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What's your favorite hard science fiction novel?
I'm a big fan of Peter Watts (Blindsight, Echopraxia) and Greg Egan (Schild's Ladder, Diaspora) and always looking for more to read. That said I find myself a little bit difficult sometimes as I'm not really a fan of massive scope stuff like operas or anything too dated. Granted I really haven't given either of the latter much of a chance as I think I just prefer tight, focused stories with a small cast of characters.
I recently started The Quantum Thief and am liking certain aspects of it but you're really thrown into a blizzard with that one.
I've said this a surprisingly large number of times around here (we seem to have quite a population of sci-fi readers, which is wonderful), but The Expanse series of books is really good hard sci-fi, even better than the show in my opinion.
I found The Expanse books to be a teensy bit derivative and predictable. They're not bad, but other people have written similar stories rather better. Neal Asher, for example, does the whole protomolecule/hegemonic nanotech thing with his "Jain" technology and he's a rather better writer than Corey.
The Expanse books are definitely more enjoyable than the TV show but I probably wouldn't put them at the top of a list of things to read.
I love the Expanse, but you're totally right. You feel like you're reading a movie or TV show. It's a fantastic page turner and a blast to read, but yeah, it's not top quality writing. It reminds me of Michael Crichton to be honest. Excellent writing if you just want to escape into a book and have fun. The book shouldn't be considered hard sci-fi though, I mean they have orbital mechanics down and possibly habitat science as well, but it isn't focused too much on the science aspect of it.
I'm pretty sure that Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (aka James S A Corey) wrote Leviathan Wakes with every intent to get it adapted to TV, because that's where the serious money is. I'm 100% sure their elevator pitch was just five words: "Game of Thrones in space".
Also I don't think it's co-incidence that Franck works for George RR Martin and Abraham is a TV producer. I'm not saying any of that is necessarily a bad thing, of course. Writing a book to get it on TV is a smart move and if you have connections in the industry it only makes sense to use them.
You're right that they're fun though. Fluff, but fun fluff. There are far worse books around.
I'll agree with you that they can be a bit predictable; I recommend them so highly mostly because I haven't come across much else in their vein. Adding Asher's books to my list.
I have seen this mentioned in several places. I devoured books by Isaac Asimov (all foundations and all robots series). Do you think The Expanse would be good for me?
I've actually never read any of Asimov's writing, aside from "The Last Question" (they're all on my list, just haven't gotten to them yet), but I think anyone who enjoys sci-fi writing would probably like The Expanse.
Seconding Asimov. I've been re-reading his best robots short stories, and he is such a superb story teller.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is an example of one I found a bit dated and had a hard time getting into. Refurbished shuttle external tanks as habitats isn't really current.
For what it's worth I know it's silly, maybe I'll give it another go.
That may be. I read them about 20 years ago. All science fiction tends to get a little dated here and there. I reread Dune recently and his fascination with plastics is pretty funny. But I'd urge you to finish The Mars Trilogy. It's a great achievement of imagination and yet it feels completely real. The politics and the building of society from scratch on a new planet were absolutely fascinating.
After really enjoying this aspect of Seveneves recently I'll definitely give it another go. Thanks!
My vote here for Blindsight as well, one of my favorite books of lately. started Echipraxia but didn't finish it, not sure why, maybe too vampiry, I found it confusing also. But I'll probably give it another chance.
Also, The three body problem, absolutely fantastic in my opinion, and looking forward to the Amazon adaptation. I've only read the first one so far, but I'll come to read the rest of the trilogy soon, hopefully.
Edit: Also, I think you should add some tags to the topic (you can do it after publishing as well), that will probably help in creating a ~scifi group at some point.
I think I'm definitely tracking with what you felt going from Blindsight to Echopraxia. Blindsight just felt so much more tight and distilled whereas Echopraxia feels more like you're caught in the wake of events you and the main character don't understand. That said I think it's definitely worth giving a second go depending on how far you got. Did you make it to Portia?
I started The Three Body Problem but quickly got turned off by some implausability near the beginning but I think I'll give it another go.
Umm, I don't really remember how far I got... I think they jumped into a small spaceship and everything was gooey or something? Lol, I have terrible memory. Blindsight was definitely tighter, yes. And I like gloomy.
What implausibility are you referring to in TTBP? I'm not into the field so everything sounds just plausible enough for me.
I'm also reading Embassytown and liking it (I like everything related to language and consciousness in sci-fi, let me know if you have suggestions) although I haven't been reading much lately so I have to pick it up again. Not sure if it can be considered very hard sci-fi, though.
Diaspora is definitely on my to-read list.
And add some tags!
Okay, here's my take on Blindpraxia. If the first one is dense and thematically opaque, the second starts by taking off the training wheels and finishes by knifing you in the stomach. I suggest doing three things.
First, read this as an introduction (few light spoilers) and then read the novel completely through. Second, after you finish, read the index at the end and refer back to the pages to grasp the story better. The tame tornado seemed like complete trash until I read the references about it being real (if not at that scale). Third, read the last couple chapters again, then look up discussions about what it means. You'll still have probably missed stuff.
I don't think you can really accomplish writing a novel that shows how an ultra-superhuman intelligence thinks, but that gets about as close as possible. I also don't agree with all his claims, like the ones about conscientiousness being an evolutionary backwater/deadend, or that free will is an illusion, but his writing did make me question my beliefs.
Thanks, gksu. I'll be sure to do that. I like the stomach-knifing and since I really enjoyed the first book, I definitely want to go on and "suffer" the second one. Also, English is not my native language and sometimes the style can make me dizzy, that's probably why I was having a hard time reading Echo. But hey, I read through Accelerando, so I guess I can overcome the difficulty.
I kind of do. I am actually reading The Ego Tunnel, which was one of the main references in Blindsight and liking it. Although there's a lot I don't understand and I've stopped reading it for a few weeks now, so yeah, another thing I have to pick up again. About free will, I don't remember the first book dealing with it that much, but I definitely agree it's an illusion, so I'm on board already.
I think @gksu absolutely nailed it with his reply in regards to Echopraxia.
As to TTBP oh man I don't know if I remember. Something about old rumors of a military installation causing... illnesses? Near the beginning.
As far as Egan goes I think my favorite is Schild's Ladder. Diaspora took me a bit of effort to get into but eventually plots a beautiful, perfectly exponential curve of mind meltiness. Permutation City has a particular focus on consciousness but I didn't really get into it (though most agree it's one of his best, so who knows)
Tags added! (Kind of went overboard at first but cut it down to a reasonable count)
Haha, ok, I don't really remember anything about an illness or anything similar, so I don't think it was very relevant all in all. In any case, it doesn't sound that implausible.
I'll check the recommendations, thanks. And tags look good!
+1 for Embassytown. One of the most enjoyable random SF books I've been recommended in quite some time
I'm on the book after Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest. I loved TBP, I thought it was a refreshingly well done and unique. I'm having a little more trouble with the next book, but I haven't given up on it yet I think it may be because it's a difference translator than the first.
Yes, it might be. Also the structure, no titles, and so many characters...
I've read all three, and found it hard to relate to in many parts. I can't decide if it is due to a difference in culture, or if he just writes unrealistic characters. Many of them, and even humanity as a whole, seem to act in ways that go from weird to borderline retarded.
But still, the books are very unique, and have some very interesting concepts.
I just reread Egan's The Clockwork Rocket last week.
Greg Egan is one of my favorite authors (and I think Diaspora is maybe his best book), but his work is pretty weird. Some of his stuff is super dark and creeps me out; lots of the stories in Axiomatic were terrifying, and I never finished Distress. The whole Clockwork Rocket Orthogonal trilogy has a completely different tone: it wants to be young adult sci-fi, for young adults who are into relativistic spaceflight and transhumanist feminism. And the ending of Permutation City (which is a book I still recommend and don't want to spoil) isn't really hard sci-fi at all.
I read Blindsight, and it was also weirdly dark. I mean, it's one thing to point out that people are made out of cells and meat and electrical brain activity, but the overall tone was a bit too "lol you thought you had dignity" for me. It was too pessimistic and not at all constructive. Compare to Egan, where there's better than even odds that by the end of any given book the characters will have constructed their way out of the universe.
I tried to read The Quantum Thief, but I was concerned it was going a bit too much in the Blindsight direction, and never really got too far into it. Is that where it was headed?
As far as recommendations, I'm a big fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga books. They're hard sci-fi, in the sense that nobody's running around with psychic powers communing with aliens or whatever, but they're also lighter in tone than a lot of stuff out there, because the characters are all too fun to kill off. It is mostly driven by a relatively small group of characters, with a rotating cast of villains and other contacts.
I also just read the novella All Systems Red, by Martha Wells, which starts with the sort of premise that Greg Egan or Peter Watts might take in a horrifying direction and turns it into something much sweeter and more interesting.
The Quantum Thief was by no means as dark ended as Blindsight. Where Blindsight was definitely an almost Outer Limits style story, The Quantum Thief is a little more like Diamond Age mixed with Altered Carbon, somewhat pessimistic but not hopeless.
I picked up a Diamond Age used hardcover in a local bookshop but I haven't started it. Should I?
I enjoyed it, the story has good depth and twist you may not see coming.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
My favourite is probably Neuromancer by William Gibson. It was incredibly revolutionary at the time, basically inventing the idea of cyberspace. Gibson's descriptions completely draw me into that world. One of my favourite books ever, it came out in 1984 and it hasn't aged a day.
Does anyone else have any similar recommendations that I might like?
I've not long finished reading Idoru. It's a fun read, but is very much of its time with references and predictions of tech advancement. There was a BBC radio adaptation of Pattern Recognition that worked quite well. Unfortunately it's no longer available on iPlayer, but could probably be found somewhere.
Embassytown by China Mieville -- I've read a bunch of his work and this one sticks out as the best to my eye. It's the fabulous intersection of language, sci-fi and a truly alien mind.
I love this book so hard. It's definitely one of my top five books of all time. Meiville is one of my favourite authors and this is his best book by far.
I'm not sure I'd called hard sci-fi though.
Hmm, I suppose that's true -- particularly (while only briefly mentioned IIRC) the mode of travel practiced by the Immersers is very much "soft" sci-fi.
But on the other hand, the development of the language of the Ariekei and it's effect on their culture is intricately imagined and (I think) would appeal to most hard sci-fi fans out there.
In either case, I agree it's a fantastic book :)
It's not my favourite (as they have been mentioned) and I'm not really sure if it's really considered Hard SF or if it's more of a futurism thought experiment on interplanetary and asteroid colonization, transhumanism, quantum computing and AI, but 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson had me pretty captivated.
For what it's worth I almost didn't finish Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. The audiobook narration wasn't too good and apparently a lot of people didn't like the second half but I ended up switching over to text and absolutely loved it.
Goes from present day to an extrapolation 5000 years into the future and has some of the coolest worldbuilding I've seen with some extremely cool mariage of orbital mechanics and engineering.
I read Seveneves recently, and overall I did like it, but I found it tedious to read in many places. The books long length didn't help either.
What did you like about it?
I agree it was a bit tedious at times but I didn't find it too bad. I think going through the first half as an audiobook might have been helpful as it allowed me to zone out when needed.
~ doesn't seem to have spoiler formatting so I'll keep this vacue: I really liked the cultural extrapolation post-bottleneck as well as the ring and the eye. The moment right after the truck goes missing is definitely up there as well.
I loved Seveneves. I’ve loved almost all the Stephenson I’ve read, and my favourite thing about him is that he can be shamelessly didactic (like with the inclusion of whole section of endnotes in Anathem that are literally just geometry lessons) and he trusts you to stick with him, and it’s worth it.
Also, I kind of love that he obviously is invested in working on his weaknesses as a writer. Like, two of the biggest criticisms of him that I’ve heard are his sometimes coldly unemotional treatment of plot, and that his women are... not believable characters pretty much ever. I am in the probably minority of ardent Stephenson fans who are female, and honestly I do not care at all that most of his characters are thinly disguised versions of himself. But I gotta respect him for being like “heh I’ll show ‘em” and writing a book where everyone on earth dies but seven ladies, in a scene that was genuinely heart-wrenching. I think I actually cried when Earth was destroyed, and then stopped in surprise that I was crying at something freaking Neal Stephenson wrote.
Tell me about it, that last morse code exchange broke my heart. I had to put the book down for a few seconds.
A Deepness in the Sky : Vernor Vinge
I just recently got into sci-fi but Ender's game is an amazing book. I don't read often but that thing had me hooked from the very beginning!
Haven't read it but I've heard good things!
In case you were wondering hard science fiction is a subgenre that usually focuses on scientific plausibility and technical detail.
What I particularly like about it is it's basically a delivery mechanism interesting science, an idea wrapped in a narrative.
Yes that's definitely what got me into the book! I enjoy that these authors apply a lot a theoretical physic that we aren't capable of implementing today. All the different speculation and application is quite interesting!
Have you read any of the rest of the books surrounding Ender's Game? There's a decent number of them and most are quite interesting, if a little bit weird at times.
I've read the entire series including the parallel novels. I really liked them and would say I prefer enders shadow to game but the shadow series suffers from diminishing returns quite rapidly.
Now however I have a hard time recommending any of them to anyone because I don't want to see money going towards the extreme religious/political causes the author supports.
Yeah, the shadow series drops off quickly (I did like Shadows in Flight though). I'd never heard about Orson Scott Card's political stuff before, but after reading a bit of what's out there about that I kinda agree with you that I don't really want to support him by buying more of his books.
I'd argue this isn't Hard SF really. Also I was sadly very put off by the authors later rampant homophobia :(
I enjoyed it when I first read it though.
That's odd. Don't parts of the book imply Ender had relations with other guys?
Shoutout to Greg Egan. Such a prolific writer with such a wide range of original ideas. Permutation City is still a book I think about regularly
Since I'm a huge fan of first contact stories, my go to recommendation for hard sci-fi is always The Mote in God's Eye - one of the best, most thrilling depiction of an alien race which is so similar to us yet not. Another, albiet less known book is The Ring of Charon by Roger McBride Allen - more relevant than ever now with LIGO's discovery of gravity waves. It is the first book I've read in which the aliens are so utterly different from us, you can very barely understand what they are, let alone relate to them
Oh man I'm a sucker for the First Contact concept, will definitely be checking these out, thanks!
Have you read Blindsight? Part of why I'm practically evangelical with that book is precisely because of how alien the aliens are.
Can't say that I have. I'll be checking it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
If you remember to reply back I'd love to hear your thoughts on it considering your penchant for the trope. Enjoy.
Rendezvous with Rama, a classic Arthur C. Clarke novel about humanity's brief contact with a completely alien spacecraft that's just passing through our solar system.
Hard sci-fi?
Stephen Baxter. His Xeelee Sequence is one of the greatest of all time. It's not quite as hard as Egan - Baxter never quite goes as far as have actual lectures on advanced theoretical physics - but it's still pretty freakin' granite-like. Also there is a LOT of it and I like long series of books.
I recently read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky which was pretty hard and really enjoyable. The genre is often full of physicists but Tchaikovsky has a biology background (similar to Watts) so he goes in some interesting directions. Well worth a read if you get the chance.
Hard SF or not, I really enjoyed Accelerando by Charles Stross. Although dated now, the sheer bravado and speed of the imagery really did capture for me the feel of the Singularity.
It may not fall into the category of Science Fiction as it is more Tom Clancy-esque, but I really enjoyed Ghost Fleet. It was a tad alarmist when seen as a warning for what the future may hold, but the book presents some pretty interesting examples of what future tech could look like in warfare between major nations.
I really enjoyed Singularity by Bill DeSmedt
I enjoy gritty, practical Sci-Fi so take that as it is. To me it had elements of Noir, Aeon Flux, and 24 (the show). Very entertaining and well written.
Really enjoyed The Gibraltar Trilogy from Michael McCollum. Definitely hard sci-fi, a great concept, and most importantly, a completed trilogy you won't have to wait on the author to finish.
http://www.scifi-az.com/gibraltar-series.html
I don’t think it’s his best by Vonneguts Slapstick sucked me in and was the first book since my childhood that I blew through in a single day. I consider Cats Cradle his best but Slapstick will always have a special place to me.
I recently finished the Three Body trilogy. Great set of novels by a Chinese author, Liu Cixin, but translated into English. Won the Hugo Award for best novel a few years ago. I enjoyed reading something from an author outside of immediate culture. I will add that the names can trip you up if you aren't careful.
The trilogy name is the same as the first book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)
Only read the first one so far (in Chinese, lol, with help of the translation and a lot of dictionary, though) and I loved it. I started the second one but it was more difficult to follow (even in English, but the translator is different), I liked the structure of the first one better.
I think the trilogy is called "Remembrance of Earth's Past", though.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification on the trilogy name!
I enjoy Ian McDonald's writing a lot. Particularly Brasyl and the Luna books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McDonald_(British_author)
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mcdonald_ian
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/31/17175806/ian-mcdonald-time-was-time-travel-science-fiction-romance-excerpt
I'm not sure I can pick a favourite book though.
Ed: Alastair Reynolds writes some good stuff as well.
Do the Halo novels count?
Protector: Larry Niven
Proteus in the Underworld by Charles Sheffield
It might be because it was really an introduction to scifi for me, but I have such a soft spot for this book.
Neuromancer is a classic. The whole Sprawl Trilogy is actually great. Both Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive expand on the original in a great way and offer a satisfying conclusion to the whole narrative. I can't remember which is my favorite, though. I think I remember liking Mona Lisa Overdrive the most because it had a huge scale and its characters were compelling.
I really love the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card. It's what first brought me into science fiction, and what made it my favorite genre. It kind of shows what (in my opinion) might happen if we ever met an alien race.
If you do give it a try, and I hope you do, please let me know if you enjoyed it!
'Heart of the Comet' by David Brin and Gregory Benford. It's about an expedition to Halley's Comet (published to coincide with that comet's appearance in 1986). It's very heavy on biology, but with some AI stuff thrown in. It's a long-standing favourite of mine, which I've read and re-read repeatedly.
Pretty much anything by Asimov is great.