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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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Holy crap, did you ever actually get to meet Greg Bear?
He's one of my favourite authors. First sci fi I ever read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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.
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