I’m moving into my slow time at work which means more time for reading. What are your suggestions for recent “hard” sci-fi books to read? Hopefully books of a substantial length with lots of science!
Here is the thread I started last year on the same topic.
Stephen Baxter is pretty hard as far as sci-fi goes, to my taste . Can I recommend Iain M. Banks though? He’s got too much empathy for his characters (quite a few of whom are machines) to be really hard, but well worth reading in any case.
Vernor Vinge, who wrote one of the first, if not the first, SF short stories about the Internet (I believe the first, and I believe it predated the Internet) writes excellent hard SF. Try his award winning novel “A Light Upon The Deep” which postulates with an interstellar internet.
Robert Metzger and Wil McCarthy are two writers who came on the scene this decade who write extremely hard, science-oriented sf.
I’m reading Gridlinked by Neal Asher now. Very good stuff, definitely on a par with Iain Banks.
Speaking of, I read The Algebraist by Iain Banks recently. About an alien civilization that exists in gas giants, humanity’s interactions with them, and a mystery. Really truly great stuff. Very highly recommended.
I believe it’s A Fire Upon the Deep. And yes, it’s really good. I’d also suggest Marooned in Realtime, which is truly mind-blowing.
That’s “A Fire Upon the Deep”. Good book. “A Deepness in the Sky” is quite good too.
I like his “Zones of Thought” universe (embodied in the above books).
The core of the galaxy consists of the unthinking depths where sentience cannot exist.
In the next shell outside the core, is the Slow Zone where nothing can exceed lightspeed and computers cannot achieve true sentience (BTW, Earth is stuck here).
Next, in the Beyond, communications exceed lightspeed, as does space travel, and computers can achieve sentience. A galaxy-wide (for the Beyond) internet, with instant communications, is available for a small fee.
Finally, outside the Beyond is the Transcendence, where sentient beings may attain godlike powers and insights, and either leave the universe, or try to destroy it, or both.
It is indeed A Fire Upon the Deep. A Deepness in the Sky is set in the same universe. One of the items/abilities in that book fascinates me…and is possibly the scariest thing I’ve ever read. The most recent novel of his that I’ve read is Rainbows End, which is set on future Earth. Almost nobody in that future uses computers the way we do, instead most people wear their connections and computers.
John Varley writes some hard SF too, though I think that he hasn’t had a book out in a year or so. Red Lightning was his most recent book that I know of, and it came out a couple of years ago.
L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future series generally has some good hard SF in its collections, as well as some well done fantasy. It’s a story and illustration contest, with the winners and runners-up published. Sometimes I find a story that’s not entirely to my liking in a collection, but on the most part, I feel that the anthologies are a very good buy.
All this based on the premise that the laws of physics behave differently depending upon how far away from galactic center you are. When I got my head around that, is about when my brain exploded. Good stuff. 
It’s mentioned by one of the talking ferns that the neighbor galaxies have their own Zones of Thought. (Was it based on gravity? Or some other effect of proximity to supermassive black holes?) I’d love to see some serious website about this setting. Maybe a MMORPG. Probably the only fanfic I’ll ever read will be set in the Zones of Thought.
Back to the OP, I don’t have anything to contribute, I tend to go back and re-read old Niven and Asimov, though I am currently looking for new material and will be watching this thread with much interest.
I just finished “Rainbows End” Set in San Diego around 2025, it’s definitely worth a read.
I picked this up a few weeks ago but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Recently published though not recently written. It has 60 pages of technical notes at the end.
I disagree on “anything by Allen Steele.” While most of his stuff (Orbital Decay and related works and so on) probably would qualify as hard sci-fi, I think that the Coyote series doesn’t qualify. His world-building stinks in the Coyote series and it’s all just a place to hang three books (almost all of which is short stories and novellas previously published in Asimov’s) worth of social commentary.
I’m a big fan of Charles Sheffield.
McCarthy’s “the Fall of Sirius” and “Collapsium” were both excellent, hard SF reads. I need to get a copy of Metzger’s Cusp.
Susan R. Matthews Jurisdiction series leans towards the Military SF axis a bit more than towards hard SF, but what I’ve read of it is still plenty hard.
Peter Watts writes fantastic, and very dark, hard science fiction. His latest novel, Blindsight, is up for a Hugo - and he’s released it under a Creative Commons license on his website, along with two earlier novels and a bunch of short stories. Watts Backlist
And of course, you can also buy dead-tree versions of his stuff on Amazon if you want.
FWIW, this is the first time I’ve heard somebody say something about Allen Steele’s “Coyote” books that wasn’t praise. One of these days I’ll get around to reading them.
I’m currently re-reading John Cramer’s book Einstein’s Bridge. It’s good. I’ve heard his previous book, Twistor, is even better. Evidently, Cramer is a well-known physicist who came up with the transactional interpretation of QM – which I read about in Robert Sawyer’s book Flashforward and had no idea that the guy he was talking about was the author of the fascinating Einstein’s Bridge book I’d read a couple years before.
Well, here’s a second one.
They weren’t great.
As stories they weren’t terrible. But nothing exceptional at all.
As hard SF, they sucked.
I came in to mention Peter Watts, but Mr. Excellent beat me to it. 
His books tend to be a little dark, but are consistently pretty interesting. Blindsight is a first contact novel, with a bit of a twist. Good stuff.
“A Logic Named Joe,” by Murray Leinster (1946) is sometimes cited as the first SF prediction of the Internet.