Oh–a few more recommendations, with the understanding that “hard sf” needs to lean into having interesting tech, and recommendations need to be for awesome books:
Ancillary Justice and its sequels. You want interstellar travel? How about a protagonist who’s actually an interstellar battleship, walking around in a commandeered human body? These books are a bit chilly, but the tech is mind-bending goodness.
Ninefox Gambit and its sequels. This probably goes too far away from hard SF, as the central premise is a galactic empire that engages in bloody rituals that distort local mathematics, enabling them to deploy horrific weaponry (such as a beam that causes deadly radiation to spill out of all doorways on a ship). But the tech is at the forefront of the series, and it mostly happens in space. If George Lucas ever hires the ghost of Lovecraft to write the next Star Wars movie, it might look like this. Super creepy, super good.
A Memory Called Empire: The key tech here is a neural mesh that allows you to merge personalities with a dead mentor figure. The book is lush and beautiful and leans heavily into society-building.
Embassytown: the key science in this book is linguistics, and the novel explores growing relationships and tensions with an alien species whose language is nearly impossible for humans to comprehend. It’s China Mieville at his best.
The first book of a new trilogy by James SA Corey is freshly out, The Mercy of Gods. I thought it was fairly Extruded Science Fiction Product, but YMMV.
I travel with a skinny 4x6" paperback in my pocket. I had to scour used book/antique stores before a trip, found a nice collection of Saki stories, but the cover was boring.
So I Photoshopped one (with Martha Wells art, but no permission) and glued it around the book, and it looked like I was reading…
The Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon A Non-Digital Teleplay direct from the shooting scripts
(Soon to be a major download)
No, it’s not time dilation. It’s the fact that the transits that are “so fast as to be indistinguishable from instantaneous by any known technology” are each decades long.
Haldeman really didn’t do his homework for that book.
I assume that you saw that you posted this right after I was talking about Project Hail Mary, and that that’s what prompted your question. Does that count for you and you want more of the same, or if it doesn’t meet your criteria, why not?
The time dilation/relativity effects were caused by the distance needed to travel at near lightspeed between the collapsars as I recall. The FTL transit times in the story were first thought to be instant, and later a very small length of time.
Except that the relativistic time dilation effects really would be small, given what’s said in the book, and the book itself eventually admits that the transits themselves each take several decades. Never mind that he also has all of that science and technology being discovered, developed, invented, applied, and widely deployed within the span of ten years after the story was written.
This is Mandella speaking from the first novel - was there something different in the later book then? Maybe someone had corrected his physics.
When I’d studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was
exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond
Welp you admitted it had one central implausibility. I am only asking because there has been a lot of latter-day back and forth about the plausibility of interstellar travel, including here, esp. as it relates to the Fermi paradox. Sleeper ships, von Neumann self replicators/artificial wombs combined with microprobes, Bussard ramjets/nuclear pulse or even antimatter (assuming a relatively cheap way of gathering or producing), or ye olde sleeper or generation ships (without chaos taking over as said). All with explanations of how to overcome things like interstellar radiation, micrometeoroids, and having to fix things far from home.
Well, in Project Hail Mary, the crew is in an induced coma for the trip, which simplified the provisions problem a little, but not very much. Fortunately they weren’t going far. And Weir was very efficient with his implausibility, since the same discovery solved the problems of propulsion, fuel, and radiation shielding, among others, as well as providing the motivation for the mission (and sufficient motivation was key, because it turns out that there are a heck of a lot of problems that can be solved when all of the major governments of the world collectively make it their top priority).
Being Weir, of course, “having to fix things far from home” was a major theme of the book, because of course things needed fixing.
The 2024 Hugo award winners were recently announced. I use the best novel and best series nominees as a recommendation list. The ones on the lists which I have read, I can recommend.
Best novel
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager, Harper Voyager UK)
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK)
Translation State by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
Best series
Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK, Orbit US)
The Last Binding by Freya Marske (Tordotcom, Tor UK)
The Laundry Files by Charles Stross (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
October Daye by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
The Universe of Xuya by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz; JABberwocky Literary Agency; Subterranean Press; Uncanny Magazine; et al.)
I didn’t know they were announced! I have read all of them except for The Saint of Bright Doors, which is by my bed upstairs. My favorite was Translation State, because Ann Leckie absolutely slaps. Some Desperate Glory was very good, and I’m not sad that it won.
I actively disliked Witch King, but I think Martha Wells is just not for me.
Do NOT get the audiobook. Wil Wheaton narrates most of Scalzi’s books, it seems, and frankly his narration is, well, not a hell of a lot better than MINE would be. Zero attempt to differentiate between character voices being the main flaw. I’ve actually avoided getting one of Scalzi’s newer ones because Wheaton does the narration.
To be fair, he does a decent job when needing to make a character sound drunk. But otherwise, the character voices are beyond awful.
Others have beaten me to the Murderbot series. The world’s most lovable murderous robot (except not really), who would would probably rip your head off if you suggested it was beginning to care for its humans. Supposedly there’s a series being produced for Apple TV+ but I haven’t heard any news of it in a while. I have all of the series on audiobook; the narrator’s voice is low enough though that it can be tough to follow in a noisy car.
Becky Chambers (author of A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) has also written a pair of novellas, A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer For The Crown Shy, both in the Monk and Robot series. I have not read the second one, but really enjoyed the first one.
Quite possible. I can’t take Kim Stanley Robinson for some reason. I liked Witch King, but it really does read like it’s the third book in a five part series, which can be off putting if you’re already sour on the author.
I’ve seen this opinion stated before (maybe including by you), but I have to disagree. (Well, I don’t have an opinion on how your narration would compare with his.)
I’ve been a fan of Wheaton’s narration ever since my first Scalzi audiobook, Agent To the Stars. I had tried to read it for myself but it just wasn’t working for me, but then I gave the audio version a try, and Wheaton’s narration really helped me relate to the main character and brought out the humor.
The fact that he doesn’t do different voices for different characters doesn’t bother me. Especially in a book written in first person point-of-view, where I’m not hearing the other characters speak directly; I’m hearing the POV narrator tell me what they said.
If you want von Neumann probes, you might check out the Bobiverse-series by Dennis E. Taylor, that’s told from the view of one such probe (the titular Bob). It starts relatively near future and develops and branches out from there as the series proceeds, with the fifth book having just come out. It’s very nerdy and can get a bit Mary Sue-ish, but overall, I found it to be a good read (well, listen; I got the audiobooks for my commute and while doing chores and such).
More generally, I’m surprised I see no love for Greg Egan so far. Both Permutation City and Diaspora I thought were excellent, with the former actually inspiring some work in quantum gravity on the idea of event symmetry, and the chapter Orphanogenesis from the latter still being the most plausible exploration of the computational theory of mind, via the genesis of an artificial consciousness, I’ve ever read (you can read it on his website for free).
Rereading this thread has gotten me thinking about some of the minor sci-fi novels I read when I was a teenager - mostly '60s and '70s stuff that was light on science but deep on philosophy, and which probably formed a bigger impression on my general worldview than I might realize. So I figure I’ll list some of them off;
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin. In a distant future setting where human colonies separated from each other for thousands of years are only just beginning to reestablish contact, a diplomat travels to a wintry planet whose population are, thanks to some sort of ancient genetic engineering, monogendered (the book uses the term “bisexual” which caused me quite some bit of confusion at first) and only exhibit male or female characteristics during their mating season.
The Dispossessed, same author, set in the same universe, with a similar diplomat-visiting-a-strange-world premise, but with a twist. Here, the main character is coming from a planet of space hippies who several centuries ago fled a planet with two eternally warring superpowers a la the US and the Soviet Union.
Return From the Stars, Stanislaw Lem. An astronaut returns from a scientific survey of a star several dozen light years from Earth, but thanks to time dilation several centuries have passed where it’s only been a few years for him, and he arrives in a post-capitalist society where the population are perpetually drugged so as to render them peaceable and non-violent.
Solaris, same author, maybe the same universe. An astronaut reports to a space station orbiting a planet which appears to be covered by an ocean, but the ocean is in fact a massive single-celled organism. The organism is possibly sapient and is apparently attempting to communicate with the station’s crew by creating simulacrums of their loved ones, complete with their memories intact, and the main character finds himself interacting with a copy of his wife who committed suicide several years earlier. There’s a movie version starring George Clooney which is pretty decent.
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny. On a colony world whose unique characteristics make reincarnation both possible and scientifically manipulable, a ruling caste have used advanced technology to make themselves immortal and give themselves superhuman powers, and rule over the population by posing as Hindu gods and meting out rewards and punishments to mortals by controlling who and what they become in their next life. The main character is a renegade “god” who decides to start a revolution by instead presenting himself as Buddha.
Dhalgren, Samuel Delaney. A young man with no memory of his past wanders into a post-apocalyptic city where time and reality appear to be coming apart at the seams. (I never did actually finish this one; it gets kinda weird, and the explicit gay sex scenes were offputting to 15-year-old me. At least it wasn’t Hogg.)
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart. A young man survives a viral pandemic that wipes out most of Earth’s population, and the book follows his life throught the decades as he and other survivors begin to build a new primitive society amidst the ruins of the old. A lot of post-apocalyptic fiction owes its existence to this one.
The Quest for St. Aquin, Anthony Boucher. In a post-nuclear future where an authoritarian government has banned religion, a Catholic priest is sent by the Pope on a secret mission to find the supposedly incorruptible body of a legendary preacher who died centuries before. He is accompanied by a robotic mule which hosts a sapient AI that is a hardcore atheist and skeptic, and they find themselves discussing theology as they search for and eventually find the remains of the saint, which turns out to have been a robot.
Gift of a Useless Man, Alan Dean Foster. A high space outlaw finds himself betrayed, crippled, and left for dead on the surface of a barren asteroid. As he lays there waiting for death, he discovers that a race of hunter-gatherer humanoids standing less than an inch tall have taken shelter in his shadow and believe him to be a god. He winds up teaching them about agriculture by having them plant a seed from the tomato sandwich in his pocket and use his feces as fertilizer, and winds up shepherding their society for dozens of generations as the humanoids feed him and care for him in exchange for his wisdom. Futurama parodied this one with the episode where Bender gets abandoned in deep space.
In Our Hands, the Stars, Harry Harrison. An Israeli scientist accidentally discovers a means of producing antigravity and, realizing its potential for the good of mankind, promptly defects to try and prevent it from being made into a weapon. He attempts to keep it secret until, realizing it could be used to revolutionize space travel, he reveals it to the world by rescuing an ill-fated Soviet Moon landing, and subsequently tries to keep it out of the hands of both militaries and capitalists who would exploit it recklessly. Written in a techno-thriller style reminiscent of Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy.