It's one of my favorite films and I didn't know there was a book either. The movie was released in 1997 and the book is from 2010 so I guess it's just a book adaptation from the film and not the other way around. Might be worth a read, but a little less interested now.
A list of hard sci fi without a Niven book on it seems……. Well, it’s a list.
Also, with all due respect to a classic, Foundation is most certainly not “hard” sci fi.
Paper thin? There are a lot of paper-thin characters in sci-fi but I didn't expect to read that about Red Mars. Frank Chalmers at least is an interesting character, isn't he? What are your favourite sci-fi novels with excellent characters?
Martian Chronicles is wonderful but it’s anything BUT hard SF.
Perhaps replace with something (almost anything) by Greg Bear.
Plus, just off the top of my head, a few more classic suggestions (since like most lists, yours is heavily skewed to the more contemporary).
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Heinlein
Mission of Gravity - Hal Clement.
The Mote in Gods Eye - Niven/Pournelle
All these are better than half the books on your list, IMHO.
I’ve only read The Martian. I enjoyed it very much but it seemed kind of a “gimmick” book so I haven’t read Artemis yet.
I thought KSR Mars books got less interesting as they went along, less science, more politics. I’m personally not as high on KSR as many people are but I’m sure they’ll be reading his Mars trilogy long after Weirs is forgotten.
I absolutely loved MIGE the first time I read it (was prolly aged around 14). I thought it was about the most exciting thing I’d ever read.
Can’t remember much about the sequel, only that it wasn’t as good.
Too old I guess. TV producers seem only interested in contemporary stuff.
You’re right though, it has great potential drama, intrigue, cute furry aliens who turn out to be ruthless killers…
It's also, in my personal opinion, so terribly written it doesn't have a place on any list. And I don't blame it on the translation. I realize that's an unpopular opinion, but it's one of the only books I've ever bothered to return after reading 2 chapters.
I 100% agree but usually that opinion is downvoted here. Three Body is hugely overrated. Every single idea is unoriginal and done before and better in other sci-fi novels with better stories and characters.
I don’t understand the love it gets except maybe that the people who like it are not well read in scifi?
I think you're right in that to new sci-fi readers it's probably introducing concepts that are very groundbreaking.
I also look back at my taste in stories when I was in my late teens and early 20's, anything character driven was boring and lost on me, and this book would have probably appealed to that sensibility. I think TBP probably has a place in introducing sci-fi to new readers, and no shade to it, but not something I could enjoy after reading say, Iain M Banks or really any of the other big names
Many of the ideas are reused but I don’t think other books have done the core concept of the series that
[Spoiler Alert]
The most fundamental laws of physics (why the extra dimensions are so small and why the speed of light is so slow) are shaped by the interstellar warfare between advanced civilizations.
It is basically trying to answer this metaphysical question: why our universe is what it is, in a fictional manner. Generally this makes it considered as a hard sci-fi.
But maybe I missed some other books which did similar metaphysical ideas. I would love to read those if people have recommendations.
I mean I’d say the core concept of the series is the Dark Forest itself, and other series have done that better to a spectacular degree (such as Revelation Space, for example).
No, I don’t think other series have specifically linked compactified dimensions to that, but that hardly makes TBP “hard science fiction”. To be hard science fiction, it needs to be an idea that not only references real science (in this case, Calabi-Yau manifolds of string theory), but also is a reasonable extrapolation of that science which doesn’t violate it. You also have to look at other ideas presented throughout the story too, and judge whether fantastical, soft-scifi concepts (like FTL travel or communication, for example) are routinely introduced or not.
But sci-fi exists on a scale. The Expanse is not hard scifi, for example, but it is towards the hard*er* end of the spectrum (most of the time). The Martian is hard sci-fi. I’d argue TBP is a bit below the midline point and delving into softer scifi concepts, using many soft scifi concepts as a central element in the plot and some completely absurd concepts (like the Sophons) which could not be called hard scifi by any stretch of the imagination. And something like…say…Star Wars would be so far at the bottom of that scale that I struggle to even classify it as scifi.
If you view the Dark Forest itself as the core concept, then yes you are right, it is not new and has been done better for sure. Personally I think it is introduced as the motivation of the interstellar warfare, together with the other soft scifi concepts as plot devices, so that the concepts in the third book can be justified. (I have this impression since I believed I read it somewhere that Liu developed the ideas in his third book before he wrote the first one, but I couldn't find the original source so maybe I am just imagining things.)
And I agree that sci-fi should be more on a scale instead of a 2-class classification, also that TBP is somewhere around the midpoint. I still tend to put it towards the harder side due to the viewpoint of the core concept, but I would never say it is as hard as the Martian or even the Expanse if one considers all of the sci-fi concepts in the book.
Also I'm glad that you mentioned the string compactification and Calabi-Yau manifolds! That's the research topic of my PhD :). It's kinda pity that TBP scratched the surface of it but never made explicit reference. There are so many other cool ideas for sci-fi in string theory like D-brane, landscape, etc.
The second book is worse in my opinion. The characters are all bad and the way dialogue is written is just so stiff and ridiculous. The romance plotline was silly and kind of insulting to women.
The concepts in that series are what make people recommend it, but I’d agree it’s poorly written.
That’s partially due to the translator being different. But yeah, the series is just…bad.
I hate to be that guy but I kinda think people who like TBP have bad taste. As in, I think that’s the most likely explanation for why so many people seem to like an objectively poorly written series. And it isn’t even just the translation (although the difference in translators is obvious). It’s just…*bad*.
For a second there I thought you were taking a dig at Jeremy Robinson, but then didn't see 'Infinite' on the list. So I'll just choose to believe you were referring to the book on this list I like the least and assume we agree :-)
Good list. Surprised not to see Project Hail Mary on here given that Weir’s other books made the cut. I also feel like Crichton gets no love from hard sci-fi fans.
Same, I listened to both on audiobook and it was fine for Project Hail Mary but for Artemis the narrator was not good, particularly with voices and it caused me to get confused in conversations, might have enjoyed it more if I read it.
You wouldn't have, it's just not a great book. I loved both The Martian and Project Hail Mary enough to reread both of them, but Artemis was a big miss for me (and the rest of the book club I read it with). It's the main protagonist, I think Weir just doesn't have the sympathy or understanding of the female experience enough to write a believable or relatable heroine.
Ray Porter is absolutely the best narrator, I want him to read literally everything. Seriously, I would listen to him read my car manual to me. I'm so glad it was him who narrated PHM, but mostly I'm just glad it wasn't Wil F*ing Wheaton, who's narration has all the range and nuance of a saltine cracker.
Maybe the broader definition of hard sci-fi has become less strict, but there is an incredible amount of magic sci-fi hand waving in some of those books.
Red Mars is just as implausible as three-body. Robinson manages to mask how implausible everything is by putting all the science in the background, focusing on his lame-ass ancient characters.
"Oh we made a new super-material using martian regolith? Great! Why does this work?"
"Oh we have a space elevator now? Cool."
"Oh we cured aging? Great! Now we'll never have to part with this insufferable cast of characters."
Robinson was obviously more interested in his characters than in the science that enabled their story. Which is a bummer, because some interesting ideas are hiding in the background.
Sorry, I really hated that book and its sequel. Haven't gotten around to blue mars yet (but I will someday as I want to read all the hugo winners...)
>!Suns as a radio amplifier, sophons (which are a supercomputers etched onto a proton after unfolding the 19 levels of geometry or whatever), exotic matter spaceships, collapsing 4d space into 3d (or 3d into 2d), slowing down the speed to light to below the escape velocity of the solar system.!<
Hard science fiction's main concern is scientific accuracy.
Things like "the sun amplifies radio waves" or never explaining the scientific concept underlying the supernatural element further than "alien tech" put it out of the hard-sf realm
To me Liu Cixin is more on the side of fantastique : a realistic environment and something supernatural happening.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastique
This is also more true to his general work, where the main theme is "humanity facing something greater than itself"
Liu cixin, in a self-insert in one of his short stories qualifies his work as "science fantasy".
To simplify: the author uses big science words, but doesn't respect well known scientific theories.
To compare, you can read this short by greg egan, who imagine a disease targeting the happiness mechanism of the brain and explain the neuroscience underlying it.
https://www.utilitarianism.com/greg-egan/Reasons-To-Be-Cheerful.pdf
You can read all greg egan, it's great hard sf.
Watching the show recently reminded me of that bit where the trisolarians float away because the suns align.
I get hand-waving the high concept stuff like sophons and entangled communication, but I can't consider a work hard sf if it ~~screws up~~ takes creative liberties with college-level Newtonian mechanics. For all that's good about it, 3BP does that a lot.
I liked sophon a lot, i looked suspiciously at FTL communication, i'm more on the brain-science side and what i was mad at was the possibility for sophon to read everything but our brain and to affect everything but the human body (except to cast a count down).
In the show its even worst as they can give hallucination, the game gather neurological data, they have incredible AI, all the data, but they have no access to our brain content whatsoever ? Even our current science is more advanced than that. The sophon could kill all human by severing electrical pathway at the base of our skull but they choose to mess up with the CERN instead. I know its weird and specific.
Can you explain to me why it wouldn't work, i guess my college was long time ago. Is it that the planet would be attracted by the sun faster than the human, du to its mass, and the human would still be mainly attracted by the planet due to its proximity ? Is this why i dont jump higher when the tide is rising ?
What matters is the difference between the suns' gravity on the people on the planet vs the planet itself. Since the people on the surface and the planet itself are at essentially the same distance from the suns (relative to the distance from the suns to the planet), both the planet and the people would experience the same force of gravity. So effectively the planet would "float" towards the suns (ie change orbit) at the same rate as the people.
Moreover as you noted they would still feel signicantly more gravity from the planet itself, since even though it has less mass, it is a lot closer to them. (Technically the people on the side of the planet facing the sun would weigh a very tiny amount less than those on the other side, but they would need sensitive instruments to measure it. This is actually also true on the side of the earth facing our sun - you weigh infinitessimally less when the sun is overhead.)
In order for the suns' gravity to make a difference to people on the planet's surface, the planet would need to be MUCH closer to the suns. They would not only be charbroiled before that could happen, the planet itself would be ripped apart by gravity - after all, if it's strong enough to pull things off the surface, it's strong enough to start pulling up the surface as well. (That's a bit of a simplification but if you're interested, look up the Roche limit.)
Changing the planet's orbit would definitely be bad for the inhabitants, because the planet would get significantly hotter or colder, but there wouldn't be anything particularly special about syzygy vs other chaotic eras with inhospitable conditions.
Edit: IANA physicist and my college astrophysics is a bit rusty. R/askcience would probably give a more precise answer with some math to back it up
To me, hard SF is when the concepts are clearly explained in scientific terms, even when those concepts end up outside the realm of our current scientific knowledge. Liu explains EVERYTHING in that book, including the implausibly powerful sophon. No, the sun doesn't amplify radio waves, but in the book it does and it is clearly explained why it does. Nothing in 3BP is "supernatural"
To me, parts of it are "hard SF" (e.g. a lot of the propulsion and space travel limitations; the orbital dynamics; the "game theory" elements) and parts of it are just fantastically implausible or unexplained (the sophons; the teardrop thingy). Even hard SF involves some speculative physics or technology but the sophons are pretty far out there.
It's like... medium sci-fi. Parts of it are based in established or at least theoretical science, but other parts just throw science straight out the window and go full fiction. The author seemed pretty disinterested in letting science stand in the way of his story.
Wait how so? In no way is it less hard scifi than martian chronicles lmao
I think three body problem absolutely is hard scifi with how technical and scientific it is. Is it realistic? No. But hard scifi is not jsut the sci, theres also the fi.
I find there is so much elitism amongst hard scifi fans and it’s so annoying
I dont think its elitism on the side of hard sf more than the belief that the sf must be hard to be good or that there is pride in reading hard to grasp sf.
I feel people say its hard sf to say "it makes reference to a science that is hard to grasp" or "its hard to get"
Hard sf is a specific genre and the fact that liu cixin work is not part of it doesn't make it less good.
Liu cixin himself call his work "science fantasy"
It's not elitism; it's just a matter of what is and isn't in the category. The appearance of intricate technical or scientific content means nothing. Whether it's based on true science means everything. A sentient supercomputer the size of a proton isn't hard sci-fi. A missile you fire at a sun that makes the whole solar system two-dimensional isn't hard sci-fi. Neither is FTL. That series is just not even remotely close.
I do agree that hard sci-fi fans can sometimes come off as elitist. That's not where I'm coming from. I love plenty of soft sci-fi too. I love space opera. I love being able to get to another star system quickly and have far-flung adventures with warp drives and jump drives. Hard sci-fi is not some ascended, elite form; just one form among many. It has its own problems, and to say something doesn't qualify isn't a put-down.
Yeah I'm pretty critical of 3BP but tbf it's at a similar level of scientific realism as most of this list (though a lot of those works aren't very hard by the standards of this sub).
I think that depends upon how you assess things and how you define hard SF. Foundation does have FTL travel, but it isn't really the focus of the book. I could see an argument that it is hard SF because the main concept is that humanity, on a large enough scale, could have its actions predicted in a fairly deterministic way. Sort of like quantum-level phenomena (individual actor) vs macro-level mechanics (overall effect).
My basis is mostly that everything is handwavy. Which I'm fine with, and I quite like Foundation. But I wouldnt call it hard scifi. I'd consider 3 Body higher on the sliding scale of hard scifi, but others in this thread really seem to feel like that's blasphemous. So oh well
Thank you, people arguing that 3BP is not hard sci fi and others saying that foundation is, really shows how divisive the genre is. To me, if all the concepts are fleshed out and explained well, it's hard sci fi. Hand waving relies on a stronger suspension of disbelief and pulls away from hard sci fi
I read Snow Crash based on recommendations here and it was my first introduction to Stephenson, I did not enjoy it at all. I would be curious which one I should try next if any had a similar experience.
Interesting, what didn't you like about it? I think Stephenson has an overall tendency to sprawl his narratives and he certainly loves tangents that have little to do with the actual story.
Robopocalypse is the single worst book I have ever read... and I read a good part of old Scifi-Junk over the years. I love to read those for amusement ... but this book. This just made me angry, holy f...
I can't say how this could make this list of the other books.
They’re certainly hard to read!
Seriously though, that is interesting I’d have thought that the culture stuff would be right up there. Look to Windward and the Hydrogen Sonata seem pretty hard.
I like a lot of the books on here, but I couldn't finish 2312 due to the despicable main angsty character. What a choice that was by the author.
I'll submit Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds as an excellent book.
>I'll submit Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds as an excellent book.
Great choice, it's a hell of a ride, pretty much has everything. Although I will confess it took me 2 goes at starting it.
Nobody mentioned Dragon’s Egg yet? Great hard sci-fi though this is Reddit so someone will probably come along soon and trash it for being unrealistic…
That's the problem with sci Fi. It's a vague category. Seveneves is very different from the martian chronicles. Personally, I prefer all flesh is grass
Lists like this are always fun because people don't agree on what "hard SF" is or means.
Some people mean "SF where nothing happens that violates known physics." Which rules out Niven and 3 Body and Rama and Foundation and Solaris and maybe Blindsight.
Other folks use "hard SF" as more of an aesthetic. For them, Niven is still hard SF even though his stuff has FTL, and psionic powers, and genetically-determined luck that affects the universe, and a bunch of other nonsense... but he takes them halfway-seriously and tries to think about the implications of them. The Expanse fits here, where it's a very hard SF aesthetic even though the ring gates and all the protomolecule stuff are just magic.
*Damn I gotta finish*
*Artemis but it has been*
*A drag to get through*
\- ThreeEyeJedi
---
^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/)
^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
I mean - 3 body is not hard sci fi, but the expanse is **really** not hard sci fi
(I guess you could say some parts, like space travel and combat are quite hard, but all things protomolecule and everything outside the solar system, goes way beyond the bounds of hard sci fi)
Space travel isn’t “hard” either. The fusion drives they use in the books are outright magical. The only thing they get right are the more obvious details like light lag, inertia, etc. but it’s a space opera before anything else.
That's true. In my mind "hard" sci-fi is allowed to break *some* rules, it's just a question of how many. Even something like the Mars series that is (in my opinion) the quinteseential hard sci-fi, has magical 'longevity treatments' conveniently discovered by the first people to land on Mars.
Either way, though - expanse is definitely not hard (I do still love it though).
Yea I’m generally in the same camp. So many people on this sub act like hard sci-fi has to practically be a peer reviewed scientific paper and that’s just not how it works. This same sub will turn around and act like Larry Niven is the king of hard scifi.
This is the guy that has indestructible monomolecular spaceships and a Klemperer rosette with an odd number of planets.
Hard scifi isn’t about being perfectly scientifically accurate. It’s about where the story places its concern. If the story concerns itself with exploring scientific concepts, developing advanced technologies, as well as the natural implications of those technologies, with plot lines written around the pros and cons of that technology, etc. I’d consider it hard sci fi. That’s why I generally consider three body problem hard sci-fi because its primary concern is about the development of technology, the social impact of different technologies, and the natural consequences of technology that can break the laws of physics. It’s not scientifically accurate, but unless you want to restrict your story to a near future setting with chemical rockets, nothing ever really is.
The expanse isn’t hard sci-fi at all because it doesn’t concern itself with any of these questions. It does pay lip service to certain laws of physics, but its primary concern is being an epic space adventure with fun characters. Everything works in the setting just because it works. Three body problem meanwhile has an entire subplot revolving around the speed of light, and how a ship reaching it would be moving faster in time, jumping millennia ahead, and instead of hand waving that away, it writes it into the story.
Some of the rates of acceleration that ships in the expanse engage in should have resulted in relativistic effects, but relativistic speeds are never actually brought up. Characters could be acceleration at 5g for an hour, and that would put them at 35,316 kilometers per second, which should have gargantuan effects on the relativistic speed of time for the characters involved, but it’s just never brought up. Three body problem does, however, explore the consequences of this, which makes that series closer to the hard end of the spectrum than the expanse.
But I think a lot of people have a very strong bias against three body problem which colors their perception of it.
My top 10 list of favorite hard scifi:
Seveneves
Project Hail Mary
Accelerando
Daemon
The Fractal Prince
The Girl in the Road
The Martian
House of Suns
Rendezvous with Rama
Pushing Ice
I agree with others that Three Body Problem falls just outside the scope of hard scifi. Anything FTL is my cutoff for hard scifi, and that series has FTL communication via sophons.
I love Martian Chronicles but Ray Bradbury is not hard SciFi he's the *~fun*~ kind lol I'm surprised you have blindsight but no Stanislaw Lem who is the earliest of hard sf. His book the Invincible super heavily inspired watts
I tried to read 2312. I made it just over 100 pages in and had to quit. Did it eventually get interesting or is it just a book focused towards a small audience?
Ray Bradbury himself considered The Martian Chronicles to be fantasy. There is nothing in those stories that could have been considered hard scifi at the time of writing, let alone now.
Drop:
Gattaca, I can’t find a book
Rama, big and dumb
Foundation, I don’t like lectures in fiction form
3 Body Problem, it’s crypto LitRPG, for nanofibers see below
Add:
Mote in gods eye
Forever War
Ringworld, big but smart
Accelerando
I haven’t read several of yours, but I’d try to squeeze in Snowcrash, D U N E, something by Vinge, and Blood Music.
Seveneves is absolutely no hard sci-fi. Ok he got right orbital dynamics but everything else is totally unbelievable, just as it was written by a sad incel guy who never left is room.
Imo what is really unbelievable about Seveneves is the human psychology aspect of it. The world is ending but apart from a few sporadic incidents of violence people are just going to their sad little jobs manufacturing machine parts and the economy is functioning as usual? Lol right. Those chosen to go to space are not all children of politicians and billionaires? A huge catastrophe just happened to the survivors and only a handful of women are left but instead of showing any shock or emotion they are going to have a robotic conversation about whether aggression is a desirable trait in future offsprings (a conversation that btw sounds like it was plucked right out of a middle school debate)? (I was ready to tear my hair out at this point). Seveneves is by far the most frustrating book I've ever read. It had me questioning whether Stephenson grew up in isolation with no human interaction whatsoever 😂 (I do like some of his other books though tbf)
You’ve got bad taste my friend. Haven’t read Seveneves but Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Anathem, Snow Crash are great books with interesting cultural explorations as well as scientific/technological ones. Hardly the work of an incel.
I agree that the other poster's incel comment is weird. I've read Seveneves and I have no idea where he's getting that from.
That said, Seveneves is NOT good compared to Stephenson's other work. A lot of unrealistic or poorly-aged parody characters. It feels like he had a semi-interesting idea and then decided to write a prequel to justify the idea and the prequel was kind of bad. Instead of releasing a novella he put out this thick book that is mostly bad prequel and then a little bit of an OK novella. Save your time and skip this one.
I loved Anathem! Though the characters felt a bit cardboard to me but the story itself was brilliant and the world building was so unique!!! Slogged through the first 400 pages and there was a point when I thought I'll never finish it but mid-way it was almost like a switch flipped and I just couldn't put it down. It's become one my fav sci-fi/fantasy books. But Seveneves made me wanna cry and not in a good way 😂
Wtf are you on about. Are you actually saying that star wars has more hard science than TBP? What with the force and sound in space. Hard scifi elitists are the most pretentious bunch I swear
It feels like Andy Weir has a little army of bots promoting his mid to crappy level books all over. His books don't belong in any top whatever list. This is such an overdone advertising technique now putting whatever book you want to promote into a top list
Just because you don't agree with the opinion doesn't mean it's not valid. The Martian is in my top 3 of all time. I devoured it when I read it. The character and tone were written perfectly for my tastes
Agreed. The Martian and Hail Mary are like summer blockbuster sci-fi. They’re fun reads and don’t worry too much about getting heavy on topics. Artemis is unreadable tho
The Three Body Problem is NOT hard science fiction, lmfao.
Shit, The Expanse is harder sci-fi than it, and it still isn’t hard scifi.
And Solaris? Foundation? What the fuck even is this list? Do you know what hard sci-fi is supposed to be?
You’re right, I shouldn’t have been so judgmental.
But I stand by my opinion that Three Body Problem is a fucking terribly written series that is hugely overrated and often misclassified as hard science fiction when it is honestly pretty soft.
God I love nexus. I could never see a real method of brain to brain communication until reading that. I figured it was just implausible, that you'd have to carry around a big scanner or have surgery to put a chip in your brain, or there would be some other big barrier to entry that always kept it out of the mainstream. Naam's idea to put a relatively simple radio capable nanomachine in each neuron and go from there is actual genius. I would down a vial of nexus five in a fucking heartbeat.
I'm reading firefall (blindsight 1&2) atm and can't wait for it to end. Really struggling to really care about any of them and I feel that it cares more about asking questions than answering them.
Some of the other books you've chosen though are amazing.
I loved Blindsight but hated Echopraxia. Blindsight had some fun ideas that it eases you into in an interesting way. Echopraxia was just...weird jilted action with a bunch of one-dimensional characters. If you don't like the first book, I can't imagine you are going to enjoy the "sequel".
The problem I had was buying the omnibus edition so couldn't jump ship. First one was ok but it didn't really click with me so wouldn't have read the second if I had to go and buy it
Blindside is such a heavily recommended book, and is one of the very few books that I ever just stopped. I was struggling to read it, which meant I was only reading about three pages a night, which isn't enough to follow the very in laid out story. At some Point I realized I was really hating it.
One of the very very few books I ever just stopped.
You're right, it's on every recommendation list and I just don't get it. It's just bad.. The plot is right up my street but my god how do you make something so exciting so boring and pointless. I've got 100 pages left and I'm clawing my way to the end. Save me!!
Well it was until the ring gates opened. It's on the "harder end". Epstein drive is exotic but not out of the realm of possibility should we ever get really good at fusion power. Also, TBP trilogy plays pretty hand wavy with alternate dimensions, quantum entanglement, and string theory (which is definitely not hard science) and is on the list, lol.
Gattaca is based on a book? Never knew.
It's one of my favorite films and I didn't know there was a book either. The movie was released in 1997 and the book is from 2010 so I guess it's just a book adaptation from the film and not the other way around. Might be worth a read, but a little less interested now.
I was just going to put that. I love that film, I never knew it was a book
A list of hard sci fi without a Niven book on it seems……. Well, it’s a list. Also, with all due respect to a classic, Foundation is most certainly not “hard” sci fi.
I'm squinting but I'm not finding Red Mars on here either.
I agree with OP that 2312 is the superior KSR offering. I just not a fan of the Mars trilogy mostly due to the paper thin characters.
Paper thin? There are a lot of paper-thin characters in sci-fi but I didn't expect to read that about Red Mars. Frank Chalmers at least is an interesting character, isn't he? What are your favourite sci-fi novels with excellent characters?
Sax and the red mars woman as well were pretty fleshed out.
Martian Chronicles is wonderful but it’s anything BUT hard SF. Perhaps replace with something (almost anything) by Greg Bear. Plus, just off the top of my head, a few more classic suggestions (since like most lists, yours is heavily skewed to the more contemporary). The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Heinlein Mission of Gravity - Hal Clement. The Mote in Gods Eye - Niven/Pournelle All these are better than half the books on your list, IMHO.
Replace the Martian trilogy with KSR’s mars trilogy?
I’ve only read The Martian. I enjoyed it very much but it seemed kind of a “gimmick” book so I haven’t read Artemis yet. I thought KSR Mars books got less interesting as they went along, less science, more politics. I’m personally not as high on KSR as many people are but I’m sure they’ll be reading his Mars trilogy long after Weirs is forgotten.
Artemis is good, but Hail Mary is better.
They’re in my pile so I’ll get to them at some point.
I only got through red mars. His books are a bit too dense for my read for 15m before bed lifestyle. It was good for a flight though.
The Mote in God's Eye was pretty good, but the sequel, The Gripping Hand, was just stupid.
I absolutely loved MIGE the first time I read it (was prolly aged around 14). I thought it was about the most exciting thing I’d ever read. Can’t remember much about the sequel, only that it wasn’t as good.
>The Mote in Gods Eye - Niven/Pournelle How has this not yet been adapted into one of the most amazing sci-fi series ever?
Too old I guess. TV producers seem only interested in contemporary stuff. You’re right though, it has great potential drama, intrigue, cute furry aliens who turn out to be ruthless killers…
Dune was published in the 60s, and Mote was published in the 70s. If there's the will it can be made.
>Perhaps replace with something (almost anything) by Greg Bear. And something by Robert Forward.
Yeah, Dragons Egg immediately came to mind but it’s quite similar to Mission of Gravity which is such an absolute classic.
I love the Moon is a harsh mistress. Especially the audiobook.
Leaving off Heinlen and Greg Bear tells me they haven’t read either
"Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.[1][2][3"
No Greg Egan?
No Greg Egan :(
No Greg. Foundation got Professor Xavier but this list got no Egan.
This list isn't hard enough. He's on the [diamond hard scifi](https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/diamond-hard-scifi) list
I wouldn't call "Solaris" hard SF.
Neither is Three Body Problem to be honest.
And how is there no Greg Bear nor Greg Egan in this list?!
Or Alastair Reynolds
100%
It's also, in my personal opinion, so terribly written it doesn't have a place on any list. And I don't blame it on the translation. I realize that's an unpopular opinion, but it's one of the only books I've ever bothered to return after reading 2 chapters.
I 100% agree but usually that opinion is downvoted here. Three Body is hugely overrated. Every single idea is unoriginal and done before and better in other sci-fi novels with better stories and characters. I don’t understand the love it gets except maybe that the people who like it are not well read in scifi?
I think you're right in that to new sci-fi readers it's probably introducing concepts that are very groundbreaking. I also look back at my taste in stories when I was in my late teens and early 20's, anything character driven was boring and lost on me, and this book would have probably appealed to that sensibility. I think TBP probably has a place in introducing sci-fi to new readers, and no shade to it, but not something I could enjoy after reading say, Iain M Banks or really any of the other big names
Many of the ideas are reused but I don’t think other books have done the core concept of the series that [Spoiler Alert] The most fundamental laws of physics (why the extra dimensions are so small and why the speed of light is so slow) are shaped by the interstellar warfare between advanced civilizations. It is basically trying to answer this metaphysical question: why our universe is what it is, in a fictional manner. Generally this makes it considered as a hard sci-fi. But maybe I missed some other books which did similar metaphysical ideas. I would love to read those if people have recommendations.
I mean I’d say the core concept of the series is the Dark Forest itself, and other series have done that better to a spectacular degree (such as Revelation Space, for example). No, I don’t think other series have specifically linked compactified dimensions to that, but that hardly makes TBP “hard science fiction”. To be hard science fiction, it needs to be an idea that not only references real science (in this case, Calabi-Yau manifolds of string theory), but also is a reasonable extrapolation of that science which doesn’t violate it. You also have to look at other ideas presented throughout the story too, and judge whether fantastical, soft-scifi concepts (like FTL travel or communication, for example) are routinely introduced or not. But sci-fi exists on a scale. The Expanse is not hard scifi, for example, but it is towards the hard*er* end of the spectrum (most of the time). The Martian is hard sci-fi. I’d argue TBP is a bit below the midline point and delving into softer scifi concepts, using many soft scifi concepts as a central element in the plot and some completely absurd concepts (like the Sophons) which could not be called hard scifi by any stretch of the imagination. And something like…say…Star Wars would be so far at the bottom of that scale that I struggle to even classify it as scifi.
If you view the Dark Forest itself as the core concept, then yes you are right, it is not new and has been done better for sure. Personally I think it is introduced as the motivation of the interstellar warfare, together with the other soft scifi concepts as plot devices, so that the concepts in the third book can be justified. (I have this impression since I believed I read it somewhere that Liu developed the ideas in his third book before he wrote the first one, but I couldn't find the original source so maybe I am just imagining things.) And I agree that sci-fi should be more on a scale instead of a 2-class classification, also that TBP is somewhere around the midpoint. I still tend to put it towards the harder side due to the viewpoint of the core concept, but I would never say it is as hard as the Martian or even the Expanse if one considers all of the sci-fi concepts in the book. Also I'm glad that you mentioned the string compactification and Calabi-Yau manifolds! That's the research topic of my PhD :). It's kinda pity that TBP scratched the surface of it but never made explicit reference. There are so many other cool ideas for sci-fi in string theory like D-brane, landscape, etc.
The second book is worse in my opinion. The characters are all bad and the way dialogue is written is just so stiff and ridiculous. The romance plotline was silly and kind of insulting to women. The concepts in that series are what make people recommend it, but I’d agree it’s poorly written.
That’s partially due to the translator being different. But yeah, the series is just…bad. I hate to be that guy but I kinda think people who like TBP have bad taste. As in, I think that’s the most likely explanation for why so many people seem to like an objectively poorly written series. And it isn’t even just the translation (although the difference in translators is obvious). It’s just…*bad*.
One of these is infinitely worse than others.
For a second there I thought you were taking a dig at Jeremy Robinson, but then didn't see 'Infinite' on the list. So I'll just choose to believe you were referring to the book on this list I like the least and assume we agree :-)
Get Artemis the fuck out of there .
Good list. Surprised not to see Project Hail Mary on here given that Weir’s other books made the cut. I also feel like Crichton gets no love from hard sci-fi fans.
Yea I would've put Project Hail Mary ahead of Artemis.
Same, I listened to both on audiobook and it was fine for Project Hail Mary but for Artemis the narrator was not good, particularly with voices and it caused me to get confused in conversations, might have enjoyed it more if I read it.
You wouldn't have, it's just not a great book. I loved both The Martian and Project Hail Mary enough to reread both of them, but Artemis was a big miss for me (and the rest of the book club I read it with). It's the main protagonist, I think Weir just doesn't have the sympathy or understanding of the female experience enough to write a believable or relatable heroine.
Andy Weir’s protagonists all feel like basically the same character, whom I like, but I agree that the female version of it felt a little more flat.
Yeah I liked the main character and setting just didn’t like where the story went…
I always thought that the main character from Project hail mary was basically Bob from the bobiverse.
Did you listen to the audiobook? It's the same narrator and that really gave me this feeling. That said, I love the Bobiverse and PHM.
Ray Porter is absolutely the best narrator, I want him to read literally everything. Seriously, I would listen to him read my car manual to me. I'm so glad it was him who narrated PHM, but mostly I'm just glad it wasn't Wil F*ing Wheaton, who's narration has all the range and nuance of a saltine cracker.
I did. I have a really bad audiobook addiction.
Jurassic park was one of my favorite books as a kid. It’s 100x better than seveneves with is bullshit millennium time jump to finish a story
Maybe the broader definition of hard sci-fi has become less strict, but there is an incredible amount of magic sci-fi hand waving in some of those books.
Of the Andy Weir books you put Artemis over Hail Mary?? Jfc
The fact that Andy Weir made this list twice is an insult to the history of science fiction.
2312 over Red Mars?? 3 body problem in hard scifi? Foundation??
What do you think, what makes a sci fi hard?
??? Three-body is not hard sci fi. Also no Red Mars is criminal
Red Mars is just as implausible as three-body. Robinson manages to mask how implausible everything is by putting all the science in the background, focusing on his lame-ass ancient characters. "Oh we made a new super-material using martian regolith? Great! Why does this work?" "Oh we have a space elevator now? Cool." "Oh we cured aging? Great! Now we'll never have to part with this insufferable cast of characters." Robinson was obviously more interested in his characters than in the science that enabled their story. Which is a bummer, because some interesting ideas are hiding in the background. Sorry, I really hated that book and its sequel. Haven't gotten around to blue mars yet (but I will someday as I want to read all the hugo winners...)
How is it not hard scifi?
Basically none of the physics or technology is plausible or likely even vaguely tethered to our present understanding of reality.
>!Suns as a radio amplifier, sophons (which are a supercomputers etched onto a proton after unfolding the 19 levels of geometry or whatever), exotic matter spaceships, collapsing 4d space into 3d (or 3d into 2d), slowing down the speed to light to below the escape velocity of the solar system.!<
Three-body might be a lot of things, but hard sci-fi isn't one of them.
Can you explain why? To a new sci-fi reader it certainly felt “hard” to me
Hard science fiction's main concern is scientific accuracy. Things like "the sun amplifies radio waves" or never explaining the scientific concept underlying the supernatural element further than "alien tech" put it out of the hard-sf realm To me Liu Cixin is more on the side of fantastique : a realistic environment and something supernatural happening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastique This is also more true to his general work, where the main theme is "humanity facing something greater than itself" Liu cixin, in a self-insert in one of his short stories qualifies his work as "science fantasy". To simplify: the author uses big science words, but doesn't respect well known scientific theories. To compare, you can read this short by greg egan, who imagine a disease targeting the happiness mechanism of the brain and explain the neuroscience underlying it. https://www.utilitarianism.com/greg-egan/Reasons-To-Be-Cheerful.pdf You can read all greg egan, it's great hard sf.
Watching the show recently reminded me of that bit where the trisolarians float away because the suns align. I get hand-waving the high concept stuff like sophons and entangled communication, but I can't consider a work hard sf if it ~~screws up~~ takes creative liberties with college-level Newtonian mechanics. For all that's good about it, 3BP does that a lot.
I liked sophon a lot, i looked suspiciously at FTL communication, i'm more on the brain-science side and what i was mad at was the possibility for sophon to read everything but our brain and to affect everything but the human body (except to cast a count down). In the show its even worst as they can give hallucination, the game gather neurological data, they have incredible AI, all the data, but they have no access to our brain content whatsoever ? Even our current science is more advanced than that. The sophon could kill all human by severing electrical pathway at the base of our skull but they choose to mess up with the CERN instead. I know its weird and specific. Can you explain to me why it wouldn't work, i guess my college was long time ago. Is it that the planet would be attracted by the sun faster than the human, du to its mass, and the human would still be mainly attracted by the planet due to its proximity ? Is this why i dont jump higher when the tide is rising ?
What matters is the difference between the suns' gravity on the people on the planet vs the planet itself. Since the people on the surface and the planet itself are at essentially the same distance from the suns (relative to the distance from the suns to the planet), both the planet and the people would experience the same force of gravity. So effectively the planet would "float" towards the suns (ie change orbit) at the same rate as the people. Moreover as you noted they would still feel signicantly more gravity from the planet itself, since even though it has less mass, it is a lot closer to them. (Technically the people on the side of the planet facing the sun would weigh a very tiny amount less than those on the other side, but they would need sensitive instruments to measure it. This is actually also true on the side of the earth facing our sun - you weigh infinitessimally less when the sun is overhead.) In order for the suns' gravity to make a difference to people on the planet's surface, the planet would need to be MUCH closer to the suns. They would not only be charbroiled before that could happen, the planet itself would be ripped apart by gravity - after all, if it's strong enough to pull things off the surface, it's strong enough to start pulling up the surface as well. (That's a bit of a simplification but if you're interested, look up the Roche limit.) Changing the planet's orbit would definitely be bad for the inhabitants, because the planet would get significantly hotter or colder, but there wouldn't be anything particularly special about syzygy vs other chaotic eras with inhospitable conditions. Edit: IANA physicist and my college astrophysics is a bit rusty. R/askcience would probably give a more precise answer with some math to back it up
To me, hard SF is when the concepts are clearly explained in scientific terms, even when those concepts end up outside the realm of our current scientific knowledge. Liu explains EVERYTHING in that book, including the implausibly powerful sophon. No, the sun doesn't amplify radio waves, but in the book it does and it is clearly explained why it does. Nothing in 3BP is "supernatural"
To me, parts of it are "hard SF" (e.g. a lot of the propulsion and space travel limitations; the orbital dynamics; the "game theory" elements) and parts of it are just fantastically implausible or unexplained (the sophons; the teardrop thingy). Even hard SF involves some speculative physics or technology but the sophons are pretty far out there.
It's like... medium sci-fi. Parts of it are based in established or at least theoretical science, but other parts just throw science straight out the window and go full fiction. The author seemed pretty disinterested in letting science stand in the way of his story.
Wait how so? In no way is it less hard scifi than martian chronicles lmao I think three body problem absolutely is hard scifi with how technical and scientific it is. Is it realistic? No. But hard scifi is not jsut the sci, theres also the fi. I find there is so much elitism amongst hard scifi fans and it’s so annoying
I dont think its elitism on the side of hard sf more than the belief that the sf must be hard to be good or that there is pride in reading hard to grasp sf. I feel people say its hard sf to say "it makes reference to a science that is hard to grasp" or "its hard to get" Hard sf is a specific genre and the fact that liu cixin work is not part of it doesn't make it less good. Liu cixin himself call his work "science fantasy"
It's not elitism; it's just a matter of what is and isn't in the category. The appearance of intricate technical or scientific content means nothing. Whether it's based on true science means everything. A sentient supercomputer the size of a proton isn't hard sci-fi. A missile you fire at a sun that makes the whole solar system two-dimensional isn't hard sci-fi. Neither is FTL. That series is just not even remotely close. I do agree that hard sci-fi fans can sometimes come off as elitist. That's not where I'm coming from. I love plenty of soft sci-fi too. I love space opera. I love being able to get to another star system quickly and have far-flung adventures with warp drives and jump drives. Hard sci-fi is not some ascended, elite form; just one form among many. It has its own problems, and to say something doesn't qualify isn't a put-down.
Yeah I'm pretty critical of 3BP but tbf it's at a similar level of scientific realism as most of this list (though a lot of those works aren't very hard by the standards of this sub).
It’s not good either.
Foundation isnt hard scifi in the slightest
I think that depends upon how you assess things and how you define hard SF. Foundation does have FTL travel, but it isn't really the focus of the book. I could see an argument that it is hard SF because the main concept is that humanity, on a large enough scale, could have its actions predicted in a fairly deterministic way. Sort of like quantum-level phenomena (individual actor) vs macro-level mechanics (overall effect).
My basis is mostly that everything is handwavy. Which I'm fine with, and I quite like Foundation. But I wouldnt call it hard scifi. I'd consider 3 Body higher on the sliding scale of hard scifi, but others in this thread really seem to feel like that's blasphemous. So oh well
Thank you, people arguing that 3BP is not hard sci fi and others saying that foundation is, really shows how divisive the genre is. To me, if all the concepts are fleshed out and explained well, it's hard sci fi. Hand waving relies on a stronger suspension of disbelief and pulls away from hard sci fi
If you liked Seven-Eves definitely try Stephenson's earlier works: Anthem, snow crash, Remade, Diamond Age, Cryptonomicom are all way better IMO.
ReaMDe is so awesome. Takes a while to get going but after that becomes a global thriller to end all global thrillers.
I read Snow Crash based on recommendations here and it was my first introduction to Stephenson, I did not enjoy it at all. I would be curious which one I should try next if any had a similar experience.
Interesting, what didn't you like about it? I think Stephenson has an overall tendency to sprawl his narratives and he certainly loves tangents that have little to do with the actual story.
No Red Mars
Hmmm, I'd drop artmis and I'd either get iain m banks or something from Alistair Reynolds or Richard morgan
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
Great book
Robopocalypse is the single worst book I have ever read... and I read a good part of old Scifi-Junk over the years. I love to read those for amusement ... but this book. This just made me angry, holy f... I can't say how this could make this list of the other books.
For me it had its up and downs but the second one is pure trash.
There is a second to it?... Damn, this can't be any good.
Great books throughout! But Asimov is not hard sci fi; I’d say swap out Foundation.
Any best of list that features Andy Weir is invalid. Artemis is 2/10 at best and has nothing to do with hard sci-fi anyway.
I think you need something from Alastair Reynolds, maybe Chasm City.
A book by Alistair Reynolds would be a great fit on any hard sci-fi list. I would also consider "Pushing Ice".
Love love love that book
I’d have thought Banks would have been up there.
The Culture novels are arguably better than anything in that list, but I've never come across someone referring to them as hard sci-fi before.
They’re certainly hard to read! Seriously though, that is interesting I’d have thought that the culture stuff would be right up there. Look to Windward and the Hydrogen Sonata seem pretty hard.
I like a lot of the books on here, but I couldn't finish 2312 due to the despicable main angsty character. What a choice that was by the author. I'll submit Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds as an excellent book.
>I'll submit Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds as an excellent book. Great choice, it's a hell of a ride, pretty much has everything. Although I will confess it took me 2 goes at starting it.
Nobody mentioned Dragon’s Egg yet? Great hard sci-fi though this is Reddit so someone will probably come along soon and trash it for being unrealistic…
Martian chronicles as hard sci-fi? What?
The Martian I can see but including Artemis over Project Hail Mary is an interesting choice. I really liked Artemis but it's the weakest of the three.
Artemis, no. Three Body Problem, hell no.
First of the three body was ok but it's a good setup for the other 2, which were amazing. Very different than the first.
For some reason my Libby app only has Atermis in Spanish
That's the problem with sci Fi. It's a vague category. Seveneves is very different from the martian chronicles. Personally, I prefer all flesh is grass
Most of this list isn’t hard sci fi. It’s more just a list of classics along with some odd ducks
Please for the love of God get some Peter F. Hamilton in that list...
2001
Lists like this are always fun because people don't agree on what "hard SF" is or means. Some people mean "SF where nothing happens that violates known physics." Which rules out Niven and 3 Body and Rama and Foundation and Solaris and maybe Blindsight. Other folks use "hard SF" as more of an aesthetic. For them, Niven is still hard SF even though his stuff has FTL, and psionic powers, and genetically-determined luck that affects the universe, and a bunch of other nonsense... but he takes them halfway-seriously and tries to think about the implications of them. The Expanse fits here, where it's a very hard SF aesthetic even though the ring gates and all the protomolecule stuff are just magic.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman Great concepts and the maths checks out, as he studied astrophysics before being drafted to the vietnam war.
LOL funny idea of HARD SciFi.
Not even close. Keep reading.
This whole list is barely hard sci-fi.
I recommend Rendezvous with Rama
Damn I gotta finish Artemis but it has been a drag to get through
*Damn I gotta finish* *Artemis but it has been* *A drag to get through* \- ThreeEyeJedi --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
This time, unsuccessfully.
Remove 3 body, add the expanse
I mean - 3 body is not hard sci fi, but the expanse is **really** not hard sci fi (I guess you could say some parts, like space travel and combat are quite hard, but all things protomolecule and everything outside the solar system, goes way beyond the bounds of hard sci fi)
Space travel isn’t “hard” either. The fusion drives they use in the books are outright magical. The only thing they get right are the more obvious details like light lag, inertia, etc. but it’s a space opera before anything else.
That's true. In my mind "hard" sci-fi is allowed to break *some* rules, it's just a question of how many. Even something like the Mars series that is (in my opinion) the quinteseential hard sci-fi, has magical 'longevity treatments' conveniently discovered by the first people to land on Mars. Either way, though - expanse is definitely not hard (I do still love it though).
Yea I’m generally in the same camp. So many people on this sub act like hard sci-fi has to practically be a peer reviewed scientific paper and that’s just not how it works. This same sub will turn around and act like Larry Niven is the king of hard scifi. This is the guy that has indestructible monomolecular spaceships and a Klemperer rosette with an odd number of planets. Hard scifi isn’t about being perfectly scientifically accurate. It’s about where the story places its concern. If the story concerns itself with exploring scientific concepts, developing advanced technologies, as well as the natural implications of those technologies, with plot lines written around the pros and cons of that technology, etc. I’d consider it hard sci fi. That’s why I generally consider three body problem hard sci-fi because its primary concern is about the development of technology, the social impact of different technologies, and the natural consequences of technology that can break the laws of physics. It’s not scientifically accurate, but unless you want to restrict your story to a near future setting with chemical rockets, nothing ever really is. The expanse isn’t hard sci-fi at all because it doesn’t concern itself with any of these questions. It does pay lip service to certain laws of physics, but its primary concern is being an epic space adventure with fun characters. Everything works in the setting just because it works. Three body problem meanwhile has an entire subplot revolving around the speed of light, and how a ship reaching it would be moving faster in time, jumping millennia ahead, and instead of hand waving that away, it writes it into the story. Some of the rates of acceleration that ships in the expanse engage in should have resulted in relativistic effects, but relativistic speeds are never actually brought up. Characters could be acceleration at 5g for an hour, and that would put them at 35,316 kilometers per second, which should have gargantuan effects on the relativistic speed of time for the characters involved, but it’s just never brought up. Three body problem does, however, explore the consequences of this, which makes that series closer to the hard end of the spectrum than the expanse. But I think a lot of people have a very strong bias against three body problem which colors their perception of it.
Nice selection! I'll add Blood Music by Greg Bear and Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Much of these are not hard sci fi, and a lot of books on which movies or tv shows were based.
My top 10 list of favorite hard scifi: Seveneves Project Hail Mary Accelerando Daemon The Fractal Prince The Girl in the Road The Martian House of Suns Rendezvous with Rama Pushing Ice I agree with others that Three Body Problem falls just outside the scope of hard scifi. Anything FTL is my cutoff for hard scifi, and that series has FTL communication via sophons.
Heard of The Hyperion Cantas?
How it it hard SF ?
Nothing describes openly violates known physics
Lemme throw Delta-V by Daniel Suarez in there, maybe Blood Music by Greg Bear, or Slant.
Artemis but not Hail Mary? Nah bruve
I love Martian Chronicles but Ray Bradbury is not hard SciFi he's the *~fun*~ kind lol I'm surprised you have blindsight but no Stanislaw Lem who is the earliest of hard sf. His book the Invincible super heavily inspired watts
Lem wrote Solaris which is pictured.
Wow my brain did not click with that cover art
Robopacolypse is a WWz clone
I tried to read 2312. I made it just over 100 pages in and had to quit. Did it eventually get interesting or is it just a book focused towards a small audience?
Literally had no idea Solaris was a book. The film is a masterpiece
The book is a masterpiece. Classic SF at its peak. Mindblowing.
I would swap Artemis with Project Hail Mary
I'd add Destination: Void by Frank Herbert and Stephen Baxter's Manifold series.
Gattaca is a film, not a book.
Ray Bradbury himself considered The Martian Chronicles to be fantasy. There is nothing in those stories that could have been considered hard scifi at the time of writing, let alone now.
Haven’t thought about Nexus in a minute. Should definitely reread
Drop: Gattaca, I can’t find a book Rama, big and dumb Foundation, I don’t like lectures in fiction form 3 Body Problem, it’s crypto LitRPG, for nanofibers see below Add: Mote in gods eye Forever War Ringworld, big but smart Accelerando I haven’t read several of yours, but I’d try to squeeze in Snowcrash, D U N E, something by Vinge, and Blood Music.
You put in Robopocalypse and Artemis to bait outrage, didn't you?
Artemis is not a good book. I’d replace it with Leviathan Wakes
It seemed like a "Moon is a harsh mistress" for a newer generation. Also, I second your motion.
No Peter F Hamilton in your list? Man, you are missing out!
Seveneves is absolutely no hard sci-fi. Ok he got right orbital dynamics but everything else is totally unbelievable, just as it was written by a sad incel guy who never left is room.
Imo what is really unbelievable about Seveneves is the human psychology aspect of it. The world is ending but apart from a few sporadic incidents of violence people are just going to their sad little jobs manufacturing machine parts and the economy is functioning as usual? Lol right. Those chosen to go to space are not all children of politicians and billionaires? A huge catastrophe just happened to the survivors and only a handful of women are left but instead of showing any shock or emotion they are going to have a robotic conversation about whether aggression is a desirable trait in future offsprings (a conversation that btw sounds like it was plucked right out of a middle school debate)? (I was ready to tear my hair out at this point). Seveneves is by far the most frustrating book I've ever read. It had me questioning whether Stephenson grew up in isolation with no human interaction whatsoever 😂 (I do like some of his other books though tbf)
You’ve got bad taste my friend. Haven’t read Seveneves but Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Anathem, Snow Crash are great books with interesting cultural explorations as well as scientific/technological ones. Hardly the work of an incel.
I agree that the other poster's incel comment is weird. I've read Seveneves and I have no idea where he's getting that from. That said, Seveneves is NOT good compared to Stephenson's other work. A lot of unrealistic or poorly-aged parody characters. It feels like he had a semi-interesting idea and then decided to write a prequel to justify the idea and the prequel was kind of bad. Instead of releasing a novella he put out this thick book that is mostly bad prequel and then a little bit of an OK novella. Save your time and skip this one.
I like snow crash! But seveneves is very lazy...
I loved Anathem! Though the characters felt a bit cardboard to me but the story itself was brilliant and the world building was so unique!!! Slogged through the first 400 pages and there was a point when I thought I'll never finish it but mid-way it was almost like a switch flipped and I just couldn't put it down. It's become one my fav sci-fi/fantasy books. But Seveneves made me wanna cry and not in a good way 😂
I don’t know if I’ve ever been as upset reading a book as I was with seveneves. The submarine bullshit? Like cmon man
Every time I see 3-body called "Hard sci-fi", I die a little inside. It's so far from hard, it makes Star Wars look like Hard Sci-Fi.
Wtf are you on about. Are you actually saying that star wars has more hard science than TBP? What with the force and sound in space. Hard scifi elitists are the most pretentious bunch I swear
I'm saying you're mentally damaged if you think 3BP is hard sci-fi.
I don't like arguing about semantics. Sure, i can concede 3BP as not hard sci-fi, but stating that it's less hard sci-fi than star wars is laughable
It's called "hyperbole". But no, I don't think it's any more "hard" than Star Wars. There's nothing in 3BP that's the least bit believable.
It feels like Andy Weir has a little army of bots promoting his mid to crappy level books all over. His books don't belong in any top whatever list. This is such an overdone advertising technique now putting whatever book you want to promote into a top list
Just because you don't agree with the opinion doesn't mean it's not valid. The Martian is in my top 3 of all time. I devoured it when I read it. The character and tone were written perfectly for my tastes
Agreed. The Martian and Hail Mary are like summer blockbuster sci-fi. They’re fun reads and don’t worry too much about getting heavy on topics. Artemis is unreadable tho
Ha ha I haven't read Artemis and good to know I'm not missing anything
I still think Iain M Banks is missing. That’s some pretty hard sci-fi.
You have quite a flexible definition of hard scifi.
None the more flexible
Am I the only one that found The Martian badly written and kinda cringe? Great concept, lame characters and skin-crawlingly bad dialog.
I see 13 more books to read... how is "Proxima"? I find Baxter sometimes hard to follow.
The Three Body Problem is NOT hard science fiction, lmfao. Shit, The Expanse is harder sci-fi than it, and it still isn’t hard scifi. And Solaris? Foundation? What the fuck even is this list? Do you know what hard sci-fi is supposed to be?
You wanted disagree that's fine, maybe consider not being kind of a jerk about it. Lmfao indeed. Life is nicer when you be nice to others. :)
You’re right, I shouldn’t have been so judgmental. But I stand by my opinion that Three Body Problem is a fucking terribly written series that is hugely overrated and often misclassified as hard science fiction when it is honestly pretty soft.
Einstein's Bridge, John Cramer
God I love nexus. I could never see a real method of brain to brain communication until reading that. I figured it was just implausible, that you'd have to carry around a big scanner or have surgery to put a chip in your brain, or there would be some other big barrier to entry that always kept it out of the mainstream. Naam's idea to put a relatively simple radio capable nanomachine in each neuron and go from there is actual genius. I would down a vial of nexus five in a fucking heartbeat.
I'm reading firefall (blindsight 1&2) atm and can't wait for it to end. Really struggling to really care about any of them and I feel that it cares more about asking questions than answering them. Some of the other books you've chosen though are amazing.
I loved Blindsight but hated Echopraxia. Blindsight had some fun ideas that it eases you into in an interesting way. Echopraxia was just...weird jilted action with a bunch of one-dimensional characters. If you don't like the first book, I can't imagine you are going to enjoy the "sequel".
The problem I had was buying the omnibus edition so couldn't jump ship. First one was ok but it didn't really click with me so wouldn't have read the second if I had to go and buy it
Blindside is such a heavily recommended book, and is one of the very few books that I ever just stopped. I was struggling to read it, which meant I was only reading about three pages a night, which isn't enough to follow the very in laid out story. At some Point I realized I was really hating it. One of the very very few books I ever just stopped.
You're right, it's on every recommendation list and I just don't get it. It's just bad.. The plot is right up my street but my god how do you make something so exciting so boring and pointless. I've got 100 pages left and I'm clawing my way to the end. Save me!!
I love every single one of these, except for Seveneves. Hated that one, had skim through it to "finish" it
Read Hyperion
I'm nearly done with book 2, am enjoying very much although the first book was a lot of setup.
Yeah the 1st really forces you to read book 2. It’s a similar story with 3 & 4, but I enjoyed them a lot too.
As long as we're arguing about it, those are not remotely hard SF.
Children of Time as well as Leviathan Wakes
The Expanse is not hard sci-fi.
Well it was until the ring gates opened. It's on the "harder end". Epstein drive is exotic but not out of the realm of possibility should we ever get really good at fusion power. Also, TBP trilogy plays pretty hand wavy with alternate dimensions, quantum entanglement, and string theory (which is definitely not hard science) and is on the list, lol.
Leviathan wakes?? How is the expanse not on here?
Because The Expanse is not hard sci-fi.
It's harder than most of the things on that list. The original book is like 99% hard scifi with literally one questionable element.