to a book in which the author more plausibly allows it.
And, in the first book, I didn't. Fisticuffs, shipboard romance, intrigue among rival noble houses; as good as a bag of cheap chips. This one, however, has a heavy subplot in which a princess has our hero, also a lot of other men, conditioned through psych and drugs to be sex slaves, and it was all too gratuitous. The mean-minded repetitive sex scenes weren't either good or horrifying enough to keep me from noticing that if conditioning is that effective, much of the politicking the harem arrangement is said to support isn't necessary, including the princess' own upbringing. Once the thin edge of disbelief got in, I became more dubious about the balance of power between warships that never make habitats uninhabitable and the manufacturing societies; much confusion can be written off to the idiocy of our hero, but that's losing its charm.
Good setup among the oppressed miners on Mercury, though.
ISBN: 0-446-61082-8
Hunted,
Hunted also has fisticuffs, shipboard romance, intrigue among rival noble houses, but I was not embarassed to finish, nor yet reread, the book. His hero is stupid, but learns, changes, repents some of his actions. Also there's no carefully delineated sex slavery.
There are mechanical similarities between the plots: unbelievably powerful ancient alien races, who sit in lethal judgement on the characters; enormously different competing societies easily seen as caricatures of parts of our own; scary loyal sidekick aliens; indistinguishable-from-magic technology. Gardner is just better at it, especially the ignorant narrator. (In Ascending he has a wilfully ignorant but quite bright narrator with a voice so delightful I quoted her for days.)
ISBN: 0-380-80209-0
So wrote clew in
SF&F.