Charles Stross has written some good hard SF. I’d recommend two of his duologies: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise; and Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood.
My mistake . I was thinking technology oriented was “hard”, not realising that scientific realism was the criterion :smack:
Classifying the Culture is difficult. If any sufficiently-advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, then any sufficiently-advanced science fiction is indistinguishable from fantasy.
Ancillary Justice is hard SF in the “holy crap, what a bizarrely wonderful idea!” school of thought. Having your central character be an ex-starcruiser is one of those things you don’t see every day in the genre. I picked it up at random several years ago and loved it.
Oh! Another amazing hard SF book is The Three-Body Problem. It’s a translation from Chinese and is a little awkward in the way translations often are. It starts with several chapters about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with very little SF elements at all. But once the science-fictiony part gets going, it’s got enough excellent ideas to populate a half-dozen lesser books. Not such great characterization IMO, but it does the hard SF thing very, very well.
Agree on Ancillary Justice. Great book, but perhaps not high on the “hard” scale. As Qadgop notes, it’s much more in the “space opera” genre than “hard scifi.” I’d put it in the same “hardness” category as Ursula K LeGuin’s Hanish universe in that there is tech that seems magical from our 21st century perspective. There is, after all, FTL travel.
LHOD, you frequently like books that I like. I think your impression of Ancillary Sword was similar to mine, that it suffered from Second Book Syndrome. I finished the third book in the series (Ancillary Mercy) this week and think it was as good as the first, maybe a little better.
I read Three Body Problem last year and enjoyed it. There were sections that felt very disjointed. I’m not sure how much of that is a function of the author, the translator, or the culture. Still, the story made up for the problems with flow. The sequel, The Dark Forest, didn’t have those issues, and I thought it was a better book.
When the Culture intersects with Earth in The State of the Art some of the discussion about whether to make Contact or not revolves around how Earth popular fiction and TV expects super-advanced societies to have abilities that the Culture isn’t capable of eg time travel and routine teleportation. Banks certainly considered the level of technology of the Culture, and pitched it lower in some ways than Star Trek.
Lois McMaster Bujold has a new Vorkosigan book coming out in a couple of months (Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen). There’s pretty much a standing recommendation for her work if you’re looking for good SF.
But the Culture does effectively have teleportation - “Displacement” - sure, it’s a mini-wormgate not disassembly/reassembly, and they’re much more aware of the safety margins. But stuff (people, drones, missiles) gets displaced all the time in the books. IIRC, it does have a 1-in-(80/60 depending on book) million failure rate (how does that compare to on-screen transport failures in Trek?), and doing it at speed is decidedly more dangerous c.f. Player of Games. But I still consider it the equivalent of ST transporters.
The Vorkosigan books are excellent (and thanks for the heads up!), but they’re not really hard SF.
The Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
I appear to be the first to mention John Scalzi - his Old Man’s War series is frequently compared to classic Heinlein.
I have enjoyed what I have read of his.
Lots of great ideas here, thanks. I grabbed Blindsight from the library and put myself on a waiting kid for several others
Really? I feel they are. Other than faster-than-light travel and a single use of psionics, everything in the series has been real science. No “super science that is indistinguishable from magic” either.
Bujold even has her technology advancing, which many SF authors don’t do. Over the forty years or so the series is set in, new technologies are invented and become commonplace.
Seconded, and very enthusiastically (although it’s medium rather than hard sf, I’d say). Likewise Joe Haldeman (The Forever War, Tool of the Trade and All My Sins Remembered, in particular).
Just looked through my list of favorite authors and realized how few **hard **science fiction authors are on the list. So, apologies if these aren’t hard sciencey enough. I’ve always been more interested in the story than the science.
Asaro, Catherine - She’s kind of romance-y, but they take place in a hard science universe.
Baker, Kage - Time travelers preserving cultural artifacts for the future, which they have to live to see because time travel only works to the past.
Cherryh, C. J. - I’ve always enjoyed the Foreigner series - what’s it like to be the alien.
Shepherd, Joel - Military cyborg who defects in search of peace.
Love these, especially ‘Startide Rising’. Not really hard science, but it has that feeling. My main critique is how much he likes the climaxy climax with lots and lots of serendipity and synchronicity; the climaxes become become more elaborate as the series progresses, almost as bad as a ‘Lensman Arms Race’.
This pervades his other works, too. Speaking of which, 'Earth" is a great book and ‘Kiln People’ is a fun yarn.