Hard SF recommendations?

I recently read Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns and enjoyed it. That was the first time I'd heard of Reynolds, but now I'm going to read more of his work.

You may also want to try Robert J. Sawyer. I liked his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (2003), and I loved Mindscan (2005, quite a creepy concept there). His novels are mostly set in present-day to very-near-future. Apparently his current project is a trilogy of novels about a self-aware World Wide Web.... That could be interesting.

Robert Charles Wilson! Definitely. Spin, Chronoliths, and I've got Axis sitting on my to be read shelf, tempting me.

Not sure if this qualifies as "hard sci fi" or not. But if you haven't read Card's Ender's Game, drop everything and get it. lol. I'm not kidding.

Calculating God and Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer. His later stuff is good, too, but those two were by far my favorites. I haven't yet read his earlier novels.

Dale

Tachyon said:

You may also want to try Robert J. Sawyer. I liked his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (2003), and I loved Mindscan (2005, quite a creepy concept there). His novels are mostly set in present-day to very-near-future. Apparently his current project is a trilogy of novels about a self-aware World Wide Web.... That could be interesting.

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Yes, his next one is called Wake, and it's being serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact magazine. The first installment is available now.

Dale

Check out Greg Bear. Eon and Blood Music are two of my favs...

JoNightshade said:

I'm feeling an empty space in my heart lately, and it is because I have not read any hard core sci fi in a long time. I did Asimov, Heinlein, etc. when I was younger, but the last awesome hard SF I read was Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky).

I'm not looking for cyberpunk, and I would prefer newer stuff since it gets dated pretty quickly.

Any recommendations for me?

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At the risk of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs...
Have you read Larry Niven? Protector, Ringworld, A Mote in God's Eye, Neutron Star, and A Gift From Earth are all still current.

Here are some that I have loved:

Blindsight, Peter Watts (scary!)
Appleseed, John Clute (not for the kiddies)
anything at all by Vernor Vinge (I LOVE VV!)
Light, M. John Harrison
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (the most science-y of all SF)
Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson (way more exciting than you would imagine)
Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson (girls rule!)
Postsingular, Rudy Rucker (this one is lots of fun)

It's not newer stuff, but I enjoyed the works of Nancy Kress. I found her Probability series to be very entertaining.

dpaterso said:

<falls off chair> Ringworld is on my list of 10 books I'd choose to swim ashore with if I were shipwrecked.

-Derek

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Hmm. Perhaps Jo meant "on a personal level" - living in SoCal, and all...

One fella I forgot:

David Brin, Sundiver and Startide Rising. Somewhere between space opera and hard science, but Brin himself is an astrophysicist - when he violates a law of nature, he knows it and knows why. And they're both a hell of a lot of fun.

Even though I'm a hard sci-fi fan I've got a soft spot for the uplift books, if only because of how interesting the uplift mechanism is.

Dommo said:

Even though I'm a hard sci-fi fan I've got a soft spot for the uplift books, if only because of how interesting the uplift mechanism is.

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Absolutely; a really fun conceit.
It's the first two books that are the best, though.

I've always been a big fan of hard SF, so I'd be interested in titles of recent stuff too, but some of the stuff mention here is so old I've already read it...

JamieFord said:

Check out Greg Bear. Eon and Blood Music are two of my favs...

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Even though it's not a "recent" book, I read Eon recently and very much enjoyed it.

Something else that comes to mind is Gregory Benford's "Artifact" that I read when it was new, early '80's or so, and I also liked his popular, dare I say even legendary novel "Timescape."

And for something older, if you haven't read it, there's Piers Anthony's "Macroscope." It's actually frustrating, because it shows he can write good SF, but it's hard to blame hom for choosing to write what sells to a wider audience...

How could I forget?

Haldeman's The Forever War is fairly hard SF - the training sequence out beyond Pluto is exceptionally solid.

Have you read Vernor Vinge? If not, do.

Tachyon said:

I recently read Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns and enjoyed it. That was the first time I'd heard of Reynolds, but now I'm going to read more of his work.

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As soon as I saw the title of this thread, I was trying to remember the name of the hard SF author I got into recently. And stone me if it wasn't the first one recommended by someone else.
Anyway, yeah, Reynolds is very good. I read the Revelation Space trilogy (Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap) a few months ago. Definitely highly recommended.

Reynolds' Pushing Ice is also great, and it's a lot nearer-future than most of his works while still being a vast space opera in scope.

Another vote for Reynolds from me.
Also, Richard Morgan writes somewhat hardish SF. It's more cyberpunk than space SF, but it's still worth to check it out.
Maybe even give Charles Stross a try. Far-future SF, and not space opera, though i'm not quite sure i'd classify it as hard SF.
Though none of them is as soft as Startrek or Starwars of course.

Bob Forward wrote Dragon's Egg, about life on a neutron star.

I like Kim Stanley Robinson, too. The Mars series is excellent.

I'd like to suggest Stephen Baxter. Titan is the story of a mission to the moon Titan, using cobbled together bits of present day Shuttle and even Apollo technology, and bits and pieces of previous research hanging around in storage at NASA - and he makes it seem totally plausible. It helps, of course, that he actually was on the astronaut program.