The Phantom Server

For a Star Trek-style sci-fi RPG, give The Phantom Server series a go.  Livadny is an actual Russian science fiction writer who decided to try his hand at LitRPG, unlike many of the other Russian LitRPG writers who were indie authors at first -- Livandny is actually a published author. On the whole, his writing, plot, and characters are a cut above the usual LitRPG I feel.  Livandny helped prove to the Russian market that LitRPG was a real thing, with his Phantom Server series becoming national bestselling books in Russia and proving that LitRPG was not just a niche thing (at least to the Russians).I'd say along with The Gam3 by Cosmo Yap and the Galactagon series is probably the best sci-fi LITRPG I've read so far in the genre.The Phantom Server covers the same territory that most of the other RPG's tread, except for the setting in that this one is all about space. This is another book by a Russian author, so it's translated into English and you get the occasional language oddities in the writing from this - not a put-down-the-book sort of thing, but there are some problems with the prose.It's kind of like an LITRPG version of the video game Eve Online but with the characters inside those ships real people trapped in a video game.The premise starts out like most LITRPG's: The protagonist plays this new illicit video game he hears about (though of course, the standard game capsule conceit) and finds himself trapped in the sci-fi game, unable to logout, and stuck in a hellish alternative beginning where your task is to die, and die, and die some more. I struggled through the beginning of this one, but you get into the thick of things, the plot starts to come together than the world (and how things end up the way they are) pull you in. So definitely give the book some time to warm up - it gets better as you go along, significantly improving by the end of the first book. Book two is MUCH, MUCH better than the first book. Things fall apart by the end of the third book, so the series is rather uneven, but certainly worth reading if you want one of the better LitRPG's (and a pure science fiction in the vein of Star Trek).It's also one of those LITRPG books that will have you guessing at what's really happening behind the scenes -- are things in the game as experienced by the player actually real or is the whole thing just part of the game.