Wow, almost 40 replies and no mention of Robert L. Forward? I was always under the impression that he was considered one of the “hardest” of the hard SF authors. His stories usually start with “What if X”, and extrapolates. X doesn’t break any known laws of physics (although they may certainly stretch them), and builds from there.
Dragon’s Egg & Starquake: life evolves on a neutron star. Camelot 40k: life on a planetoid in the Oort cloud. Timemaster: a space creature is discovered that has negative mass and when split is connected to it’s parent by a wormhole. This combo allows for wormholes where one end is at a different time than the other due to relativistic time dilation. Rocheworld: life on a double planet that are in such close orbit their atmospheres intersect. Also includes light sail ship propulsion and AI.
His stories are short on characterization, but I find them interesting scientifically.
Actually, there’s one small plot point in the book which takes it out of the realm of hard science fiction and all the way into fantasy. However, it’s very subtle and easy to miss and doesn’t really affect the story. It is made explicit in the other books in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, although mostly it doesn’t have much influence on the rest of the story there either.
Enoch Root is actually immortal.
Another Neil Stephenson book, Zodiac is also pretty hard, even as it doesn’t always take itself seriously.
To continue the hijack, certainly not prick/zzzt, but what you envision is to complex still. It will be quite easy to do.
Print an oligo array with 2 million or so oligo pairs. Each pair represents an allele specific oligonucleotide (ASO) for a disease-associated polymorphism.
Add denatured genomic template DNA +/- amplification.
Perform PCR using Cy3 labeled dNTPs. Instead of a heat denaturation, cross-link. Repeat for a few cycles. Wash between cycles. The neighboring oligo ASO spots on the chip will ensure that a product will only be formed where a disease polymorphism is present in the genomic template.
Read the chip using a laser with a Cy3 detector, or better yet do the whole thing in a real-time PCR detector.
On-chip PCR is already being done. Several dozen projects are identifying disease-associated polymorphisms. The rest would be easy. Real-time PCR runs are well under an hour now, with air cyclers (like the Roche LightCycler machine).
Also, how about the David Brin Uplift books? I’m sure there is FTL and so forth, but those are mere throwaway plot devices around the central idea of uplifting species to sentience, which is done using forseeable biologic techniques.
Nothing in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is technologically implausible.
About artificial intelligence: I’m never convinced that the deliberate human development of such isn’t basically implausible. If it did develop, I think it’d be far more likely it would develop accidentally, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Asimov’s stories about Multivac, or the Ender’s Game series.
The new Battlestar Galactica is probably the hardest-SF television series I’ve seen (the FTL is an acceptable hand-wave; judgment will depend on how they wind up handling the whole prophecy angle), and many viewers have complained about the lack of aliens and ray guns. Can’t be SF without aliens and ray guns, I guess. Firefly got similar complaints.
Other modern-set science fiction that people don’t recognize as such include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Charly (based on Flowers for Algernon).
I liked Gattaca because it presented the humanistic side of ultra logical science and showed triumph of spirit, It defined the limits of science and represented spiritual and mystical Magic in sleight and human will. It’s effectiveness infiltrating even the most perverse extremity of scientific abuse.
I’ve always thought of Michael Crichton’s work as being *mostly *rooted in hard science. I’ve always enjoyed his earlier novels–mostly pre-Jurassic Park. They tend to be anchored about 98% in hard, actual science, with one small conjectural leap thrown in as a plot catalyst. They tend to take place in the present day, within present scientific limitations . . . mostly.
[semi-hijack]I thought this book was dire and the aliens utterly implausible and two-dimensional; although I suppose some of the science was more or less real-world, there were parts that were far-fetched - pretty sure the laser propulsion systems wouldn’t have worked as stated.
I like Niven, but I’m getting tired of his endless trumpeting of the fact that he was consulted by the government on Orion and Thor. Dude, we get it - the government talked to SF writers, great, now please write about something else.