There was a magazine called Space Science Fiction published in the 1950s.
(I just indexed the magazine shown in the link on Saturday, so it was fresh in my mind.)
Helpful, I know.
More usefully, Stephen Baxter has two that might suit. Voyage is about a trip to Mars in an Apollo capsule in an alternate world where JFK lived. It is actually very similar to the true story of Apollo. Titan is a darker story of a trip to Titan on a space shuttle.
How about John Varley’s Red Thunder? Less than twenty years old, all takes places on Earth, Mars, or points between, and right in your length criterion. Four college-age kids and a washed out astronaut go to Mars. All of the science is excellent except for the drive, which works, more or less, by magic. It reads like a love letter to Heinlein’s juveniles. Great stuff.
You can try Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gap Cycle - it takes place almost completely in space, and involves an impressive amount of space-to-space combat. The world-building is very good, and it even makes some nods in the direction of actual physics.
That’s said, the characters and prose are excessively Donaldsonian, even more so than usual. If you’ve read him before, you know what that means, and if you haven’t, consider yourself warned.
(Incidentally, the series features two of the best book names in the history of SF:* A Dark and Hungry God Arises* and This Day All Gods Dies. You see, it’s actually a retelling of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In space.).
A little old (1972), but there is no better choice than Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
What? It was published in 1934!
I read Axis and thought it was pretty good, but not as amazing as Spin. I didn’t know there was a third; thanks! In any case, Spin works as a stand-alone novel, which is one of the best things a first book in a trilogy can do :).
Am I missing a joke? Red Thunder is from 2003. Or are you commenting on the fact that it was deliberately written in the style of one of Heinlein’s juveniles?
That book seems weird-which is just how I like them.Thanks for the suggestion!
Yeah,it seems like a lot of people like that book.As far as Clarke books go,is Fountains of Paradise any good?(I’m not sure if that book was published after 1980,and it may be over 500 pages long,so it might not follow my own guidelines.I don’t know.But anyway,it’s gotten pretty good reviews.)
‘Red Ken’ wrote a book with a lot of libertarianism? I can’t imagine he was in favor of it. That sounds boggling, but you make it sound like an interesting book; I’ll have to check it out.
For the OP, I like ‘Galactic North’ from Alastair Reynolds. It’s a book of short stories/novellas set in the Solar System (and beyond) of 2-300 years from now: e.g., Mars and Europa are colonized. The first couple of stories are set in the Solar System, before humanity figures out interstellar sublight drives. He gets dark. The stories aren’t individually 100-500 pages long, but the ones dealing with the Solar System only, combine to that length, I think.
A longer novel from him, also set in the Solar System (but a different history) is Pushing Ice. I liked both quite a bit. He tends fairly hard on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
Fountains of Paradise (1979) is very good also, IMHO. I’m not entirely sure it would be your cup of tea, though, as it focuses on science and engineering more than maybe any others of Clarke’s books. Still, building an elevator to space is a really fantastic concept and he does a terrific job imagining it.
FYI, almost all of Clarke’s work is pretty firmly rooted in real science and in the laws of physics as we understand them. He’s a great storyteller, but he’s not your go to guy for swashbuckling adventure yarns.
Well,I guess 1979 is close enough.
Anyway,it might be worth checking out FOP,even if it is technical,because there aren’t many other places where you can read about an elevator into space.
Thanks for all the help.The 2nd paragraph of your post was especially helpful.
S M Stirling began his “Lords of Creation” series in 2006. There are two novels so far, plus a couple of stories. It’s set in an alternate Solar System, in which Venus & Mars are quite different. What if the Cold War military budgets had been channeled into serious interplanetary exploration?
From the acknowledgments to The Sky People, set on a Venus inhabited by sabre tooth cats, pterodactyls, brutish subhumans & beautiful warrior princesses:
In The Courts of The Crimson Kings takes us to Mars:
Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds came out at the same time as Fountains of Paradise, and is also about building a Space Elevator. In fact, Clarke wrote a Foreword for Shweffield’s book pointing out the (often eeerie) similarities, and absolving Sheffield of plagiarism – the similsarities are due to “convergent evolution” of two writers describing the same situation, and being so similar that the Chief Engineers have the same background, and both name the Elevator “spider”. But the stories still diverge considerably in other aspects, and Clarke doubts the feasibility of Sheffield’s anchoring process for the elevator.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know about Sheffield’s book.
Is Sheffield’s book any good?
I liked it. It has some intriguing notions (a giant water balloon as a satellite!), but isn’t as technologically sound as Clarke’s. I prefer Clarke’s writing to Sheffield’s, as well.
Not only is it written in the style of Heinlein’s juveniles in general, it’s kind of a rip-off of Rocket Ship Galileo in particular. If I were making that joke, though, I’d have said 1947, the year that RSG was published. Varley does dedicate the book to RAH in the foreword, though.