This isn’t exactly what the term “mundane” is used here for, but since Crichton was mentioned, I’ve always wanted a version of Jurassic Park (maybe as a TV show) where nothing goes catastrophically wrong, and the characters have to deal with the more mundane aspects of running a dinosaur park.
The Kajiu Preservation Society (by John Scalzi) might scratch that itch
The Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness page on TVTropes discusses this in some detail. Named after the mineral hardness guy they have six degrees of hardness, 1. being Science in Genre Only: The work is unambiguously set in the literary genre of Science Fiction, but scientific it is not. and 6. being Real Life (a.k.a. Fiction in Genre Only): A Shared Universe which spawned its own genre, known as “Non-Fiction”
What most people consider hard science fiction is 5. Speculative Science, Forward’s Rocheworld and Heinlein’s The Moon is a Hard Mistress specifically mentioned as examples and placing Weir’s The Martian in a sub-category, 5.5 Futurology.
For my money, it is hard to beat Robert J. Sawyer. Of his works I have read, the softest is 4. One Big Lie – e.g. FTL travel – yet he explores the human condition. For example, in Rollback, a multi-billionaire is funding SETI and the project gets a hit, a message from an alien civilization 40 lightyears away. It is in the form of a puzzle which is revealed to the world so anyone can try to solve it and (only) a Canadian astronomer succeeds. A reply is sent and the billionaire undergoes a rollback procedure, costing billions, to extend his life so he’ll be around when the response comes back some 80 years hence. He wants rollback performed on the astronomer as well, in case it’s another puzzle, but she refuses unless her beloved husband get one too.
Spoiler
The procedure works on the billionaire and the husband, but not on her, leaving the husband in a physically 25-year old body and the astronomer with a normal lifespan.
Charles Stross’s book Neptune’s Brood has an interstellar reach, but there is no faster than light travel. I think there is slow interstellar sleep ship type travel, but I might be misremembering. The only thing that generally travels between stars is information, and that at the speed of light. The book is primarily about what sort of economic system could work in such a society.
It is a sequel, but thousands of years in the future, and with none of the same characters as his earlier Saturn’s Children book.
They are definitely hard sci-fi.
Some that have hard sci-fi elements, but are primarily about the characters are Martha Well’s Murderbot series.
Both of those series have in common that the primary magic (to us) technology is artificial intelligence.
I think Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series, starting with We Are Legion (We are Bob) has a similar feel to Weir’s Sci-Fi. It stars a guy from our present time who dies and wakes up as an AI construct of himself 150 years or so in the future. He’s tasked with becoming a Von Neumann probe, heading out into the galaxy with matter printers and a reactionless drive starship but otherwise limited by conventional physics. The series gets softer sci-fi wise as it goes on, but if you’re interested in competent characters using logic and science to cleverly solve problems then Bob’s your uncle.
Although I read and enjoyed Mission of Gravity many years ago, it really doesn’t gel with current ideas of planetary science. A planet 16 times as massive as Jupiter would be regarded nowadays as a brown dwarf, and almost certainly be covered in a thick, hot hydrogen/helium atmosphere and a layer of metallic hydrogen. Not quite what Clement described.
I don’t think the planet in Mission of Gravity was 16 times the mass of Jupiter. It had a higher surface gravity, but that’s not the same thing, since it also depends on density and shape. As a rocky planet, it was significantly denser than Jupiter, and its freakish shape also worked in its favor. And it’s a lot easier to handwave when you consider that it was chosen for that mission precisely by the fact that, out of all the known planets in the Galaxy, it had the freakishly highest surface gravity: You don’t need planets like that to be common for the story to work, you just need for there to be one.
Supposedly it was based on a planet detected in orbit around the nearby star 61 Cygni in the early 50s; this detection turned out to be a mistake, and doesn’t actually exist. But yes, the mass was supposed to have a mass of 16 Jupiters, and rotate every 17.75 minutes. If this planet were real it would deform very rapidly into a prolate shape, then split into two (or more) objects. It is way beyond any reasonable stable state.
Clements did a lot of very difficult maths working out the characteristics of this world, all without a computer; kudos to him, but modern models wouldn’t allow it to exist in the form he described.
I don’t think you can fault the author or the story if actual science has moved on since the story was written. Larry Niven wrote a story based on the notion that Mercury was tidally locked with the sun, and not long before it was supposed to be published, someone announced the discovery that Mercury did, in fact, rotate, albeit very slowly.
The trouble is, planetary science is moving on so rapidly nowadays you can’t keep up with the changes. Try writing a story set in the system Trappist-1, for instance; since 2016, when the planets were discovered, at least eight different models for conditions on these worlds have been published. This means any fiction set in this system will quickly show its age. This comes up again and again in ‘hard’ science fiction; you can often tell when the story was written by looking at the data they used when doing their research.
I can recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts. It’s a hard-SF first-contact story set in a semi-transhumanist near-future. It’s bleak stuff, tonally - Watts has some rather pessimistic ideas about consciousness and its usefulness as an evolutionary advantage.
Agreed with all that. It’s really good, and really bleak. I started reading the sequel, but after fifty pages was like, “Christ almighty, I gotta put this down for my own sanity.”
Another possibility, which I recommend with caveat: The Three-Body Problem. It’s hard sci-fi in the sense that science is definitely the star of the show. But folks with far more physics expertise than I have assured me that the science is pretty bad. Nevertheless, it’s got a series of really spectacular sequences that depend on the author’s interpretation of physics, so if you’re willing to put up with a bit of, er, speculation as to how an alien species might be able to (for example) dimensionally unfold an electron (or something like that), it’s great fun.
You can avoid this issue by just not being too specific. Don’t set your story on Trappist-1-c; set it on the planet of Homestead. Maybe Homestead is based on what was known of Trappist-1-c at the time the story was written, but if the science changes, well, I guess it wasn’t Trappist-1-c after all.
The prominent SF reviewer says “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts”
That’s my secret, Cap. I never have any will to live.
The prominent SF reviewer, James Davis Nicoll…
Case in point, Sawyer’s WWW trilogy with the precis that the World Wide Web has become conscious. Using the bicameral mind hypothesis as a springboard, the awakening was caused by China cutting its access off from the outside web for a time to hide the news of a pandemic,* then rejoining.
The hypothesis was put forth in 1976, was always controversial, and has pretty much fallen out of favor.
*Life imitates art. It was published 2009-11.
On this recommendation, I read Dragon’s Egg (well, technically it was read to me on Audible). An engaging, thought-provoking story, even if it’s a little weak on character development.
I too love hard science fiction. With that in mind, I thought I’d ask for recommendations from something that would have been considered science fiction itself not long ago—ChatGPT. You may find its list helpful.
Question: give me a list and short description of the best hard science fiction books.
ChatGPT: Here is a list of some of the best hard science fiction books, in no particular order:
“The Martian” by Andy Weir - A story of survival on the harsh and unforgiving surface of Mars, filled with technical detail and scientific accuracy.
“Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke - A tale of exploration and discovery as humans encounter an alien artifact that defies explanation.
“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card - A classic of the genre, this novel follows the training of a child prodigy as he prepares to lead humanity in a war against an alien race.
“Foundation” by Isaac Asimov - A sweeping epic that spans thousands of years, exploring the rise and fall of civilizations and the mysteries of psychohistory.
“Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson - An epic novel that explores the colonization and terraforming of Mars, with a focus on scientific accuracy and political intrigue.
“Neuromancer” by William Gibson - A seminal work of cyberpunk science fiction, exploring the implications of artificial intelligence and cyberspace.
“Dragon’s Egg” by Robert L. Forward - A novel that takes place on the surface of a neutron star, exploring the unique challenges and possibilities of life in such an extreme environment.
“Ringworld” by Larry Niven - A classic tale of exploration and adventure as a team of explorers discover a massive artificial ring orbiting a distant star.
“The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin - A Chinese science fiction novel that explores the nature of civilization, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the mysteries of the universe.
“Blindsight” by Peter Watts - A hard science fiction novel that explores the nature of consciousness, alien intelligence, and the limits of human understanding.
Is “the Three-Body Problem” truly considerd Hard SciFi? I stopped reading when they were looking at the stars and they started changing positions in real time, now I was fairly bored and disinterested with the book by that time, but that was the breaking point and I read no further, anyway can a book were that happens be considered Hard SciFi?
I haven’t read that one, but I see it’s Chinese science fiction. With China’s large investment in high-tech, maybe they’ve figured out how to move stars with ease. 