John Varley’s Red Thunder is a pretty good romp; very hard-science with the exception of his ship’s drive, which is very specifically laid out and understandable. His Golden Globe and Steel Beach are also pretty good in that respect, with one exception; miraculous space suits.
Someone, somewhere once said that a science fiction writer gets one free “magic” technology without having to explain it before it becomes space opera. You can have FTL, or force fields, or cloaking devices, or teleportation, or almost any one thing you want, but the minute you shoehorn more than one in, it’s basically fantasy.
I wouldn’t reduce “realistic” to “scientifically sound”; Heinlein’s work is pretty plausible in that area but his characters are rarely believable (though they tend to be fun in their cartoonish simplicity).
In comparison, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake shows a plausible world of rampant genetic engineering, its consequences on society and rich characters.
A great story set in the near[-ish] future, with cataclysmic climate change! Weather (ha, ha) his science is good or not, it’s convincing and amazingly evocative.
I don’t know that the OP would be into Snowcrash. That book isn’t for those who don’t want to suspend some serious disbelief. The only other thing I’ve tried to read by him is Quicksilver. I had to set it aside when Stephenson made a huge pirate battle as boring as a detailed description of water evaporating in the dark. Are his other books any better?
*Friday and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls were also really good. I remember loving * Rocket Ship Galileo as well, but it was the first Sci-Fi that I ever read.
I was coming here to mention Timescape in particular, which has just one not known in this world element. The rest is extremely realistic.
I agree with “Evolution” by Baxter, and would add Titan and the one where they go to Mars, whose name I forgot. That one was particularly interesting because there are a lot of analogs to things that actually happened in Apollo. I liked the Manifold series, but I’m not sure I’d call them realistic. Hard sf yes, but that is different I’m assuming.
Funny you mention it, but the Ender’s Game series was my inspiration for starting this thread. I read the first Ender’s Game and all of the Shadow mini-series first and completely fell in love with the series. Realistic political intrigue in a space-traveling future with a character I could identify with (Peter), what more could one want? I was incredibly excited that I still had four potentially phenomenal books left in the series. I specifically avoided all spoilers and reviews of the books in order to enjoy the surprises that much more.
Then I read Ender in Exile. It was ok, but definitely not as good as the Shadow mini-series. When I hit Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, good lord I barely finished them. To say I was disappointed would be an extreme understatement. Instead of continuing in the vein of the Shadow series, Children of the Mind and Xenocide were just plain awful. Lots of telepathy, an unrealistic deux-ex-machina AI solution, and both chock full of quasi-religious philosophical mumbo-jumbo. I finished Children of the Mind, but only because I had already paid for it and didn’t have anything else on my shelf.
Yeah… I disliked all of the Ender sequels as well, only I disliked all of the “Shadow” series sequels also. I always find it baffling when a good author keeps getting worse. I had the same reaction to Card’s Alvin something-or-other series: great first book (Seventh Son) and increasingly worse sequels. It’s like the guy has some sort of writer’s block that only affects his series.
I stopped at those two, specifically because folks said the series jumped the shark after that. And I have a confession to make: I got them both as Audiobooks on Audible. With the voice acting, they were AWESOME. The got the same voice actors for both books, so listening to Ender’s shadow was like a good conversation with old friends.
Well, either you like Picasso or you don’t . . . Stephenson (like, say, Charles Dickens) takes a long time in telling a story and throws in an awful lot of details. Very Baroque style. But (unlike, say, Harry Turtledove) he manages to make that work and present a fast-paced, exciting story. YMMV.
Admittedly, I didn’t enjoy the book. Quite a lot of science fiction deals with fascist thinking but this one seemed to be an endorsement … made me uncomfortable.
Sister and sociopath brother taking over the world aspects of Ender’s game. I was referring to the hard science parts of space tactics, game simulation, and training to find a malleable, yet potentially superior tactician, was interesting to me.
Also keep in mind it was written in 1985…His extrapolation of the technologies involved was pretty good.
Others by Arthur C. Clarke I’d like to recommend are Earthlight, The Fountains of Paradise, The Songs of Distant Earth,The Deep Range and any of his short story collections. They are all pretty hard SF. “Tales of the White Hart” is a bit tongue in cheek, but nevertheless good science fiction.
IIRC, Stu had to bribe the local judge/sheriff to arrest Manny, in order to create a cause celebre on Luna. The fact that local prejudice leaned his way helped; but this was not a chance result.
I like his newer climate change trilogy, starting with “Forty Signs of Rain”. Reading “Fifty Degrees Below” with the current weather patterns is a little more realistic than I generally want.
The new edition of “Between the Strokes of Night” by Charles Sheffield is also pretty good. Only part of it takes place in the near future, with the story reaching in to the very far future, but it feels very realistic.