Diaspora by Greg Egan. I kind of glazed over some of the heavy math parts. It’s the one book that made me go - oh, this is hard sci-fi. But I loved it all the same.
Diaspora still has unobtanium particles with exotic twists.
I would say permutation city is his hardest work because there is all possibility that it is already happening.
>Diaspora still has unobtanium particles with exotic twists.
Well... I love Hard Scifi. But, you can't call it "Science Fiction" without the "fiction" part.
That's true but you can, for example, do things like a story about a manned base on Europa using entirely known technology. That sort of thing is the hardest of scifi - speculative applications rather than speculative science.
Five and a half year journey in microgravity, then living on a base with less than 1/7th Earth gravity. Plus cosmic radiation, and Jupiter's radiation. Then several years back.
"Our fifteen-year journey to extreme osteoporosis and whole-body cancer."
It isn't sci-fi if it is just using known technology. By that standard, the average Western would be considered sci-fi due to the use of guns.
For it to be sci-fi, the tech has to be at a level that we have not yet achieved.
Do you or do you not agree that a story about a long term lunar colony (achievable with current scientific and technical knowledge) would be science fiction?
Remember that I said "speculative applications of science and technology". People running around on Earth shooting people with guns isn't a speculative application, it's a common practical one.
Hard science fiction is still fiction, and that's okay. The opposite of hard SF isn't when the science isn't realistic, it's when the science isn't ever really given any exposition or detail at all.
A good example is *The Culture* universe (which I love, this is not criticism) where, for the most part, the technology just works without any deep explanation, and is simply background to the plot. The ships in The Culture can harness near unlimited energy, travel faster than light, teleport, whatever; and it's not really explained how. It's simply a given that they can because *science*, and the writing is fully focused on the plot and characters.
Greg Egan, on the other hand, spends many pages - large fractions of the length of the book - on the (fictional) details and mathematics of the science involved; and these details drive the plot. The characters and their story are important too, but the science, plausible or not, is a main character, in a sense.
THIS!!!
That moment when they >!tie up the speaking modules with the listening modules and...the CONSCIOUSNESS LISTENS TO ITSELF!<
Diaspora is unmatched
Oh man, you should also read Greg Bears' Queen of Angels; mild spoiler for a topic near the end of the book, >!there's an AI that is built to train and inspect AIs, and eventually that leads it to become conscious - hence the title of the book.!<
The Orthogonal series hurts my brain sometimes because the concepts are so bizarre. But it was genius and I devoured it. I've only read a few Egan books so far, but that one was hard.
I do love that his stuff is dirt cheap, too. Ended up buying so much because they're good, and only a couple of bucks for the ebooks
Egan is a bit of a legend. And you are right, you need to have Wikipedia open when reading one of his books unless you have an MSc in mathematics or physics.
Is that why I didn't like it? It's one of the few books I've never finished. I didn't pick up on the sadness, but maybe that was part of what made the story so draggy for me.
Yeah... I slogged through Red Mars and enjoyed very little of it.
I'm sure it really appeals to some people, but not me, unfortunately.
Fwiw, I really enjoyed The Martian and credit it fully with getting me back into reading after a lengthy hiatus.
Not comparing them explicity, but they are both hard Martian based sci-fi.
I couldn’t ever finish it. Once they landed on mars it just read like a bunch of gossip to me at the time, but that was over a decade ago so maybe my perspective would change trying it again now
I just read *Delta-V* and *Critical Mass* by Daniel Suarez. Definitely hard sci-fi. Realistic near-future rocketry, astronauts that aren't petulant drama factories, and lengthy tangents on technical matters. Looking forward to the third book.
I mean if you think Gravity's science sucks and The Martian is only a bit realistic but your only objection to Star Wars is sound in space, I'm not sure that you are a good judge as to what hard sci fi is...
To be fair Gravity’s science *does* suck. I used to work in aerospace (Edit: just to add more details, I wrote flight software including Guidance Navigation Control and spacecraft control stuff) and I feel like everyone I know there either disliked the film or never took it seriously. Chris Hadfield also really trashed the film when doing a video on different space films.
It’s the kind of plot that was written by someone who read about Kessler Syndrome for 5 minutes and didn’t do any more research into orbital mechanics and whatnot.
The Martian on the other hand, yeah, if that’s just “a bit realistic” I’m not really sure what OP is looking for, or what “hardness” really mean then.
I was going to say this. He was OK with midichloridians (I'm not looking up how to spell it) and magic telekinesis, but the fact the filmmakers failed to address time dilation rendered the film unwatchable.
I don't think we can infer from OPs comments that they're okay with those parts lol. They just didn't list every thing unrealistic about star wars because that'd be an exceptionally long list.
My mom speculated that they weren’t actually going anywhere. They were just launching people into space to die. Sort of a control on how many smart people you can have in a society which requires compliance and control to function.
Seems like a pretty expensive method of execution though. But maybe the rockets were sending valuable cargo somewhere as well. 🤷🏻♂️
I dunno. It caught me off guard when she said that, but it kinda made a weird sort of sense.
+1 for Dragon's Egg. Forward's science is second to none. His writing can be kind of immature but his story concepts are just fascinating. I thought his writing had seriously matured by the time he cranked out Saturn Rukh, but I don't think he had anything after that.
I also recently read his daughter's fantasy book, Villains by Necessity, which I have seen dismissed as kind of a novelty/gimmick, but it's actually a perfectly good book that I enjoyed a lot.
Moon is a harsh mistress is so underrated. I'm surprised they haven't tried to make a movie out of it yet. It's probably the most entertaining and action filled sci-fi I've ever read in the best way possible
You say you want more hard science fiction, but you complain *The Martian* is a “bit realistic.”
What degree of hardness would be the “sweet spot” you’re looking for?
There is ["The Apollo Murders"](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57007683) written by[ Chris Hadfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hadfield), it has stuff about space and was written by an Astronaut.
> Full of the fascinating technical detail that fans of The Martian loved, and reminiscent of the thrilling claustrophobia, twists, and tension of The Hunt for Red October, The Apollo Murders is a high-stakes thriller unlike any other. Chris Hadfield captures the fierce G-forces of launch, the frozen loneliness of space, and the fear of holding on to the outside of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour as only someone who has experienced all of these things in real life can.
That’s why I asked in another post what people mean by ‘hard SF’. Primer is time travel, and so seems impossible. It’s complex and thinky - is that hard SF?
Or is that a play on the word hard?
Agreed. It's a really great movie, but the science is almost entirely obfuscated by technobabble and showing how complicated everything is. One thing I loved about the film is how it draws you into the story and the character and nobody has any idea what's going on.
I LOVED the fact that even within the movie they tried and failed to explain it.
What's really clear overall is that they are in deep trouble - having iterated over the few days dozens of times, creating cumulative effects on themselves, and the only way to explain it - is to find one of your earlier iterations and clue them into what's going on - with the inability to go backwards/forwards in time indefinitely, eventually, they'll die , but they can still send a robot backwards/for stock picks and such.
I don't remember the details too well... But Red Mars and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson was some heavy science fiction. And I've never read it, but Contact by Carl Sagan is highly praised by both sci fi readers and scientists.... At least the ones I follow. One day I'll get to it...
Seveneves was pretty hard. And it’s a dense read. I had a passing understanding of orbital mechanics (thank you, Kerbal) going in, and it definitely helped.
Im not a hardcore Stephenson fan, so I’m not trying to come across as defensive. But, how so? The things that are still around on earth 5000 years after the white rain?
You can’t just bury yourself in a mine to survive - you need to reject the heat you generate while insulating your colony from the roasting environment outside. There is little to no good tech that can conceivably do that for 5 millennia.
Ok, yeah there are a kinda disturbing number of problems with the mermen and the dwarves but that’s hardly what anyone’s talking about what it comes to that book.
Dragon’s Egg is written by a PhD in Stellar Physics and has been described as a textbook on neutron star physics in novel form. It’s really good though.
Great book, and Clarke is one of the better authors when it comes to realistic predictions. But it is also sort of shocking how much progress we have made in electronics that even he didn't predict.
Blindsight gets into the nitty gritty, pretty fantastical plot but the science stuff is well described. Same with Rendezvous with Rama.
Project Hail Mary is pretty hard sci Fi too, kinda goofy though.
Many of Michael Chrichton's books do a good job describing the science behind the plots, although they are more focused on the thriller aspects I'd say.
For movies... Maybe Ex Machina?
I thought the Seveneves was fairly hard sci-fi. Not really with equations or things like that (which honestly is funny because the author usually loves to squeeze those in) but more in a practical “what would we do if X happened, and we only have the tech available today” kinda way.
(The first section anyways, the final third of the book is quite soft and speculative.)
I think most other authors went to college to study literature...
Neal Stephenson went to Boston University where he studied physics and geography. If he's writing about a sciencey topic, it's based on science. He's also worked for Blue Origin.
The same could be said about 2001. You can let pass whatever they both did with i.e. propulsion (and, of course, aliens or whatever they both found), but the space experience seemed pretty realistic. At least compared with what happened with by very far most tv shows and movies ever.
I love how modern audiences see the spacewalking scenes in 2001 and complain because they're "too slow". Have you ever seen a real EVA mission? It makes 2001 look like a Michael Bay movie.
There's some pretty substantial aversions even outside of the... Well, the thing that's just outright magic.
From magic thrusters, to settlement that makes no logical or scientific sense, it's a little bit loose by near future hard scifi standards to begin with. But then they introduce actual magic into the setting, and that becomes an increasingly central part of the story until that's basically what the story runs on.
These kinds of things come up often in threads where folks say XYZ is not hard sci-fi because they use impossible physics.
I don't know if I just have a different (wrong) understanding of hard sci-fi, but I always thought making up some new physics to make shit work is not mutually exclusive with hard Sci-Fi.... In my mind the hard was they took real physics as a basis and expanded on them or manipulated them in a way that was to some extent at least logically explained as opposed to purely hand waved or ignored.
Now while I don’t classify Iain M Banks as ‘hard’ science fiction - everything is done with ‘fields’ and the whole multiverse thing is a bit out there, I reckon the society of the Culture and how it came to be in his ‘A few Notes on the Culture fascinating.
[A few notes on the Culture](http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm)
The first two seasons are. The 3rd and especially 4th season just outright invents magitech that doesn't even make a passing attempt to follow the rules of physics. I mean the plasma drive is firing during the entire final confrontation in season 4 but the crew inside the ship are still on the float, to use Expanse terms.
In a post-Expanse world, that kind of mistake really sticks out like a sore thumb for any property trying to be harder sci-fi.
I say this as a big fan of the show, mind you. But FAM has started losing its connection to the sci part of sci fi and I think that's a shame.
For All mankind has turned into a painful soap opera IMHO. Bizarre behaviors and decisions by lead characters and at times questionable acting. I’m still watching it but not enjoying anywhere as much as the early seasons.
The Martian was pretty good hard sci-fi. Everything explained is pretty well grounded in known science and the engineering, math, and biological science is pretty sound.
Next up the line maybe the Expanse, it's got fantastical elements, like the Epstein drive and the Protomolocule. But outside of those things everything else is pretty hard sci-fi.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke is quite hard SF, apart of the alien parts of it, of course.
Also several books by Stanisław Lem are quite hard SF, at least from my perspective. "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" for example.
Somewhat rare, but “Manhattan Transfer” by John Stith considers an alien race that lifts the entire island into space. Notwithstanding this feature, the book itself is a pretty hard engineering approach to solving their problem.
Opowieści o Pilocie Pirxie (Stories of Pilot Pirx) by Stanisław Lem - it's collection of stories with hard sci-fi technical stuff. But I wonder if that's enough to qualify. somebody i comments should correct me if i'm wrong.
Personally, I didn't find I, Robot enjoyable or realistic. The antics between the two protagonist was exhausting, and I found myself wanting to reach into the page and slap them.
I figure every science-fiction story or film is reliant on a couple of suspensions of disbelief. Even The Martian (both book and film) were entirely dependant on a willingness to accept a dust storm on Mars. In other words, it failed the "hard" test in the first 10 minutes. But it was necessary. I'm also willing to accept that it's usually that element that's fantastical that justifies its use. As Frederik Pohl wrote, 'A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.' How will we manage first contact with aliens? Or time-travel? Or FTL travel? Or AI? Okay, that said, here are a couple of films that I think aimed to be hard SF: Destination Moon (1950), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Contact (1997), Solaris (1972), Silent Running (1972), Marooned (1969), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
The issue was the high winds. Because of the lower gravity, the affect of the winds is lessened. So although there are gusts of 25 and 30 meters per second on Mars, it's barely felt. So Andy Weir totally exaggerated the power of the winds, showing things being blown all over the place, and Watney being injured. This was a choice to heighten the drama. But really, it didn't change much. There still could have been a sandstorm which resulted in Mark Watney being separated from the crew and being left behind. But the storm made for better drama for both the book and the movie. As a writer, I totally support that decision. Go for the drama! ;)
Was gonna say this. A slower paced, more 'realistic' take on time travel.
Although, I remember going to see it at the cinema. One of my two friends and a man in front had to be woken up by an usher because they were snoring too loudly.
Neuromancer and Gibson’s other work seemed pretty hard SF to me. It’s not focused on engineering and science, but it’s fairly realistic. As time goes on his work gets more and more realistic, until it’s barely SF at times.
I don’t know if the definition of hard SF is really agreed upon. Is it realism, a focus on science, a style, or what?
Hard sci-fi means only real science, no imaginary science. Most people would say hard science *can* have aliens; since we don't know what the real science of alien life is, it's OK to fill in the gap with imagination. But absolutely no FTL ever no matter what; that's disqualifying.
It’s both, I think. For example, the way people use tech - without understanding it or having everyone be engineers - is very realistic and I like it in other SF such as William Gibson’s work.
Of course, it’s not hard SF even slightly, and it’s set in the past not the future, but for example, Consider Phlebas must be set in the recent past, because in a later story, the Culture studies present-day Earth.
To be honest, I think fantasy and SF are pretty hard to define. They are perhaps settings or approaches more than genres.
> Consider Phlebas must be set in the recent past, because in a later story, the Culture studies present-day Earth.
The books are not in chronological order, so that’s kinda a moot point. But more specifically, it was stated that the Idiran War happened in our 14th century, though of course that doesn’t tell us anything about how advanced the Culture was at that time.
I’m so disappointed by the show I might not even get around to the last episode. The “soldiers as a computer” thing is probably the coolest concept I’ve seen in a book, I built that part up so much to my wife and then it was literally one throwaway line that hardly any characters even acknowledged in the show. The show is _fine_, but has hardly anything that made me like the book so much.
The human computer scene is also only one scene in the book as well, idk what more you expected them to do with it in the show other than showing what they showed.
Except for how the moon gets destroyed. A moment of suspension of disbelief and the rest is if then. If the moon just exploded, for no reason, what would happen next?
Movie: Interstellar is an interesting, in-depth hard sci-fi with various hurdles of time/gravity. Believe it was Christopher Nolan who wrote it... I'll double check myself though.
Book: Really enjoyed book 1 of Murderbot Diaries.
Show: The Expanse is definitely top of my list, it was a book first however (Leviathan Wakes).
None of these are really hard science fiction (I know there was a whole mutual masturbation society started around Interstellar, but it's pretty sloppy about just about everything *but* the wormhole and black hole renderings).
Murderbot books are utterly fantastic to read though, so definitely would recommend to anyone who enjoys scifi and fun at all. Expanse books were pretty fun as well!
The Expanse is pretty hard SF. It adds two major unreal things, but strives to make everything else real. I don’t think that makes it less hard than other works with many many minor unreal things.
I really enjoyed Inherit the Stars by James P Hogan and some of his other books for hard sci-fi. I am also interested in finding and reading The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.
The first “Children of Time” is reasonably hard sci-fi. It softens up over time, but the first book is delightful and doesn’t try to step too far outside physics.
I feel like when you ask for THE HARDEST OF THE HARD but poo-poo The Martian you're sort of setting yourself up for failure, like ... that's ultrarealism, that's hard sci-fi. Maybe try *Blindsight* or something? Which is softer than The Martian but might be in your sweet spot.
I think the question is how far you stretch "SciFi".
The hardest SciFi is probably some kind of tech thriller set in the very near future, about slightly more advanced computers. We had a lot of those in the 90s and 2000s.
It probably depends on how far you're willing to stretch the term SciFi.
The most realistic hard science fiction is probably some near future tech thriller we've all never heard of. Something where computers are just a bit more advanced, or someone does something just slightly out of reach yet with biotechnology. Just something set in the year 2030 where someone is using AI to manipulate the stock market, or creating a bioengineered plague, etc.
Blindsight by Peter Watts, fascinating dive into questions about consciousness. It's even available digitally for free under a creative commons license.
Both are very good, but Chris Hadfield did make some valid criticisms about FAM in the Vanity Fair interview. Some things just require dramatisation to make it more watcheable.
I don't have the broadest experience with sci-fi, but the 'hardest' I've come across (heh) so far would probably be Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, which he kind of wrote as a rebuttal to Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Some of the details may have flown past me, but reading about the effects of space time dilation on war was interesting, as well as the intricacies behind operating a mech suit in low gravity.
Alistair Reynolds writes some pretty hard sci-fi for what is essentially space opera. Everything's based on rough extrapolations of physic. There's no FTL, travelling between systems takes decades and you spend most of that time in "reefer sleep" (cryo caskets basically).
Depending on what sort of book you want to read there's something for everyone.
You want noir/detective in sci-fi? The detective Dreyfus series is a good jumping in point (or chasm city).
Big space opera? Check out the revelation space series.
Just a sample of what sort of writing he does? There's a compilation of short stories in a book called "Beyond the Aquila rift". If that name sounds familiar it's because the titular story was adapted into a love death and robots story.
For a TV show it's definitely the expanse.. Compared to books it's not really that hard but compared to the rest of TV sci-fi it's Definitely the hardest.
Ringworld series, and especially return to Ringworld were written specifically with the idea of having the most scientifically based absurd sci-fi you could possibly get
In terms of books, Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence.
Baxter is a physicist and it shows in his writing. While the general wider plot is pretty out there, it gets into the nitty gritty details of ships flying closed timelike curves and races experiencing the universe as expressed In Feynman diagrams. Races using string theory to reduce black holes Schwarzschild radius to below their physical radius to create naked singularities. Races using exotic matter violating the Pauli exclusion principle for armour on their shops.
Ultimately it's a series of books about humans living in extremes of the universe (including in one book, Flux, adapted humans living in a habitable fluidic layer inside a neutron star, and in another, Raft, humans surviving in a universe where matter has a higher gravitational constant)
It's pretty wild, but I enjoy the hardness of the physics in it.
The hardest book I've ever read is *The Great and Incredible Germophiles* by Tatiana Hillman. It's written like an article you can find on a science journal, including a bibliography of real articles, as it's based on actual science. The plot is an excuse to develop the scientific element. You need a good knowledge of genetics to follow it.
Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld is that hardest hard sci-fi that I think I've ever read.
It's all philosophical concepts and space exploration with barely enough character development in the protagonist to tie it all together.
A bit similar to 2001: A space Odyssey in that respect I guess.
60's to 70's were peak hard scifi
Possibly, it's one of my favorite series but I totally understand someone running out of steam during it. The sad people aspect comes more into play in the later books. The first one, the characters have a lot of excitement and discovery going on as they explore and uncover Mars secrets, but as the timeline goes on and the science becomes more and more speculative, it gets less distinct, so human misery and drama fills the gaps.
Diaspora by Greg Egan. I kind of glazed over some of the heavy math parts. It’s the one book that made me go - oh, this is hard sci-fi. But I loved it all the same.
Greg Egan is hard scifi personified
Diaspora still has unobtanium particles with exotic twists. I would say permutation city is his hardest work because there is all possibility that it is already happening.
>Diaspora still has unobtanium particles with exotic twists. Well... I love Hard Scifi. But, you can't call it "Science Fiction" without the "fiction" part.
That's true but you can, for example, do things like a story about a manned base on Europa using entirely known technology. That sort of thing is the hardest of scifi - speculative applications rather than speculative science.
Five and a half year journey in microgravity, then living on a base with less than 1/7th Earth gravity. Plus cosmic radiation, and Jupiter's radiation. Then several years back. "Our fifteen-year journey to extreme osteoporosis and whole-body cancer."
It isn't sci-fi if it is just using known technology. By that standard, the average Western would be considered sci-fi due to the use of guns. For it to be sci-fi, the tech has to be at a level that we have not yet achieved.
Do you or do you not agree that a story about a long term lunar colony (achievable with current scientific and technical knowledge) would be science fiction? Remember that I said "speculative applications of science and technology". People running around on Earth shooting people with guns isn't a speculative application, it's a common practical one.
That is a fair point. I retract my objection.
I mean but Permutation City has dust theory which is even more unobtanium than the Transmuters' funky particles in Diaspora
Hard science fiction is still fiction, and that's okay. The opposite of hard SF isn't when the science isn't realistic, it's when the science isn't ever really given any exposition or detail at all. A good example is *The Culture* universe (which I love, this is not criticism) where, for the most part, the technology just works without any deep explanation, and is simply background to the plot. The ships in The Culture can harness near unlimited energy, travel faster than light, teleport, whatever; and it's not really explained how. It's simply a given that they can because *science*, and the writing is fully focused on the plot and characters. Greg Egan, on the other hand, spends many pages - large fractions of the length of the book - on the (fictional) details and mathematics of the science involved; and these details drive the plot. The characters and their story are important too, but the science, plausible or not, is a main character, in a sense.
This is the only correct answer. I love hard SF and felt I needed a PhD in mathematics to appreciate him
The POV account of the birth of an AI is incredible
THIS!!! That moment when they >!tie up the speaking modules with the listening modules and...the CONSCIOUSNESS LISTENS TO ITSELF!< Diaspora is unmatched
Oh man, you should also read Greg Bears' Queen of Angels; mild spoiler for a topic near the end of the book, >!there's an AI that is built to train and inspect AIs, and eventually that leads it to become conscious - hence the title of the book.!<
90s Greg Egan isn’t as straight up math heavy as some of his later works.
The Orthogonal series hurts my brain sometimes because the concepts are so bizarre. But it was genius and I devoured it. I've only read a few Egan books so far, but that one was hard. I do love that his stuff is dirt cheap, too. Ended up buying so much because they're good, and only a couple of bucks for the ebooks
Greg Egan is an absolute beast in that regard, but his characterizations and plots are sometimes a bit off, coming in second to the physics.
Characterization and plot - what is that? /s
As a theoretical physicist: This. I have never read anything else that even comes close.
**Incandescent** is even harder.
Mandatory update for Diaspora and Greg Egan in general. Diaspora is a masterpiece
Egan is a bit of a legend. And you are right, you need to have Wikipedia open when reading one of his books unless you have an MSc in mathematics or physics.
Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Ah, the Mars Trilogy, a collection of sci-fi-essays stiched together with travel reports of sad people and somehow still one of my favorite trilogies.
Sad people moping about, drinking kavajava, interspersed with precise descriptions of geological formations.
I didn't know I liked rocks so much until I read Red Mars and At the Mountains of Madness.
The characters in the novels are so unlovable - and Hiroko is at another level of psychopathy.
I would totally eat regolith for her
But are you willing to have her steal your gametes to produce an offspring with her as the mother goddess, all behind your back? That is viriditas!
Is that why I didn't like it? It's one of the few books I've never finished. I didn't pick up on the sadness, but maybe that was part of what made the story so draggy for me.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see this. Yes, this is the answer for HARD sci-fi
I'd agree with that answer if not for the immortality treatments they devise. That aspect is pretty far from hard sci-fi.
And getting to a breathable atmosphere in less than 100 years.
I feel like this is almost the definitive answer. It’s like reading a documentary of events that haven’t happened yet.
Yeah... I slogged through Red Mars and enjoyed very little of it. I'm sure it really appeals to some people, but not me, unfortunately. Fwiw, I really enjoyed The Martian and credit it fully with getting me back into reading after a lengthy hiatus. Not comparing them explicity, but they are both hard Martian based sci-fi.
I couldn’t ever finish it. Once they landed on mars it just read like a bunch of gossip to me at the time, but that was over a decade ago so maybe my perspective would change trying it again now
I just read *Delta-V* and *Critical Mass* by Daniel Suarez. Definitely hard sci-fi. Realistic near-future rocketry, astronauts that aren't petulant drama factories, and lengthy tangents on technical matters. Looking forward to the third book.
I didn't realize that a 3rd book was in the works! I loved the first 2 books, fairly hard scifi!
I mean if you think Gravity's science sucks and The Martian is only a bit realistic but your only objection to Star Wars is sound in space, I'm not sure that you are a good judge as to what hard sci fi is...
To be fair Gravity’s science *does* suck. I used to work in aerospace (Edit: just to add more details, I wrote flight software including Guidance Navigation Control and spacecraft control stuff) and I feel like everyone I know there either disliked the film or never took it seriously. Chris Hadfield also really trashed the film when doing a video on different space films. It’s the kind of plot that was written by someone who read about Kessler Syndrome for 5 minutes and didn’t do any more research into orbital mechanics and whatnot. The Martian on the other hand, yeah, if that’s just “a bit realistic” I’m not really sure what OP is looking for, or what “hardness” really mean then.
I was going to say this. He was OK with midichloridians (I'm not looking up how to spell it) and magic telekinesis, but the fact the filmmakers failed to address time dilation rendered the film unwatchable.
I don't think we can infer from OPs comments that they're okay with those parts lol. They just didn't list every thing unrealistic about star wars because that'd be an exceptionally long list.
Star Wars barely classifies as sci-fi. It's fantasy and space opera.
Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Silent Running, Dragon's Egg, Gattaca, The Integral Trees, Cold Equations.
Where GATTACA totally loses me is sending guys up in rockets wearing business suits.
In the real world, we have sent an automobile into space.
My mom speculated that they weren’t actually going anywhere. They were just launching people into space to die. Sort of a control on how many smart people you can have in a society which requires compliance and control to function. Seems like a pretty expensive method of execution though. But maybe the rockets were sending valuable cargo somewhere as well. 🤷🏻♂️ I dunno. It caught me off guard when she said that, but it kinda made a weird sort of sense.
+1 for Dragon's Egg. Forward's science is second to none. His writing can be kind of immature but his story concepts are just fascinating. I thought his writing had seriously matured by the time he cranked out Saturn Rukh, but I don't think he had anything after that.
> Moon is a Harsh Mistress I have a plan for the [perfect revolution](http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/heinlein.mistress.shtml)...
Yes! Silent Running
Slowly disappearing from our collective conscious... love the movie
One of the few times Bruce Dern was a "goodie".
Almost anything by Robert Forward, though his writing can be terrible outside the science. Loved The Integral Trees!
I also recently read his daughter's fantasy book, Villains by Necessity, which I have seen dismissed as kind of a novelty/gimmick, but it's actually a perfectly good book that I enjoyed a lot.
Moon is a harsh mistress is so underrated. I'm surprised they haven't tried to make a movie out of it yet. It's probably the most entertaining and action filled sci-fi I've ever read in the best way possible
You say you want more hard science fiction, but you complain *The Martian* is a “bit realistic.” What degree of hardness would be the “sweet spot” you’re looking for?
NASA Apollo mission technical reports 😅
The transcripts of landings are actually compelling reading.
There is ["The Apollo Murders"](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57007683) written by[ Chris Hadfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hadfield), it has stuff about space and was written by an Astronaut. > Full of the fascinating technical detail that fans of The Martian loved, and reminiscent of the thrilling claustrophobia, twists, and tension of The Hunt for Red October, The Apollo Murders is a high-stakes thriller unlike any other. Chris Hadfield captures the fierce G-forces of launch, the frozen loneliness of space, and the fear of holding on to the outside of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour as only someone who has experienced all of these things in real life can.
I think he means that as in "still not realistic enough", otherwise he'd have said "a bit too realistic".
Primer (2004) People have spent time making flow charts to explain what happens and how/when.
That’s why I asked in another post what people mean by ‘hard SF’. Primer is time travel, and so seems impossible. It’s complex and thinky - is that hard SF? Or is that a play on the word hard?
Agreed. It's a really great movie, but the science is almost entirely obfuscated by technobabble and showing how complicated everything is. One thing I loved about the film is how it draws you into the story and the character and nobody has any idea what's going on.
Every time I watch this film, I have to read a wiki to explain it.
[XKCD to the rescue](https://xkcd.com/657/).
I don't know what I was expecting, but it was way more complicated than I could have anticipated.
I LOVED the fact that even within the movie they tried and failed to explain it. What's really clear overall is that they are in deep trouble - having iterated over the few days dozens of times, creating cumulative effects on themselves, and the only way to explain it - is to find one of your earlier iterations and clue them into what's going on - with the inability to go backwards/forwards in time indefinitely, eventually, they'll die , but they can still send a robot backwards/for stock picks and such.
The time travel in primer is not science fact though, the OP wants fiction based in science fact
Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.
One of the few where I saw the movie before reading the books - got me hooked on all MC’s stuff…
I don't remember the details too well... But Red Mars and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson was some heavy science fiction. And I've never read it, but Contact by Carl Sagan is highly praised by both sci fi readers and scientists.... At least the ones I follow. One day I'll get to it...
Abbot and Costello go to Mars.
Thats when NASA was experimenting with submarine spaceships.
Yes! And then Werner Von Braun comes along with those big sexy rockets and took all of the air out of the room.
Seveneves was pretty hard. And it’s a dense read. I had a passing understanding of orbital mechanics (thank you, Kerbal) going in, and it definitely helped.
Seveneves failed thermodynamics
And genetics. The genetics in the second part are pure fantasy magic.
Im not a hardcore Stephenson fan, so I’m not trying to come across as defensive. But, how so? The things that are still around on earth 5000 years after the white rain?
You can’t just bury yourself in a mine to survive - you need to reject the heat you generate while insulating your colony from the roasting environment outside. There is little to no good tech that can conceivably do that for 5 millennia.
Ok, yeah there are a kinda disturbing number of problems with the mermen and the dwarves but that’s hardly what anyone’s talking about what it comes to that book.
Aurora(space sucks so bad)
Came here to say this. That book deserves more attention
Dragon’s Egg is written by a PhD in Stellar Physics and has been described as a textbook on neutron star physics in novel form. It’s really good though.
I loved this book. I found it reading up on the Star Trek Voyager episode Blink of an Eye.
I am in page 100 of Rendezvous with Rama, and until now, pretty hard sci Fi to me. Note: don't spoil me in the comments please.
Great book, and Clarke is one of the better authors when it comes to realistic predictions. But it is also sort of shocking how much progress we have made in electronics that even he didn't predict.
Footfall.
This is the best sci-fi novel that never got made into a movie. I wish it would, it’s fantastic.
That climactic battle NEEDS to be on a screen.
Right? Just the launch of the ship itself would be epic on the big screen.
Blindsight gets into the nitty gritty, pretty fantastical plot but the science stuff is well described. Same with Rendezvous with Rama. Project Hail Mary is pretty hard sci Fi too, kinda goofy though. Many of Michael Chrichton's books do a good job describing the science behind the plots, although they are more focused on the thriller aspects I'd say. For movies... Maybe Ex Machina?
I thought the Seveneves was fairly hard sci-fi. Not really with equations or things like that (which honestly is funny because the author usually loves to squeeze those in) but more in a practical “what would we do if X happened, and we only have the tech available today” kinda way. (The first section anyways, the final third of the book is quite soft and speculative.)
I think most other authors went to college to study literature... Neal Stephenson went to Boston University where he studied physics and geography. If he's writing about a sciencey topic, it's based on science. He's also worked for Blue Origin.
No, tons of SF authors are scientists, by profession and/or training. I don’t even think most general authors study literature formally.
Europa report is very good
The expanse is pretty good hard sci-fi except for [spoilers]
The same could be said about 2001. You can let pass whatever they both did with i.e. propulsion (and, of course, aliens or whatever they both found), but the space experience seemed pretty realistic. At least compared with what happened with by very far most tv shows and movies ever.
I love how modern audiences see the spacewalking scenes in 2001 and complain because they're "too slow". Have you ever seen a real EVA mission? It makes 2001 look like a Michael Bay movie.
They really nailed the iPad experience too
True
2001 up until the wormhole(?) is very hard sf. Even the loopy AI is within the possibility, as we now see
There's some pretty substantial aversions even outside of the... Well, the thing that's just outright magic. From magic thrusters, to settlement that makes no logical or scientific sense, it's a little bit loose by near future hard scifi standards to begin with. But then they introduce actual magic into the setting, and that becomes an increasingly central part of the story until that's basically what the story runs on.
These kinds of things come up often in threads where folks say XYZ is not hard sci-fi because they use impossible physics. I don't know if I just have a different (wrong) understanding of hard sci-fi, but I always thought making up some new physics to make shit work is not mutually exclusive with hard Sci-Fi.... In my mind the hard was they took real physics as a basis and expanded on them or manipulated them in a way that was to some extent at least logically explained as opposed to purely hand waved or ignored.
Tau Zero
For All Mankind. Just recently binge watched it. Was really impressed, right up there with the expanse in terms of real science.
The expanse, that show where they changed the rotation rate of Ceres??
Well, when the books were written, considerably less was known about Ceres. Like how it's mostly water ice, so there wouldn't be a water shortage.
This is kind of like asking for the loudest whisper. The winner is the thing that just barely qualifies as science fiction.
Now while I don’t classify Iain M Banks as ‘hard’ science fiction - everything is done with ‘fields’ and the whole multiverse thing is a bit out there, I reckon the society of the Culture and how it came to be in his ‘A few Notes on the Culture fascinating. [A few notes on the Culture](http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm)
you can... see a book, right?
I've got a pile of new books on my coffee table but I can't see them. I have to listen for their cries of lamentation.
“Conan! What is best in life?” “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their coffee table books.”
stare at marked up flattened tree pulp, hallucinate for hours
Pretty much anything written by Stephen Baxter is science porn. Sometimes history and philosophy porn, to boot.
Kim Stanley Robison: red Mars, blue Mars, green mars
For All Mankind is very hard sci-fi.
The first two seasons are. The 3rd and especially 4th season just outright invents magitech that doesn't even make a passing attempt to follow the rules of physics. I mean the plasma drive is firing during the entire final confrontation in season 4 but the crew inside the ship are still on the float, to use Expanse terms. In a post-Expanse world, that kind of mistake really sticks out like a sore thumb for any property trying to be harder sci-fi. I say this as a big fan of the show, mind you. But FAM has started losing its connection to the sci part of sci fi and I think that's a shame.
I can agree with that.
For All mankind has turned into a painful soap opera IMHO. Bizarre behaviors and decisions by lead characters and at times questionable acting. I’m still watching it but not enjoying anywhere as much as the early seasons.
I couldn't agree more. Got soapy mid season 2, and now it's in a full lather!
*The Case for Mars* by Robert Zubrin
Mars Trilogy by KSR.
Any of Alastair Reynolds' books.
The Martian was pretty good hard sci-fi. Everything explained is pretty well grounded in known science and the engineering, math, and biological science is pretty sound. Next up the line maybe the Expanse, it's got fantastical elements, like the Epstein drive and the Protomolocule. But outside of those things everything else is pretty hard sci-fi.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke is quite hard SF, apart of the alien parts of it, of course. Also several books by Stanisław Lem are quite hard SF, at least from my perspective. "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" for example.
Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey* comes to mind.
Project: Hail Marry was VERY realistic.
Einstein's Bridge, by John Cramer
Saturn Run by John Sanford and Ctein
Somewhat rare, but “Manhattan Transfer” by John Stith considers an alien race that lifts the entire island into space. Notwithstanding this feature, the book itself is a pretty hard engineering approach to solving their problem.
Opowieści o Pilocie Pirxie (Stories of Pilot Pirx) by Stanisław Lem - it's collection of stories with hard sci-fi technical stuff. But I wonder if that's enough to qualify. somebody i comments should correct me if i'm wrong.
Anathem. It's the first sci-fi I read that actually grapples with metaphysics and platonic forms and goes f'ing hard.
Book: Windup Girl
From a few years ago, AI.. terrible ending
Personally, I didn't find I, Robot enjoyable or realistic. The antics between the two protagonist was exhausting, and I found myself wanting to reach into the page and slap them.
Hal Clemet's Meskilins in Beyond Gravity?
I figure every science-fiction story or film is reliant on a couple of suspensions of disbelief. Even The Martian (both book and film) were entirely dependant on a willingness to accept a dust storm on Mars. In other words, it failed the "hard" test in the first 10 minutes. But it was necessary. I'm also willing to accept that it's usually that element that's fantastical that justifies its use. As Frederik Pohl wrote, 'A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.' How will we manage first contact with aliens? Or time-travel? Or FTL travel? Or AI? Okay, that said, here are a couple of films that I think aimed to be hard SF: Destination Moon (1950), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Contact (1997), Solaris (1972), Silent Running (1972), Marooned (1969), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
Is a dust storm in Mars not a real possibility? https://science.nasa.gov/resource/hubble-sees-a-perfect-dust-storm-on-mars/
The issue was the high winds. Because of the lower gravity, the affect of the winds is lessened. So although there are gusts of 25 and 30 meters per second on Mars, it's barely felt. So Andy Weir totally exaggerated the power of the winds, showing things being blown all over the place, and Watney being injured. This was a choice to heighten the drama. But really, it didn't change much. There still could have been a sandstorm which resulted in Mark Watney being separated from the crew and being left behind. But the storm made for better drama for both the book and the movie. As a writer, I totally support that decision. Go for the drama! ;)
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson probably
"Blindsight", "The Colonel" and "Echopraxia" by Peter Watts. Amazing world, hardest sci-fi that's been written in the past 20 or so years.
The Martian, probably
Primer
Was gonna say this. A slower paced, more 'realistic' take on time travel. Although, I remember going to see it at the cinema. One of my two friends and a man in front had to be woken up by an usher because they were snoring too loudly.
Neuromancer and Gibson’s other work seemed pretty hard SF to me. It’s not focused on engineering and science, but it’s fairly realistic. As time goes on his work gets more and more realistic, until it’s barely SF at times. I don’t know if the definition of hard SF is really agreed upon. Is it realism, a focus on science, a style, or what?
Hard sci-fi means only real science, no imaginary science. Most people would say hard science *can* have aliens; since we don't know what the real science of alien life is, it's OK to fill in the gap with imagination. But absolutely no FTL ever no matter what; that's disqualifying.
Star Wars is fantasy not sci-fi. Just thought you should know that.
It’s both, I think. For example, the way people use tech - without understanding it or having everyone be engineers - is very realistic and I like it in other SF such as William Gibson’s work. Of course, it’s not hard SF even slightly, and it’s set in the past not the future, but for example, Consider Phlebas must be set in the recent past, because in a later story, the Culture studies present-day Earth. To be honest, I think fantasy and SF are pretty hard to define. They are perhaps settings or approaches more than genres.
> Consider Phlebas must be set in the recent past, because in a later story, the Culture studies present-day Earth. The books are not in chronological order, so that’s kinda a moot point. But more specifically, it was stated that the Idiran War happened in our 14th century, though of course that doesn’t tell us anything about how advanced the Culture was at that time.
I'd say the 3 Body Problem in book form.
I’m so disappointed by the show I might not even get around to the last episode. The “soldiers as a computer” thing is probably the coolest concept I’ve seen in a book, I built that part up so much to my wife and then it was literally one throwaway line that hardly any characters even acknowledged in the show. The show is _fine_, but has hardly anything that made me like the book so much.
The human computer scene is also only one scene in the book as well, idk what more you expected them to do with it in the show other than showing what they showed.
I remember them explaining in a lot of detail in the books how it worked, in the show they were literally like “human computer.”
2001:ASO (1968) Moon (2009)
Seven Eves. Very well written and researched hard scifi.
Except for how the moon gets destroyed. A moment of suspension of disbelief and the rest is if then. If the moon just exploded, for no reason, what would happen next?
Three Body Problem, and it's Chinese TV adaptation.
Movie: Interstellar is an interesting, in-depth hard sci-fi with various hurdles of time/gravity. Believe it was Christopher Nolan who wrote it... I'll double check myself though. Book: Really enjoyed book 1 of Murderbot Diaries. Show: The Expanse is definitely top of my list, it was a book first however (Leviathan Wakes).
None of these are really hard science fiction (I know there was a whole mutual masturbation society started around Interstellar, but it's pretty sloppy about just about everything *but* the wormhole and black hole renderings). Murderbot books are utterly fantastic to read though, so definitely would recommend to anyone who enjoys scifi and fun at all. Expanse books were pretty fun as well!
The Expanse is pretty hard SF. It adds two major unreal things, but strives to make everything else real. I don’t think that makes it less hard than other works with many many minor unreal things.
It's Brave New World for me.
I really enjoyed Inherit the Stars by James P Hogan and some of his other books for hard sci-fi. I am also interested in finding and reading The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.
Arthur C. Clarke is very scientifically detailed-but some times to the point of being a dry dull read.
The first “Children of Time” is reasonably hard sci-fi. It softens up over time, but the first book is delightful and doesn’t try to step too far outside physics.
Douglas Phillips - Quantum Space, Quantum Void, Quantum Time and Quantum Entangled. I learned a lot reading those books.
I feel like when you ask for THE HARDEST OF THE HARD but poo-poo The Martian you're sort of setting yourself up for failure, like ... that's ultrarealism, that's hard sci-fi. Maybe try *Blindsight* or something? Which is softer than The Martian but might be in your sweet spot.
Quantum thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
Seveneves. And slow.
I think the question is how far you stretch "SciFi". The hardest SciFi is probably some kind of tech thriller set in the very near future, about slightly more advanced computers. We had a lot of those in the 90s and 2000s.
When it comes to books, nobody is harder than Rudy Rucker.
I thought the Godwhale and half passed human by TJ Bass were pretty heavy.
It probably depends on how far you're willing to stretch the term SciFi. The most realistic hard science fiction is probably some near future tech thriller we've all never heard of. Something where computers are just a bit more advanced, or someone does something just slightly out of reach yet with biotechnology. Just something set in the year 2030 where someone is using AI to manipulate the stock market, or creating a bioengineered plague, etc.
Blindsight by Peter Watts, fascinating dive into questions about consciousness. It's even available digitally for free under a creative commons license.
“To Sleep Among the Stars” Is an absolutely **fantastic** read.
Primer
The Expanse and For All Mankind both share a similar, very high level of realism and attention to detail. I highly recommend both
Both are very good, but Chris Hadfield did make some valid criticisms about FAM in the Vanity Fair interview. Some things just require dramatisation to make it more watcheable.
I don't have the broadest experience with sci-fi, but the 'hardest' I've come across (heh) so far would probably be Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, which he kind of wrote as a rebuttal to Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Some of the details may have flown past me, but reading about the effects of space time dilation on war was interesting, as well as the intricacies behind operating a mech suit in low gravity.
Permutation City - Greg Egan
Alistair Reynolds writes some pretty hard sci-fi for what is essentially space opera. Everything's based on rough extrapolations of physic. There's no FTL, travelling between systems takes decades and you spend most of that time in "reefer sleep" (cryo caskets basically). Depending on what sort of book you want to read there's something for everyone. You want noir/detective in sci-fi? The detective Dreyfus series is a good jumping in point (or chasm city). Big space opera? Check out the revelation space series. Just a sample of what sort of writing he does? There's a compilation of short stories in a book called "Beyond the Aquila rift". If that name sounds familiar it's because the titular story was adapted into a love death and robots story.
*Celestial Matters* is hard scifi based on Aristotalian understanding of science. It's hard to follow sometimes.
Probably best to go for some science fact then... Try HBO's "From The Earth To The Moon."
For a TV show it's definitely the expanse.. Compared to books it's not really that hard but compared to the rest of TV sci-fi it's Definitely the hardest.
Star Wars as hard sci-fi? It's straight up space fantasy. You can't explain any of that stuff with science.
Ringworld series, and especially return to Ringworld were written specifically with the idea of having the most scientifically based absurd sci-fi you could possibly get
Saturn run is a book coauthored by scientists at Ctein so the science is all quite realistic, worth a read!
Leviathan Wakes
Battlestar Galactica, there are a lot of real life situations with the ships.
In terms of books, Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence. Baxter is a physicist and it shows in his writing. While the general wider plot is pretty out there, it gets into the nitty gritty details of ships flying closed timelike curves and races experiencing the universe as expressed In Feynman diagrams. Races using string theory to reduce black holes Schwarzschild radius to below their physical radius to create naked singularities. Races using exotic matter violating the Pauli exclusion principle for armour on their shops. Ultimately it's a series of books about humans living in extremes of the universe (including in one book, Flux, adapted humans living in a habitable fluidic layer inside a neutron star, and in another, Raft, humans surviving in a universe where matter has a higher gravitational constant) It's pretty wild, but I enjoy the hardness of the physics in it.
The hardest book I've ever read is *The Great and Incredible Germophiles* by Tatiana Hillman. It's written like an article you can find on a science journal, including a bibliography of real articles, as it's based on actual science. The plot is an excuse to develop the scientific element. You need a good knowledge of genetics to follow it.
'The Expanse' Tv show (books are good too).
Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld is that hardest hard sci-fi that I think I've ever read. It's all philosophical concepts and space exploration with barely enough character development in the protagonist to tie it all together. A bit similar to 2001: A space Odyssey in that respect I guess. 60's to 70's were peak hard scifi
I'd let Hiroko make a pack of communist, incest children out of any cell of my body.
Andy Weir. Iain M Banks (RIP). Neal Asher (after Banks- Asher picks up and improves Banks' ideas).
Possibly, it's one of my favorite series but I totally understand someone running out of steam during it. The sad people aspect comes more into play in the later books. The first one, the characters have a lot of excitement and discovery going on as they explore and uncover Mars secrets, but as the timeline goes on and the science becomes more and more speculative, it gets less distinct, so human misery and drama fills the gaps.
Blindsight sci fi book by Peter Watts