Contact by Carl Sagan. A believable piece of fiction that’s grounded in scientific fact and has some brilliant sociological considerations.
Everyone else has already mentioned everyone I had thought of, so a few comments…
You know, I had read the book and seen the movie but never made that connection! You are absolutely right, of course.
The thing that has always bugged me about Crichton is that most (if not all) of his books seem to depend on some completely obvious “flaw” in the system that fails and puts our heros in crisis. The flaw is almost always obvious, but none of the “experts” in the books ever see it and are always so surprised when it fails.
Larry Niven! Yes, Yes! (well, the early stuff)
You can get a roadmap on the Ringworld/Known Space series here
There is also a set of short stories that he wrote that had to do with teleportation, but in typical Niven style he put a framework of stringent rules around it. For example, he observed conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum - if you teleport from a high altitude to a lower one, you had your potential energy converted to heat. He put these in a framework of detective stories (the suspect was sweating, did he just teleport down the hill?) These were collected in a book, does anybody remember what that was called?
What about HG Wells? I just got done reading The Time Machine, and am currently reading The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Thanks, Capt. S. My jaw was about to hit the ground when I saw that no one was mentioning this one.
IIRC, the book was better than the movie. (duh, right?)
Dude! Getting a compliment from Joe Haldemann is like getting a pat on the back from God! Bad Astro, you’re a superstar.
And speaking of Joe, a somewhat hard-to-find collection of his short stories, called None So Blind, is exquisite.
Another iffy space opera which may or may not be worthy of this list is Peter F. Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction, which I think is in two parts in America and one big fat novel in the U.K.
It’s a masterpiece of universe-building with some entertaining hard science, but it’s all space opera, and unfortunately it sort of fizzles out, leaving a lot of plot threads to dangle annoyingly. Great ideas, though.
He’s more cyberpunk than sci-fi, but I’d add Neil Stephenson to the list. Pretty much everything he’s written under his own name. The Stephen Bury stuff isn’t bad, but I didn’t think the science was quite as good.
Not to hijack things too much here, but am I the only person who wonders why Forward is considered a good author?
Yes, his stories are based in hard science, but IMO his writing is wooden, his characterizations flat, and his overall style is far too top-heavy with exposition. I’ll devour pretty much anything vaguely sci-fish, but even Isaac Asimov’s pedestrian style is a gem compared to Robert Forward’s lead-balloon writing.
Is it just me? Why?
It’s better than that, even.
I wrote an article for Astronomy magazine about Hollywood ripping up astronomy in movies. My boss comes in one morning saying a letter to the editor was written by someone who liked my article; my jaw hit the floor when I found out it was Joe Haldeman!
I emailed him thanking him, and we exchanged some friendly notes. Then I found out he was going to the World Con in Baltimore in '99, and I would be there too. I found him busily signing copies of “Forever Peace”, and his wife was standing there. She said, “Can I help you?” and I replied, “Yeah, I’m here to see Joe. I’m the Bad Astronomer.” She lit up and said, “Oh, wonderful. Joe’s been wanting to meet you.”
Scraping my jaw off the floor again, Joe looked up and said, “Oh great, Phil! Glad to meet you!” (Gesturing behind him) “This is Bob Silverberg.” (!) “Look, I have to go to lunch with some folks, but we’ll talk afterwards.” I murmured something silly and let him go.
Then, of all the nerve, he has the gall to get the Hugo for “Forever Peace” that very night! I never got together with him. 
I hope he goes to the San Jose worldcon. He owes me lunch!
K364: Niven’s teleportation stories are in “A Hole in Space.”
It doesn’t focus much on hard science, but Eric Frank Russell’s “Sentinels of Space” offers a totallly rational, non-supernatural view of the hereafter. Plus, the book has some of the wildest mutants of sci-fi. I heartily recommend it.
I’m also surprised that no one has mentioned James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience.”
Another story involved teleportation (don’t remember the name, read it probably two decades ago) and impressed the hell out of me not because is was so “hard-SF” but because Niven had thought about the socialogical implications of teleportation. He wrote about the problems of “Flash Crowds”, where people from all over would overwhelm the system by trying to teleport to the scenes of big events/accidents etc.
Does that sound somewhat…familiar? Somewhat (nay, EXACTLY) like what happens with the Internet on Big News Days?
Brilliant thinking for something written quite awhile ago.
It’s not just you. I recently re-read “Dragon’s Egg” and was horrified. Its characters had no personality whatsoever. The story had no drama.
I give him points for having a clever idea about life on a neutron star and developing it thoroughly, but the book was simply an intellectual exercise. It was “hard” SF to the point that it offered nothing else.
Just wanted to thank everyone for their advice and comments.
Sounds like there’s a fair consensus for something by Larry Niven, probably Ringworld. But, there are a lot of other awfully interesting sounding suggestions too. I should be busy for a while!
Agian, thanks.
Oh yeah. I forgot to mention that I’ve read Contact and really enjoyed it. I can never look at [sym]p[/sym] the same way.
I’ve also read some Asimov and very much appreciated the “hard” sci-fi he produced. In fact, The Foundation Trilogy had a profound effect on my life.
The Bad Astronomer writes:
> I found out he was going to the World Con in Baltimore
> in '99, and I would be there too.
So then it would be pretty easy for you two to find each other there, since it was in 1998 that Worldcon was in Baltimore. In 1999 though, it was in Melbourne. I guess that’s why you and Haldeman weren’t there. You were in Baltimore wondering where everybody else was.
Sigh. After I posted that I realized i may have had the date wrong. Oh well. This wouldn’t happen if we used metric dates.
The Ascent of Wonder is a wonderful tome of hard science-fiction stories, ranging from some Poe and ‘The Cold Equations’ to Cherryh’s ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ to some more modern hard sci-fi stories, the titles of which escape me at the moment because I don’t own a copy myself.
And I’d like to say that telling The Bad Astronomer that meeting Joe Haldeman is cool, is cool. Your site is the buttocks of the feline, sir.
Um. Thanks?
And back on target, my second for “Contact”. An amazing book, and far better than the very good movie.