Recommend some "hard" sci-fi books in the vein of Andy Weir (The Martian, Project Hail Mary, etc.)?

Cafe Society
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First, the ask: What are some authors or books you’ve personally enjoyed that had an emphasis on the “science” part of sci-fi?

I recently had the chance to pick up Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir’s latest novel after The Martian and Artemis – and absolutely LOVED it. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in decades.

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I especially loved the semi-plausible first contact between the main character (a human) and the alien Rocky, as they built up a shared vocabulary starting from some physics-based building blocks. It wasn’t perfect (more on that in this article), but it was a LOT better than the usual Star Trek/Wars handwaving-away of alien cultures by adding universal translators and some makeup on a bipedal humanoid.

It reminded me a lot of Arrival, and I wish I had the chance to read that book before seeing the movie. Same with The Martian.

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In general, I love that there is a focus on the science & engineering aspects, of characters problem-solving together in a realistic way instead of using The Force or made-up technogizmos indistinguishable from magic. I didn’t know this was a sub-genre of sci-fi. I then picked up Artemis, his previous novel, and finished that in a day. Now I’m hungry for more! Are there are other novels or even narrative nonfiction in a similar vein?

Other sci-fi I’ve read and enjoyed: Michael Crichton, Dune, some Asimov short stories… that’s about all I’ve read, I think? Although I’ve watched (tv & film) and played (video game) a ton of sci-fi, I have barely read any at all. I’m excited to get started, especially if there are other authors with a similar focus on plausible science. I also really enjoy narrative nonfiction in general, everything from the adventure storytelling of Jon Krakauer to the harder science like Seven Daughters of Eve, Jared Diamond, Brief(er) History of Time, etc.

In summary, just looking for more authors and books with a harder focus on science & engineering (as opposed to mundane human cultural issues of power and politics, for example) and believably different “others” (as in aliens or AI who aren’t just boring human stereotypes, but evolved/were designed to meet the challenges of actually alien environments).

I know Dopers are a smart bunch with hopefully less pop-culturey, mass-market tastes, and really looking forward to your suggestions. Thanks!

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You can start with anything by Robert L. Forward.

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Funny you should use the word “mundane”…

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Here are a couple of relatively short lists to get you started. While these lists include many books that I have not personally read and thus cannot vouch for, they pretty well match other lists of recommended hard science fiction that I’ve seen over the years.

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/hard-science-fiction

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You might like Stephen Baxter’s Voyage, which is an alternate history where the Apollo program is extended into a crewed Mars mission. It skirts the edges of plausibility in some ways that someone really knowledgable about spaceflight would take issue with but it does get down into the weeds on technical issues in much the same way as The Martian. Baxter in general is a ‘hard sci-fi’ author with a lot of his conceits at least grounded in quantum mechanics and cosmology although much of his fiction is more far future or alternate reality, and because he was previously an engineer he does understand and present technical details with good accuracy and plausibility.

Stranger

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This isn’t exactly what you were aming for, but you really should try to get your hands on Wayne Barlowe’s artbook Expedition to see an extensively developed alien world. I see that it was republished in 2020. First time that I know of since the 1990 edition.

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Ben Bova’s books are in much the same vein. I’ve read his Mars and liked it, and Venus and didn’t, mostly because the main character of the latter was unlikable, but both were relatively engineering-driven.

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It has been a long time since I read the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson – do they get into the scientific nitty gritty?

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Yes. At least in Red Mars. Plenty of problem-solving using the tech of the day which is mostly a near-term extrapolation of our own.

Although they cheat a bit at the very beginning by assuming self-replicating machinery, so the initial dozen explorer / colonists have an amazing force-multiplier at their disposal. To the author’s credit, he keeps tight bounds on the constants attached to the exponential nature of that, so they don’t magic-wand their way into Paradise in a week of explosive exponential feedback.

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Neale Stephenson’s Seveneves will teach you about orbital dynamics. Like many of his books, the story is lots of fun, and then the end is just kind of there. His Baroque Cycle will teach you about the London sanitation (or lack of), but is not sci-fi.

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Anathem is another good hard sci-fi Stephenson read.

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With some hesitation, I’ll recommend The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey - nine books, starting with Leviathan Wakes, plus a few novellas. It’s fantastic space opera, with some decent science - it takes a while to move within the solar system, gravity works like it should, colonists have realistic problems like air, food and growing up in low gravity. It takes some liberties with rocket design and fuel - I’d put that part of the science on par with the science in Project Hail Mary.

My hesitation is that within this framework, there’s also an aspect with some ancient alien tech that is most definitely not hard science. I loved it, but you might feel differently if you’re looking for pure realism.

Ooof, that was a total slog for me, and I thought it was heavier in religion, linguistics, and philosophy than hard science. I swore to never read Stephenson again after that book (a promise I broke with Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, which I quickly regretted).

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I recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. It does have some politics and sociology as part of the plot, but it remains to this day one of the best depictions of AI emergence, and the science is as hard as it gets, especially for when it was written. Heinlein and his wife actually worked out orbits by hand to ensure accuracy, so that’s the level of detail we are talking about. And it’s a great story.

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I’ve never read that one. Heinlein has been hit and miss for me. I loved Stranger, and I love Job, and then I tried another one and hated it. Maybe I’ll give Mistress a try.

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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is generally considered Heinlein’s best work. That said, when someone loves some Heinlein and hates another, it’s usually Stranger in a Strange Land that they hate, so maybe you have atypical tastes. Or maybe you just had the bad fortune to stumble upon one of his truly horrid books (of which he does have a few).

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It’s my favourite Heinlein. His ‘Juveniles’ range from good to great. ‘Have Space Suit - Will Travel’ is still one of my favorite books. ‘Citizen of the Galaxy’ is an exploration of slavery, power, and sociology in the form of a great mystery story.

“The Rolling Stones” feels a lot like an Andy Weir novel. Or rather, Andy Weir’s novels feel like Heinlein at his more humorous. Definitely hard science fiction, and not that far off where we are today technologically, if you imagine their ship as a repurposed old Starship.

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This suggestion is probably pushing past “hard” sci-fi and into more traditional, but it’s still far harder and more near-now realistic than most: Boundary by Eric Flint. It’s part of a series, and frankly, gets more fantastic elements as it goes on due to the circumstances of the first, but it’s an easy and fun read.

It also shares several fun elements with The Martian, so another reason that it comes to mind easily.

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I heartily second this recommendation. I particularly recommend Dragon’s Egg. @Reply, based on your OP, I think you will love this book. It is one of my all-time favorites, and until Andy Weir came along, it was my quintessential example of a hard science fiction novel.

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I’ll third the recommendation for Robert L. Forward. James P. Hogan had some good hard SF. Same for Jerry Pournelle and Dean Ing.

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I have noticed that some people use the term “hard science fiction” in a narrow sense, to refer specifically to works where the main focus is on (as the OP put it) “the science & engineering aspects, of characters problem-solving together in a realistic way.”

Others use the term more loosely, to refer to science fiction that is realistic rather than fantastic, in the sense that the author has taken care to ensure that everything in the story is compatible with what we know about the laws of nature/physics/etc, even though there are things that go beyond what is currently discovered or currently available. This scientific realism is the background, but not necessarily the focus, of the story.

I do not mean to imply that there are clear boundaries between these two definitions, nor between what is and is not “hard science fiction” according to either one of them.