Adventures And Troubled Times

See A Sense Of Adventure.

We enjoy reading both adventure fiction and narratives set in troubled times. Poul Anderson conveys the sense of living in troubled times in:

Mirkheim

The People Of The Wind

The Rebel Worlds

The Day Of Their Return

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows

The Game Of Empire

 

That list was longer than I had expected. In  A Stone In Heaven, there is a threat to the status quo, a planned coup, but it remains behind the scenes, suspected only by the central characters, so the general populace has no sense of "troubled times."

For a sense of adventure in works by Poul Anderson and SM Stirling, see the above link. Other examples in Anderson's works include the following opening sentence:

"Our part in the Grand Survey had taken us out beyond the great suns Alpha and Beta Crucis."

-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 3-22 AT p. 3.

This is pure Star Trek but much better. (See ...Better Than Star Trek.)

Also:

"We do not know where we are going..."

-see here.

"'You take the Long Trail with me!...'"

-see here.