hard sci fi books

Cafe Society
21

Voice of the Whirlwind has a similar setup, but it does have some (slow) inter-system travel and some (fairly realistic) aliens, so I left it out. Even though it’s awesome. There’s a similar subplot in Hardwired, as well, though it’s not explored very much.

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Plus, the protaganist is both named Steward and is awesome. How often do those particular venn diagrams interact?

22

Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg and Rocheworld books.

23

I recently got into the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. Use Of Weapons is a particularly wonderful read, though I’d probably start with Consider Phlebas if you haven’t read any Culture stuff yet. Details can be found here. You can see info on the Culture directly here to see if it is what you are looking for.