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What hard scifi books could you recommend?
Hello! Could you please recommend some hard science fiction books? I am struggling to find a good one. My favorites are Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts, but I have failed to find anything similar.
I also enjoyed The Martian by Andy Weir and The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, though in my opinion, these aren't quite what I would call hard science fiction.
Additionally, I enjoyed books that blend fiction and non-fiction, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
What are your favorite hard science fiction books?
Two recommendations:
The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey- this one I can credit with both really compelling characters & worldbuilding and (largely) realistic space travel physics. It also covers a kind of gap that most space travel sci-fi doesn't cover- the societal transition between humanity being able to traverse only our native solar system and the wider universe.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir- if you like The Martian I think you'd have no problem enjoying this one. The main character(s) definitely spend most of their time actively thinking through how to solve technical problems, but the underlying plot conflict is fascinating too.
Thank you for your recommendations! I've heard great things about The Expanse and will definitely give it a try.
I've already read Project Hail Mary and really enjoyed it, but found it somewhat naive, so it didn't quite satisfy my craving for hard science fiction. But anyway, I'll look closely to what Andy Weir writes, since I like a lot of his novels.
Project Hail Mary is wonderful, but it reads like a movie to me.
How is The Expanse hard scifi? I haven't read the books, only seen the tv show, but some of the basic premises of the story and setting are pretty much space magic. I know it has hard scifi elements regarding space travel, but that's just one element out of many. If OP doesn't consider The Martian entirely hard science fiction, I don't see how The Expanse would qualify.
<snark>The Expanse is hard sci-fi because it doesn't include FTL.</snark>
…Or inertia suppression, mostly. I kid, a bit, but one way to rank sci fi by hardness is how many currently-known laws of physics it introduces means to violate. (There's a quote about this from someone much more authoritative than me that I couldn't find in a few minutes of searching—if anyone has it offhand, please do share!) Not choosing faster-than-light travel is (a) unusual, and so makes your setting stand out; and (b) also makes the setting unfamiliar to modern societies, which again makes it stand out.
(Let me explain briefly: modern societies are essentially scale-invariant. How long does it take the Prime Minister of Luxembourg to receive missives and send orders to the far corners of his domain? What about the US, a country almost 4,000 times larger? In both cases, the answer is zero from the perspective of human communication. Within the Earth's gravity well—where every living human being resides—the speed of light is fast enough that communication latency is irrelevant. The scale of your polity has little impact on the mechanics of its governance, at least technically. On the scale of the solar system, or especially across multiple star systems, this is no longer the case. Amusingly, this aspect probably would have been more familiar to people prior to the invention of the telegram, when even small countries were large enough to take hours to days for messages to cross.)
Anyway, the Expanse's main law of physics violation is the Epstein drive, which… basically can't be made to make physical sense, to the point the authors didn't even try. There's other stuff that doesn't add up (don't think too hard about Ceres or Eris or try to work out any of the orbital mechanics), but it strongly appears to be more "didn't do the math" than "invented new physics". And in the broader context of sci fi, that's… reasonably hard.
From my point of view the Epstein drive is a bit of a problem, but the p. m. is the biggest one. That's magic, nothing less, and it is one of the main things the story revolves around. There were some other magical things teased in the last season of the show, but I haven't read the books, so maybe they could be explained, though I doubt it.
The Expanse is no doubt harder than Star Trek, but that's not very difficult. I think that what is considered hard scifi has shifted in recent decades as mainstream scifi became less technical and more psychological. Personally I'd put The Expanse around the middle of an imaginary soft - hard scale.
The Expanse spoilers
(Note I've only read the first book here, so this is from that perspective.)
Yeah, the protomolecule is magic, but it's also Weird Alien Shit™. IMO, sci fi mostly gets a pass on hardness from Weird Alien Shit as long as it remains incomprehensible to the viewpoint characters.
That said… it violates relatively little physics. It's got inexplicable matter-to-energy-conversion (not really physically impossible), inertia suppression (not physically impossible), and everyone's favorite implausibly-effective biochemistry (not physically impossible, but very unrealistic); but it is still bound by the speed of light and conservation of energy.
I mean, broadly I agree with you. The Expanse is solid space opera; it isn't, and isn't trying to be, diamond-hard sci fi. It's tough to place it on a scale without establishing a scale, which I don't have broad enough experience with sci fi to do confidently; but yeah, it's probably somewhere (in the vast, empty gulf) between Iain Banks's Culture and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars. I'd honestly put it in the vicinity of Alastair Reynolds's work, though obviously there's loads of room to quibble.
With the p.m. I'm be willing to suspend my disbelief a bit more since it's
spoiler
alien technology from a far advanced speciesW.r.t. where it ranks on the soft/hard scale, I like to compare scifi to fantasy for this. If we put Tolkien then on one end and on the other end it turns into historical fiction instead, I'd then place the expanse on the scifi scale somewhere where I'd place ASOIAF for fantasy. Yeah there's dragons, some magic and the things beyond the wall so it's not super hard, but it's also not like there's wizards, orcs, elves and dwarfs (okay maybe one) running around all the time. GRRM calls it "low-magic", with the amount of magic increasing as the story progresses. I think the Expanse hits a similar spot. Whether that's the middle depends on what you put on the extremes.
What do you consider hard sci-fi? Is it all restricted to earth, moon, and robots on mars?
For me hard scifi means that the story is centered about encountering and interacting with things that are plausible, exploring that interaction and building the story on what comes from that, meaning that unexplained things can be there, but the "hard" part is where the focus is.
Imo this applies for example to some young adult focused books by R. A. Heinlein that would not normally be in some hard scifi lists more than to The Expanse.
I’d argue the books do an ok job of making clear the p.m is not magic and actually backing that up with some very light theories on how it might be working.
It does not matter in the scheme of things since it’s still used basically as a macguffin of sorts.
It’s certainly not the hardest sci fi and writing wise struggles in a lot of narrative and characters spots(although it shares that with hard sci fi I suppose) but I think it’s more than fine to start someone there.
Honestly towards the end of the series it definitely veers into "space magic" territory. The last couple books honestly feel more like chthonic horror genre in some parts. I overall really enjoyed the series though, and I don't really care about the "hard sci-fi vs non-hard sci-fi debate" but if I had to make a choice based on the entirety of the plot I think I'd put it in the latter.
Eh, I liked watching The Martian but I wasn't a fan of the writing style in Project Hail Mary. Both stories are a bit more "survival horror" than sci-fi imo. The Martian definitely gets scored high in "realism" for me.
Whether you consider The Expanse hard sci-fi is going to depend on your own criteria. For me it's about realism of tech; I'll allow some unexplained/understood phenomena to create a plot. In The Expanse the "space magic" is 100% a feature of the unknown and that is the contention of the series. Humans are bound essentially by the physics we already understand. The politics and socio-economics are also well modeled.
I'd definitely call it harder than most popular sci-fi. Much harder and you're constrained to our solar system.
There are one or two bits of serious space magic, but IMO it's at least a proper space opera with strong physical rules for navigation in space. About as 'hard' sci fi as maybe Star Trek TNG or Stargate SG-1's early Showtime seasons.
So I wouldn't recommend it if you're a stickler for the 'hard scifi' bits, but otherwise it's worthwhile.
On the other hand, James SA Corey's new series seems to be a bit harder (and quite a bit grimmer). Closer to Dune levels of hardness. Definitely worth reading the first one since it'll likely be a decent length series and the authors have already proven their ability to land one fantastic series.
I didn't realize they had released a new book! I know what I'm doing tonight. And it looks like it's slots right into what I have been reading (history/politics of authoritarianism).
I kind of felt like it's setting up some interesting stuff, but was generally underwhelming as it's own book. I think it will be like those TV shows where everyone tells you you have to just make it past the first season.
Good to know. I ended up busy yesterday and haven’t had a chance to crack it yet.
It’s hard to look back at Leviathan Wakes without the context of when I read it. I was a grad student flying to work at UCONN for a week. It hooked me on the plane and I had to pick up Caliban’s War before flying home. I remember leaving lunch with my advisor early because I was like “sorry this book grabbed me and I need the second one for my flight home.”
In retrospect, the first book of expanse is my least favorite. I’m excited to try the first book of this new trilogy but hopefully having to wait for book 2 this time around doesn’t diminish the experience.
I've read a very large amount of sci-fi over the years, so It is hard to separate the hard sci-fi from the rest, but I think I can recommend a few. I'm going to try to avoid summarizing them as you should be able to easily find that info if you want it, but I'd rather not spoil by default.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson was an enjoyable read. It goes a bit off the rails in the later section, but I think the vast majority (first part of the book) is a really scientifically grounded sci-fi story.
The jackpot trilogy (the third book coming soon) by William Gibson could probably be considered hard or at least semi-solid sci-fi and I really enjoyed it and I can't wait for the final book. Amazon picked up the series for a show a few years back (The Peripheral), but killed it off after season 1/book 1, which I consider a travesty as I really liked the show despite its deviations.
I'd also recommend the Ian M. Banks "Culture" series, though again, it is hard to say it is considered true "hard sci-fi". The series has a lot of books in the same universe, but they are generally pretty stand alone and do not really need to be read in a specific order though it is probably better to start early in the series so you get a feel for the universe. I started with Consider Phlebas.
I really don't know what happened with seveneves. The first two sections are great but that final act.. I couldn't even finish it. Luckily each section is basically its own whole book so I still 100% agree with the recommendation.
Someone here once told me that the second part was actually a proposed MMO that Neal couldn't get anyone to make for him. So he simply added it to the end of the story instead.
Like his long passages on the correct way to eat cereal, I suspect Neal is too popular and too good a writer for editors to delete certain bits of his writing. And honestly some of those bits are quite good, so I understand his instinct to 'ship' them to an audience even if his books might be a bit cleaner without them.
He did kickstart a game several years ago, but I got the idea it was medieval.
My personal theory is that Stephenson's books all come from some very cool basic though or premise and in some of his later books he starts wondering "ok, but what are the weird long term implications of this story" and he actually ran with it in Seveneves, for better or worse. I think because of the general backlash to this, when he did wanted to do it it again he wrote the crazy part as a sequel (normal Reamde followed by bonkers Fall). FWIW, I didn't hate the last part of Seveneves so much as think it should also have been a weird follow up book. That would have also given him more time to flesh out the new weird stuff and be less rushed.
As someone who has generally liked Neal's books (especially Snowcrash, Anathem, Cryptonomicon, Reamde), would you say Fall is worth reading?
Hmm, that's a tough one because I believe my first comment I said to my wife after finishing Fall was "Wow, what a cool book... I don't know that I can ever recommend this to another person". But... since you've read and liked so many of Stephenson's books, and even read Reamde to which Fall is a sequel, then yes I think you should read it. It has some really fascinating ideas in there that really stuck with me and some of which feel prophetic in a Gibson-like way (I wish I could elaborate, but I don't want to spoil anything).
Excellent recommendations! I too started the Culture books by reading Phlebas, and it was excellent, but I don't think it got better than The Player of Games. Folks seem to really like Use of Weapons, but I really disliked the structure of the narrative.
I'm also really excited for the third Jackpot book - I think these are Gibson's best since the Sprawl trilogy.
I will always recommend the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I mentioned it in a post a few months ago, so I’ll just quote my comment again here.
Based on your post, I think it would be a perfect fit.
That's cool! Thank you!
I've thought a lot about what defines hard science fiction as a genre. Beyond using futuristic settings to explore humanity, I believe there should be real scientific hypotheses underlying the fictional technologies that shape these settings. After all, that's what makes it science fiction.
Robert Heinlein was a master of such exploration. While his books may seem somewhat outdated today, I still enjoy the human aspect of his stories. One of my favorite books is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In this story, one of the main characters is a computer that became so complex that it gained sentience and developed a sense of humor. This computer felt empathy toward people who were surviving in the lunar colony and helped them become free from Earth's government. It's a very inspiring story.
Worth noting that only Red Mars is really hard sci-fi and quickly progresses into sci-fantasy with Green and Blue along with a greater change in the scope of the books themselves. Personally, I did not like the latter two and would have been just fine only reading Red.
If you use my metric for science fantasy (and I freely admit this isn’t the same as the general consensus seems to be), Green and Blue Mars are still absolutely science fiction.
For me, the distinction isn’t about the science at all. The “science” is just a setting to explore humanity. For example, Speaker for the Dead makes way more scientific assumptions than the Mars trilogy even dreams of, and everyone seems to agree that it is science fiction. If your metric for hard science fiction is scientific plausibility, then blue mars is way closer to science fiction than many of the great sci-fi works.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember there being any significant increase in scientific ability in Green or Blue Mars (although I may have forgotten some). They mere more able to work at scale, but that is exactly what happens as time passes. The most fantasy element in the trilogy is the gerontological treatment, but that happens in Red Mars. And with the state of CRISPR today, that isn’t even very far fetched.
Just to add to your great points here, though you could probably get about as many definitions of hard science fiction as there are readers. I think it ultimately comes down to how the author uses science in their stories. Do they just make stuff up that sounds "futuristic" or do they apply scientific method and rigor to their scientific extrapolations. While Kim Stanley Robinson clearly makes up plenty of things that aren't possible today, his approach still follows the scientific methodology and there is a great internal consistency within the universe. I think hard science fiction is not really about how "accurate" it is, but how it is part of the story. Does the futuristic inventions just exists as means to an end to get a specific space plot going, or do the technological and scientific progress proposed in the story have a central focus point for the story. I mention Greg Egan all the time, but some of his stories is technically pure fantasy as he makes up new universes where the laws of physics work differently than our own (like in The Clockwork Rocket), but it will be sort of ridiculous to say he doesn't write hard sf.
The 2nd and 3rd books are definitely still in the sci-fi genre, but are so far from hard sci-fi they might as well just be sci-fantasy in my opinion, with Blue going off the rails with things like artificial suns inside asteroids, the near-instant terraforming of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune's moons, interstellar travel, and magical memory-restoring drugs that cause 200 year old people to remember their own birth.
I really need to read some Heinlein. Would you recommend Harsh Mistress for my first Heinlein story, or something else?
Yes, it is a good story to start. I also could recommend Double Star and Stranger in a Strange Land. But be aware that it was written 65-70 years ago and may feel outdated.
I recommend the short story the Roads must Roll.
Actually, the book starts off in 2026, not 2061. Personally, this makes the book very interesting, as it seems to speak to the world that could have been when they were published in the mid-1990s. The first 100 were in their 40's when the book begins, so KSR was looking at the children around him, imagining what they would be like in this future he was writing.
I don't see much hype for Mars lately, but it seems as though there was some intense interest in Mars for the past two decades. After reading the Mars trilogy, I felt like all the Mars One hype had just been people reading the Mars Trilogy and saying, "That's a good idea, let's do that!"
I liked all the books, but the martian geology (areology) in Red Mars was written so well, I often wondered if KSR had actually been there to see it himself. The part that was really strange was that he wrote this before we got all these high-resolution, color images from Mars. The best we had was the black and white images from the Viking Lander. Somehow, KSR wrote with such detail about Mars that it was as though he must have seen it with his own eyes.
I spent so much time with those books that the characters feel like friends that I have neglected to keep in touch with.
I've been thinking about this book series recently. I want to give it another shot. I haven't read much strictly genre/sci Fi in a long time and the last time I tried to read this series I was maybe 14 years old and made it 2/3rds of the way through the first book before giving up. But now that I'm in my 30s I think I would appreciate them more
Commenting to second this recommendation. It's been a long time since I read the trilogy, but I do recall the science fiction and political intrigue were really enjoyable.
E: typo
Everything that Kim Stanley Robinson has written is fantastic, in my opinion. He's definitely my favorite author.
I read the first one when I was a little too young for it. I remember thinking it was neat, but also finding it hard to keep track of all the characters and sub plots. It's still siting on a shelf in my parents house and I keep thinking I should pick it up and give it another read.
I have the unabridged audio books and I don't know. Red Mars was great, but by the latter half of Green it really starts to chug and there are very long sections where it feels like someone just reading out an operations manual or a research paper versus telling an engaging story, which is really what science FICTION should be about.
Anything by Greg Egan, though beware it is really hard science fiction. A good starting point could be Permutation City and Incandescence, or his short stories. His website is filled with behind the scenes type stuff about the scientific concepts of his stories.
It may be useful to more closely define exactly what you mean by hard science fiction. Generally, that means real science in a fictional narrative, but what I have learned is that it comes with expectations of what kind of science. And by that, I mean physics.
A number of years ago in Hollywood my producing partner was the creator and showrunner for the SyFy show Eureka. After a few seasons he asked if I wanted to contribute a script. So I looked at what the show had done so far and thought a story arc about biological immortality would be cool.
They rejected it. They said it didn’t have any science in it. And by that, I realized they meant the Hollywood version of science with lasers and explosions. Biology and Medicine don’t qualify.
But if they do qualify for you, you might want to consider Darwin‘s Radio by Greg Bear. Genetic artifacts are hidden in our chromosomes and humanity stands at the cusp of radical transformation. We were developing it as a TV series when he passed. That would’ve been a great opportunity.
Good point. What I particularly appreciate in science fiction is when authors incorporate cutting-edge scientific theories as foundational elements of their storytelling. The most compelling hard sci-fi doesn't just use science as window dressing, but explores how technological advances fundamentally reshape human society and consciousness. So it is definitely not about space pirates.
Peter Watts's Blindsight (and notes at the end of the book specifically) exemplifies this approach brilliantly. His extensive research into evolutionary biology and neuroscience to develop the vampire subspecies demonstrates the level of scientific rigor I seek in hard sci-fi. While the technical details of the vampire biology may be complex, the way he weaves this scientific framework into the larger narrative about consciousness and intelligence is masterful.
The book you mention is quite intriguing, thank you. I'll try to find it.
Yeah it was maybe five years ago at one of the big Science Fiction conventions. The producer for this piece was a really wacky guy who had been associated with NASA for decades and tried to jump rails into the science fiction game.
We were all in a little hotel room in San Jose and Greg was surrounded by gadflies. I had done some close reading of recent genetic advances that I thought didn’t quite square with what he had written in Darwin‘s Radio a decade before, but it just wasn’t the time or place to get into a detailed discussion.
He was quite nice and seemed excited about the project. Too bad the success rate in Hollywood is so low and we were not able to get any momentum before he fell ill.
He lived in the Seattle area and used to go to used bookstores. My partner worked at one and met him a couple of times. Sounds like he was a pretty nice person.
It may be a touch on the softer side, but I enjoyed most of the Honor verse books.
Military scifi with a focus on large navel style ship battles. They have faster than light travel but things like communication is mostly still constrained by light speed. So you have these interesting situations where ships are shooting FTL missiles at eachother from a million km away, and they're getting messages from ships that they know already blew up a minute ago.
I so rarely see the Honor Harrington series mentioned! I read the whole thing when I was younger, and loved the way the technology and military doctrine advanced throughout the series.
David Weber is still one of my favorite authors, though I haven't kept up as much with him lately. I also really enjoyed his collaboration with (IIRC) Ringo on the March Upcountry trilogy.
I read most of the main series books, but I started to lose the plot a bit when characters from the spinoffs were popping up to explain important plot points. But that's like 10 books in.
I was a big fan of the Honorverse series back in university! The way it handled ship to ship combat was exquisite, and the characters were quite fun. Admittedly my interest ran dry as I realized (1) space communism is portrayed as bad, actually, and (2) David Weber hits the same story beats a fair bit.
It still holds a special place in my heart, though, and I’m still disappointed there’s no game adaptation.
(edit) also I’d put it as a ricotta on the cheese sci-fi hardness scale, so very far away from a sibling to Blindsight in that sense. Still quite fun though!
I think you'd enjoy Pandora's Planet and Judas Unchained, a duology about humanity in the future, the Commonwealth, building its first spaceship after centuries of relying on wormholes to connect planets in a vast intragalactic network transited by trains. They're there to explore an ancient artefact, an entire planet sealed off by an alien forcefield that's recently dropped, in their first ever encounter with alien life. Points in its favour:
I do think those Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained are the best of them, and they 'end nicely' instead of being super open-ended or a cliffhanger, but if you're not aware he's written a couple sequel series in the Commonwealth. The Void trilogy had some interesting stuff going on with the development of the world, the ones after that I haven't read yet.
I think he does a great job bringing the Opera back to Space Opera but understand the criticism that the cast is large enough that it can take awhile to circle back to what a given character is doing.
I haven't read Pandoras Star och Judas Unchained, so I can't comment on them. But, even though I enjoyed it, I would definitely not call the void trilogy hard sci-fi. To me that fits squarely into the science fantasy category. Imho the science is almost on par with star wars, but the themes of the stories are more mature and advanced.
Yes, the Void trilogy blurb was what made me not want to go on to it after the Commonwealth duology.
Hardness of sf is pretty debatable usually. A few first came to mind, but then I thought about them and really they're more space opera, ad made various sacrifices in order to tell the story. But here's one that definitely fits the bill: Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. Premise: what happens when you keep accelerating when you're nearly at the speed of light? Very hard sf, until the end, which gets fairly speculative but I found satisfying.
Children of Time and it's sequels are fun, dealing with the (millennia) long term fallout of Earth 'nuking' itself back to the stone age right as the first terraforming projects are about to be completed. Setting up humans on generation ships that have had to bootstrap their tech from the ruins interacting with remnants humans left in space.
The Lost Fleet series are definitely more "B-movie" sci-fi, at least plot wise, but I appreciate the amount of thought put into "fleet battles when you have to account for speed-of-light delay are really hard".
Others will have to weigh in on whether it's hard sci-fi or not, as it was a couple of years since I read all of these works, but here you go!
I've enjoyed Alastair Reynolds books, especially his older ones. With House of Suns and the Revelation Space series being my favorites.
I also like Charles Stross accelerando a lot. The ending probably isn't hard sci-fi, but it's so full of cool (realistic) ideas and references that it's almost breathtaking read. Most of the tech also feels very plausible and possible.
Not that Alastair Reynolds isn't above a little shark jumping in the latter half of the Revelation Space series, but he puts that PhD in Astrophysics to good use in his books. Counts as hard for me.
There is a lamp shade from Ikea in my daughters room that makes me think of Lascaille's Shroud whenever I look at it.
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin might scratch your itch for you. There's also a pretty decent adaptation on Netflix (called 3 Body Problem).
I will only vouch for the first book in the series as that's the only one I've read so far.
I felt Three Body Problem had a common issue in scifi where the author feels compelled to pick the most futuristic solution to a problem and handwaving away conventional ones.
Three Body Problem ship cheesewire event spoiler
In this case, there's a bunch of terrorists on a cruise ship passing through a canal and the government needs to recover sensitive intel from their computer without giving them a chance to delete it. They settle on using carbon nano filament to cut the ship and everyone in it up into itty-bitty slices as it passes, but this has the fairly obvious drawback of also cutting through and destroying any hard drives and electronics on the ship that are at the wrong height, too, and no-one brings it up. Even just cutting through the power system could destroy the data if they're paranoid enough to put it on volatile memory, so it's lost when the power goes out. It's presented as an incredibly simple solution and all others are dismissed as "they could have prepared for that and given themselves enough time to delete the data."I really enjoyed the TBP series but there are some really bizarre things that happen in it, especially once you get to the last book. I think it's not really "hard sci-fi" but it's still a good story.
As silly as that scene was, it was pretty amazing in the (US) tv series. I can't remember another scene that stuck with me so much.
Sadly that was a scene that really let me down. The TV series opted for the traditional "action" scene, when in the book it's almost more chilling due to how clinical and unaware the whole thing goes.
I read this one last year, and it was actually addressed in the book. They said they could fix any damage caused from clean cuts, whereas other forms of damage would be harder to recover from (missiles, fire, or intentional sabotage). There was basically a whole chapter dedicated to evaluating different approaches to taking the data safely.
It was still very Looney-Tunes, but they did at least try to justify its use.
I'm ninety percent sure that the smallest mote of dust is enough to ruin an entire hard drive sector because of how densely packed and delicate the internal magnetic platters are, but I appreciate the attempt the author made.
To be a little bit fair to that particular solution, the whole point was the literal novelty of it since it could not have been prepared for.
Still hand waving sure but there’s not a lot of hard sci fi that has perfect plot device use because it’s probably just “oh yeah none of that ever makes sense to use. “
I don't think having to storm a ship with terrorists on board, while needing to preserve vital intel that's also on board is that novel.
EDIT: I'm very much reminded of the Flight 8969 hostage crisis in France, when Algerian Islamic terrorists hijacked an aeroplane at an airport and held the passengers and crew, shooting one when their cover was blown and it wasn't allowed to take off. France's special forces police team, GIGN, stormed the plane when it landed for refuelling.
I was not saying the situation was novel. I was saying the solution had to be. This was sorta kinda because of knowledge the people on the ship are known to have at that point in the story.
I'm being vague because fairly major spoilers, and it's also not exactly a great justification so i'm not dying on this hill or anything, but I do think you're misunderstanding my point.
Thank you! I've read all the books in the series, and I think that the most interesting idea to me, the "Dark Forest" paradox, was in the last book.
I feel that the writing style of Three Body Problem is more similar to the science fiction of classic American authors of the twentieth century. It has less focus on science and more emphasis on exploring human behavior in unusual settings. While the writing style might feel somewhat simplistic at times, the ideas presented are intriguing.
Nit—the paradox was introduced in the second book, called The Dark Forest :)
Some of the classics:
Forever War by Joe Haldeman - the rest of his work is pretty good as well
Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke - sequels to Rama are meh
Caves of Steel and Nightfall by Issac Asimov
Ringworld by Larry Niven - the sequels are medium, and there are tons of other books set in the same universe if you like RW, but it is the most well known one.
Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A Heinlein. Some of his work is pretty out there, these two are the best/most important IMO
Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh
Dune by Frank Herbert
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - really anything by Bradbury. His short story collections are really good.
Enders Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide by Orson Scott Card - the rest of the Enderverse books are good too, as well as his other work, but these three are what I would consider his masterwork. Note that in later life his views have become pretty repugnant
Diamond Age is one of my favorite books. I hardly ever see it mentioned, but a lot of the world building is starting to really look like where we're headed.
Thank you so much for mentioning her. I rarely ever see her mentioned (especially for being so prolific in the genre). I don't have Downbelow Station yet, but I will soon as I'm trying to get the entire Alliance-Union universe set of books for my personal library.
So I loved snow crash but not sure I’d say it’s hard sci fi. For every thing that was either based in current reality or very prescient with its predictions of the use of that tech, there’s a lot of just flat out weird/wrong/whatever. Mostly in the service is satire or flat out fantasy I’d say.
Are you saying that accuracy is a criteria for hard sci fi? I'm not sure how that would work when we're talking about hypothetical futures. I suppose if you mean that you didn't find it believable, then maybe we can just chalk it up to differences of opinion.
Personally, I'd say the technology described was advanced but in the realm of possibility, and well justified in the context of advances in computing and biotech described within the universe of the story.
A ton of it ended up being more acccurate than he probably expected.
I hope I'm not getting this wrong, but i remember something where there was like 3rd world sweat shops full of people playing World of Warcraft earning fake gold to sell for real money to players in richer countries. And he was like "for everything I managed to get right about the future, this is something I never would have imagined."
Yeah, I think that's in Reamde.
No i think i worded it poorly, but there's characters and ideas that are clearly intended to be strange/goofy more than accurate. The things they want to be clear about they are, but there's just as much stuff that makes 0 sense.
Vernor Vinge has some pretty hard science fiction, although it depends on your definition. I would call The Martian quite hard.
Fire upon the Deep, and Deepness in the Sky, I've really enjoyed, as well as the duology Across Realtime (The Peace War, and Marooned in Realtime)
Stephen Baxter is the hardest lay-readable sci-fi I know of. Greg Egan is (much) harder but his books require explanatory lectures and relatively deep knowledge of fairly obscure topics. I find them very hard going a lot of the time but he does have some interesting ideas. Baxter is a better writer in terms of being able to structure a story, imo. Start with the Xeelee sequence, but it's all good.
If you define hard sci fi as basically not involving entirely magical explanations for stuff then the recommend list broadens somewhat. Peter F Hamilton is always worth a look. Neal Asher is good (his earlier things lean a bit more biological, like Watts). Asher's Cowl is one of the better time travel stories I know of and time travel is tough to do "hard" . Alistair Reynolds has already been mentioned and is very good. Adrian Tsaikovsky is great - start with Children of Time, it's one of my all time favourite books of any genre.
There's also always the classics. Arthur C Clarke. Larry Niven. Poul Anderson. Heinlein I think is overrated and his politics are not to my taste, but lots of people do get on with his stuff. Asimov is a great ideas guy but dreadfully dry to read. Good for short stories if you like short stories.
I'm not sure Iain M Banks qualifies as hard sci-fi, although he may, but his Culture series is superb and I will always recommend it. In the same vein anything by Ann Leckie.
Stephen Baxter's Last Contact remains the short story that has stuck with me more than any other I've read.
Ooof. Nice. Getting some pretty heavy 9 Billion Names of God vibes from that one, but that's OK - it's a classic for a reason.
For anyone who's seen the movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey's book is fantastic. IIRC Clarke wrote it as Kubrick made the movie, and they hashed out ideas together.
2010 was also an enjoyable read and a worthy sequel that ties up some of the loose ends from 2001.
If you like Peter Watts, I very much recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution. The Rifters trilogy is also amazing. Also pretty much everything else I've seen from him, including his blog. (Yes, I'm a fan.)
In case you didn't know, you can download a lot of his works from his website.
Oh yes, I'm kinda fan too :) I've read The Island and Giants, and as far as I understand FFR is a prequel to the series? Somehow I missed this book.
I haven't read Giants, I think. The Island is in the same setting as FFR, but it's with different characters, and as far as I can tell, it's not clear if it's even the same ship.
With Peter Watts, I'm never really sure I understand what's going on. But that makes it great re-reading material. I've read Blindsight at at least four times and there are still details I don't get.
I finished Starfish and Maelstrom for the first time recently, and am currently reading βehemoth, I will definitely be going through his back catalogue because these have been fantastic so far.
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. Proper hard sci-fi. One of the most awesome and mind bending books I've ever read. I strongly recommend it.
Don't be put off by the Netflix series, but Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a solid trilogy.
I haven't seen Lem mentioned on here, so I'll recommend *His Master's Voice". If you want a description of how a radical new technology can alter society, this book isn't it. Rather, Lem imagines signal encoded by a distant, unimaginably advanced civilization. Alas, Lem shows how our own civilization is not transformed by this message from the stars, only revealed. Such a brilliant book.
I really enjoyed the Revelation Space series, by Alastair Reynolds. You’ll see recommendations to read them out of order, but I think that’s a mistake. The second is Chasm City, and while it largely is a standalone story, you’ll learn things in it that enrich the later books.
While definitely on the softer side of hard scifi, I've enjoyed the Bobiverse series so far.
Very low spoiler synopsis
The series follows a human-turned-into-a-Von Neumann probe venturing out to the galaxy.
Not 100% sure if it'll land for you but give Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer a try, it's near-future science fiction and a bit more science fantasy than science fiction but it's definitely a blend of the author's ideas and fiction a la Methods of Rationality. As a warning the first couple chapters open with the most magic that the entire series of 4 books has, it's way more grounded in realism after that.
Blondsight happens to be my favorite! I don't know of any novels which are on par however a couple short story collections from Ted Chiang are. Specifically Exhalation and Stories Of Your Life And Others
Citizen Sleeper touches upon multiple topics very well. If you don't mind the format. While not revolutionary in any sense, it's still an awesome read.
But nothing beats Summa Technologiae for me. It just goes through everything. Accelerando spins the big game as a wild party, which is kinda fun, but Lem is slow and methodical as he completely obliterates any and all mysteries, leaving us with simple existential dread and clear choices. Where Accelerando tells us "it's gonna be fine, live up a little", Lem shrugs and leaves us with simple "it's up to us, let's not be idiots".
I still have this cool little video inspired by Golem XIV up, that I've reuploaded without permission many years ago. Give it a watch to get a taste.
One book I rarely see mentioned but really enjoyed is The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. If aliens take it out of the running, it's out, but what it does really well is the repercussions of slower than light travel and relativistic time.
The wiki entry for this book links to SF Masterworks, there are some great classics on that list. You can go to the overviews to see if you think you might like any.
For works on that list you may have preconceptions about:
Neal Asher is my absolute favorite hard sci fi author. Tons of action, gadgets, weapons, humor, and technology. Alastair Reynolds as well. I have read all of their novels, and can't wait for more.
Look up Ben Bova the Orion series and the Grand Tour series are my favorite books
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but I enjoyed the books I read from Charles E Gannon. I read up through Marque of Caine in his bibliography and although the books are definitely more in the thriller vein (think Crichton and the like) they do have a pretty rigorous hard Sci fi bent to them. At least at one point the first book in the series was a free ebook download but I'm not sure if it still is.
If you're in the mood for something quite different, the Black Nerve universe has a great deal of elaborate worldbuilding, including detailed descriptions of the physics of its magic systems.
(All the people and civilizations are bugs and bats and stuff but that's all actually covered in very, very exacting detail along the way, too. It's extremely good xenofiction.)
https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org/black-nerve/
(Did I mention the demi-sentient superintelligent cryptofungus)
I really loved The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt! It's future alien archeology stuff!