The Matador series by Steve Perry is good for action, adventure and intrigue with some philosophizing thrown in. There’s the original series and several sequels/spinoffs.
Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin is a semi-novel consiting of a series of linked short stories set in an interstellar civilization. The main character is Haviland Tuf, an interstellar trader and odd character who acquires an ancient EEC Seedship, a gigantic warship designed to wage ecological war on entire worlds. Lots of exotic alien critters in this one.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is good if you want some cyberpunk.
The Belisarius series by Eric Flint & David drake if you want alt-history sci-fi. The direct sci-fi elements are low key or distant, as the focus of the book is an attempt to change history via time travel.
Definitely try A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge, which IMHO is a real classic. Hard(ish) sci-fi/space opera, nicely written.
From Wikipedia:
A word of advice: if you decide to read it, don’t read reviews or wikis about it, just read the book and let things unfold at their own pace. (It’s not like there are shocking turns of events that totally upend your preconceptions a la A Song Of Ice And Fire, but one of the pleasures of the book is encountering odd things and being left to infer what exactly what’s going on well before things are made explicit.)
It might be partly that I’m judging his works through the lens of hard science fiction. The Martian and Artemis both had a few minor scientific blunders, but mostly got it right, but the central premise of Project Hail Mary just completely abandoned the laws of thermodynamics. That said, there’s a tradition in science fiction that a science fiction story is allowed one impossibility, and if you grant “Astrophage”, as a whole, as the one impossibility, then the rest works, so it’s still a pretty good story. And he clearly wanted to write a story of interstellar travel, but also wanted to keep it at a near-present tech level, which is a difficult needle to thread.
Any relatively near-future hard SF involving interstellar travel and the challenges therein? Aliens at the destination are fine, tho not really interested in the kind where they are on a generation ship where everyone has gone all feral, having forgotten where they are and what their mission was.
Larry Niven has a lot of this sort of thing, In the Known Space and The State series (STL ramships), and with Pournelle in the Motie books (FTL, but with restrictions). And there’s Haldeman’s Forever War, in which time dilation due to travel is key to the story.
I’m just not sure what “hard” means here–do you mean the focus is mostly on the science, not the characters, or do you mean the science doesn’t conflict with current physics (e.g., general relativity)?
If it’s the latter, it makes hard interstellar sf very difficult. If it’s the former, the James SA Corey Expanse series is excellent, although it also has pretty nifty characters.
Yeah, this can be very tricky. Almost any story can be picked apart that something wouldn’t work, even if the author is working real hard to obey relativity, and such.
I greatly appreciate how things unfold in Expanse. The characters don’t understand the stuff that most obviously violates known physics, and (very mild spoiler) these violations of conventional physics cause some big problems. They make some guesses, but nothing is definitive. Other technologies that the characters (at least Naomi) do understand are not explained in enough detail to be glaring violations for the reader, for example the extremely efficient fusion drive and limb regrowth in humans. I find the unified world government less believable.
Brendan Doyle, a specialist in the work of the early-nineteenth century poet William Ashbless, reluctantly accepts an invitation from a millionaire to act as a guide to time-travelling tourists. But while attending a lecture given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810, he becomes marooned in Regency London, where dark and dangerous forces know about the gates in time.
Don’t get me wrong, I love The Anubis Gates but it’s absolutely fantasy, with perhaps, a few trappings of SciFi (not really IMHO) at the beginning. Although it’s generally low-fantasy, with users of actual magic being more-or-less restricted to a single group, and everyone else getting by with OG physics or (accidently) applying the rules the magicians are affected by to the magicians.
Although since the OP is banned, I guess it’s up to us to decide what if any rules we want going forward.
I’ve been walking up to friends and saying “I have one word for you: MURDERBOT.”
Wonderfully rich character study of a cyborg who hacks his governor and finds itself with free will, a lot of PTSD, and a fascination with humans (and their media shows). Suspense, action, insights and humor.
Best part is Murderbot’s interior monologues:
There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.
She said “Just remember you’re not alone here.” I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.
But they were humans— who knows why they did anything?
The interstellar society is believable, with Corporations (often evil)competing to find and “hire” new societies. Which makes for plenty of fun action.
Martha Wells, the author, says “Come for the pew-pew, stay for the soap opera.”
Still prefer some space travel ('net hiccups from the power outages in Ohio ate an earlier reply), esp. of recent vintage taking into account all the tech challenges that have been codified over the last 2 dozen years. [So 50+ year old tomes are out]
Hyperion is fantastic. The rest of the series is good too but that first book…outstanding. Such a fun read. If you like sci-fi it is hard to go wrong with this.
Oh, Murderbot has plenty. A lot of ships, extensive space stations, and an assortment of planets.
Murderbot’s “best friend” is a deep space research vessel, and things get tense when the ship’s “bot pilot” memory is wiped and it’s being used as a warship, trying to kill Murderbot’s human teammates (as well as the planetary humans they’re determined to keep out of Corporate clutches).
I’m going to take that as posting sci-fi novel related things, until someone pushes back.
My wife made me this. She downloaded the design from someplace online, actually got permission from the creator to do a one off, cleaned up the vector files, separated the colors, cut it on a Cricut, and then put the different layers on a shirt. It made it’s debut in London, but I plan to wear it to Focococon.
Hopefully the Apple series takes off, and such items are sold for Martha Well’s benefit.
We named one of our cats Rin, after Murderbot. He is very curious about running water, flushing toilets, so calling him Engineer Rin is spot on. He is also extremely sweet but quick to violence, which is also spot on!
