Among Alfred Bester’s many other great achievements, he also coined the Green Lantern’s oath when he was writing for the comics.
But I have to carp and say that again the vast majority of these titles are not hard sf and indeed some are about as far from hard sf as one can imagine and still be in the genre. For example, there’s no science to speak of in The Stars My Destination. It’s a planetary space opera that features front and center the scientifically impossible feature of teleportation. But of course that doesn’t detract from the value of the novel.
From wikipedia: “Hard science fiction, or “Hard SF,” is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific accuracy.”
Yeah, I tossed out a bunch of stuff I’ve enjoyed in the last few years and qualified the recommendation I did make based on that limitation. The best example I can think of for hard sci-fi in the last few years would be The Martian, because real hard sci-fi can’t really leave the solar system. Move a level up and you have a story like The Cold Equations, which turns on the harsh realities of physics but allows for interstellar travel within a human lifetime. One step up from that and you have my recommendation, which allows for FTL communication but not FTL travel (among other things, I included it because a common hard sci-fi theme is working around the limitations of the physical laws of the universe).
I suppose the question is just how much speculation can you tolerate in your speculative fiction?
I have a schizophrenic view of it, really. If enjoyable SF turns out to be hard SF, I like it better for that reason because that makes the story seem more possible to me, which is a plus. But on the other hand, none of my favorite SF stories are hard.
I think that’s a different axis. Greg Egan is very obviously hard science fiction IMO, but he often goes way way outside the solar system. But it’s grounded in more scientific and mathematical realities than many books that stay on Mars or whatever.
His books are just straight up good SF. Ripping yarns. Its really my issue that I cant divorce the authors politics from my enjoyment of them, not his. If it doesn’t bother you I would say go for it.
I’ve missed some great conversation in this thread!
I’d like to cast votes in favor of The Mars trilogy, as well as Greg Egan’s books, which I’ve been a big fan of since I read his short story “Dust”, which I think became the basis for “Permutation City”. Also, a shoutout to Gibson for his most recent book “The Peripheral”, which was a real return to form for him. There’s a lot of new words he invented in that book, and part of the fun is trying to decipher them from the context (reminds me a bit of reading Irvine Welsh, though in a different way.) It’s a little hard going in the first 50 or so pages, but it begins to click quickly, and turns into a really interesting story.
Since this series hasn’t been mentioned yet, I’d also throw in a recommendation for “Chung Kuo” by David Wingrove. It’s a bit of an alternate history story, where China rises to power over the rest of the world and wipes out all other cultures. Along with the incredibly dense world and character building, there’s a great mix of eastern philosophy and thoughts in the books that I really enjoyed. Some of the ideas like wu wei (“the action of non-action”) have stuck with me for since I read the books many years ago.
I liked The Chung Kuo books but man did they fizzle out at the end. As I recall the master plan of one of the villains in the last book involved infecting people with a venereal disease that made people glow in the dark.
The last Chung Kuo book was pretty freakin’ awful (and yet I wanted more, as the series never quite finished.) That said, I think that most of the series is packed with so many ideas, characters, and a fascinating world to “live” in that it’s worth reading the rest of the books.
I’m not sure these all count as hard SF, but I have tried reading stuff by (going by my notes) Kim Stanley Robinson, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Watts, Yoon Ha Lee and Adrian Tchaikovsky, and have found them to be mostly boring. Maybe I will try re-reading them at some point in the future.
