Rex Nihilo Books in Order

Rex Nihilo is Robert Kroese in full comic space-opera mode. The series follows Rex, an interstellar grifter with endless confidence and very little restraint, plus his much more competent robot companion Sasha, who spends a lot of time cleaning up the messes he creates. If you enjoy stories where the hero is charming, selfish, reckless, and somehow still impossible to root against, Rex is built for you.

The galaxy around him is just as unruly. There are prison planets, corrupt empires, rebels, mafias, bounty hunters, cultists, black market deals, and odd frontier worlds that feel like pulpy genre jokes turned into actual places. The repressive Malarchy looms over much of the series, but Rex is too busy running scams and trying to dodge consequences to turn into a standard rebellion hero. That is part of the fun. He keeps stumbling into galaxy-sized trouble while aiming for the next easy payoff.

Easy payoffs do not exist here.

From Starship Grifters onward, each book starts with a scheme that looks manageable and then spirals outward. A poker game wins Rex a prison planet. A stolen cargo ship turns into a chase involving cultists and conspiracies. A food-short world reveals a grotesque corporate secret. Later books add fake wars, android plots, frontier towns, and side adventures with the formidable Pepper Melange. Shorter pieces like The Yanthus Prime Job and The Chicolini Incident round out the world by showing how many other hustles are happening just off Rex's usual path.

What keeps the series from becoming random is the partnership at its core. Sasha's dry perspective gives shape to Rex's chaos. She is often the reader's way into the absurdity, the one character who seems to understand exactly how bad the plan is before agreeing to help anyway. The result is a run of books that feel fast, funny, and cheerfully lawless. If you like your science fiction with crooked deals, bad ideas, and a lot of banter, Rex Nihilo is hard to beat.