Need a recomendation for good Hard Sci fi Authors and titles. Recent is better good writing is desirable>>>read cosm by benford and the idea is good but the story is dull

What do you mean by "hard"?

Some sci-fi greats...

Philip K Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
Alfred Bester's "Tiger! Tiger!"
JG Ballard's short stories, especially "The Terminal Beach"
Iain M Banks "Excession" ... in fact, most of his are good
Frank Herbert's "Dune" is still worth a read

I'm sure there are lots more, but I can't think of them at this very second. A certain publishing imprint has produced a series called SCi-Fi Masterworks, the first two on the above list are definitely in it... have a look.

Anything by Kim Stanley Robinson- the Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars; also the Years of Rice and Salt.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: VegaRiad,

For those not aware, "Hard" science fiction is a catch-all term for science ficiton where technological advancement and scientific accuracy are paramount. And it's about the diaphonous a categorization.

I'd say David Brin's Uplift books should count, though.

quote:

Originally posted by yamo:
read cosm by benford and the idea is good but the story is dull

I think you'll find that that's typical of hard sf: great ideas, but the stories, not so much. There are some great stories, but there's also a lot of unnecessary technical detail and wooden prose.

Some of the good ones would be
Greg Bear: Blood Music; Eon
Nancy Kress: Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, Beggars Ride

The ecological stuff sounds convincing, but there's a lot of bad science in Dune.

More later.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: ZoneSeek,

You're talking about science fiction where scientific accuracy is an essential part of the writing?

New one on me. Why would one read a mediocre book in which the scientific accuracy is its main redeeming feature? Surely there are books about actual science, or abstract scientific theory, that could fulfil this urge? Or am I misunderstanding?

Stephen Baxter's Manifold series

quote:

Originally posted by guernican:
You're talking about science fiction where scientific accuracy is an essential part of the writing?

New one on me. Why would one read a mediocre book in which the scientific accuracy is its main redeeming feature? Surely there are books about actual science, or abstract scientific theory, that could fulfil this urge? Or am I misunderstanding?

It's about versimilitude. If you read about a supposedly perfect plan for a bank heist, you think, why doesn't the author actually do it? Why can't I?

I'm told that sf was a significant contributing force to NASA and the early computer startups. People thought, "That's so fucking cool! I think we can actually pull it off."

And it's a way for writers to pay homage to the people in real-world sciences like astronomy, paleontology, etc. Like Cark Sagan says, it's odd how people go for the supernatural when there's so much interesting stuff right here in the observable universe.

The story is still important, of course. HG Wells and Robert Heinlen are considered hard sf, even though their stories are outdated by modern science. The story lives on, so there's no point going back to update the old stuff.

I wouldn't consider Frank Herbert hard sf because he's dead wrong about some fairly basic stuff that was certainly known in his time: genes don't contain ancestral memories, that's Lamarckianism, and human brains use up the same amout of energy whether you're concentrating hard or goofing off.

I'd never heard the term before. It all sounds rather arbitrary to me... to take an example, a Ballard short story like "The Voices of Time" talks about the activation of dormant genes as a backdrop to a wider story about the death of the cosmos. But I'm struggling, just a little, to see a clear delineation between what you're calling "hard sci-fi" and all the other science fiction I've ever read. I'm sure one could pick elements out of the writing of, say, Pohl / Aldiss / Bradbury / Dick / any of the greats, and say that they were in some way prophetic about how technology would be used.

Verisimilitude... hmmm. I wonder if "authenticity" might make more sense in this context. But, again, that's part of the writer's job: to produce a world in which their technological (or otherwise) flights of fancy feel "right". Read Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones, if you haven't done so already, and you'll see exactly what I mean. Everything, from his use of slang to the little technical frissons he adds (the zenade, for example) just feel right and proper in the universe he creates. Whether they're possible / feasible is pretty much by the by.

Please tell me if I'm misunderstanding, but the argument (if there is one) revolves around the technical aspects of a science fiction story being "convincing" or making sense if one thinks them through logically. And surely that's as much a stylistic thing, or a measure of the writer's ability, than it is to do with scientific knowledge?

Hard sf stories could actually happen with little or no fudging of natural laws as we know them. Like Dweller said, you have to get the science right. I tend to rant on how story should be paramount, but hard sf is sort of an exception, where it's about the ideas. You could think of them as thought experiments, talking points, debate instigators.

Example: Low-cost genetic engineering becomes a cottage industry. It becomes fashionable among Muslims to have the text of the Quran written into their DNA. The protagonist sees the danger in this. Here follows many pages of technical detail on how she encrypts the "bloodwriting" of the Quran, so that no tailored virus can specifically target her people.

The title, the author's name, the characters, all pass into oblivion. The idea remains.

OK. I still don't get you.

Example: Kazuo Ishiguru's "Never Let Me Go". A science fiction novel in the loosest sense. The "sci-fi" is absolutely essential to the storyline, and yet plays virtually no part in the actual narrative. You understand the principle, the science (which is arguably possible but not currently practised) is implicit, but the ideas and prose are the important things.

You're defining it by the imaginary novel's attempts to explain the science. Which, to me, sounds (immediately) like a recipe for a bad book.

We might be talking at cross purposes. A sci-fi novel doesn't need to explain the science - or very rarely. In fact, that's not true... a GOOD sci-fi novel is, like any novel, about ideas or character or both. It's not about the sci-fi, which is incidental to the central ideas, even if it does facilitate them from a narrative point of view.

Perhaps I'm just surprised that I hadn't heard the term and, now I've heard it, I'm not convinced that it really means anything. But I do appreciate your patient attempts to explain it to me

Soft sf: "Captain! The forward deflector dish just lost tachyon balance! We'll need at least a day to repair the cadmium-boron relays, and I don't think the enemy will give us that kind of time!"

Tachyons are theoretical particles because they appear to have no mass and very little energy. As such, the idea of making them into a form that could deflect an attack is sort of silly on its face. Cadmium and boron together are a poor conductor compared to a number of other alloy. The chances of their being used as something as delicate as a relay is highly unlikely, particularly in a super-science setting.

Hard sf: "Captain, the inertial dampers are venting freon. Power core's stable, but we can't take another hit like that!"

There's work currently being done at Princeton that's demonstrated that while absolute zero is still a long way off, freon reactions in the presence of high energy seem to produce a field that slows molecular reactions over a considerably longer range than predicted. It's a matter of microns at the moment, but the idea of a refined system with a high-tech power source that would be capable of stopping energy blasts cold, literally.


The engine on Serenity is soft sf. The space-suits are hard sf. The show as a whole is a Western.

And I've just confused myself.

Does there come a point where the viewer or reader neither knows nor cares whether something is feasible or not?

Just a thought.

For some, yes, for some, no. I only know of one guy with this particularly literary tic, but if he catches the faintest glimmer of scientific improbability, he's as turned off as a prescriptivist encountering a proper noun used as a verb.

Perhaps you should direct him toward Ben Goodacre's "Bad Science" column in the Guardian. He's usually worth a read.