Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy and Physics: A Topical Index (2014)

"Haldeman, Joe The Forever War. 1974, Ballantine. An interstellar war is fought using black holes for travel between battles."

I've read Forever War half a dozen times. Black holes aren't a focus of the novel, but rather the effects of relativity on soldiers fighting far flung battles. By the time soldiers reach a battle, everyone they know on Earth is dead and several generations have passed due to time dilation.

... full of HUGE spoilers! Just some random searching on Alastair Reynolds' novels revealed many many things that are only revealed at the end of his books.

I recommend Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy: The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame and The Arrows of Time. It features a finite four-dimensional universe with no time-like dimension.

"More or less accurate science", with rather significant error towards "less" in many cases.

Now, don't get me wrong; I love SF, and will happily suspend disbelief for wildly implausible fictional technologies (as long as an author doesn't then go on to flagrantly violate the physics of their own universe out of sloppiness or as a plot device).

That said, for example, I'm not entirely sure what part of current science suggests that flinging a spaceship at a black hole ("collapsar") at relativistic velocities will cause said vessel to pop out of another black hole, near-instantaneously, elsewhere in the galaxy. ("The Forever War", as much as I love you, I'm looking squarely at you.)

I'd like to suggest Blindsight by Peter Watts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

Asimov, Isaac The Gods Themselves. 1972, That's my favorite Sci-fi novel of all times; the aliens come in triads; one is the rational, the other the emotional the third one is the parent/Mother. They have sex by melting into each other, when they become one - because the weak nuclear force is so weak in this universe; Pure Genius.

I would add: Jack Campbell, The Lost Fleet series. Excellent spaceship battles, actually accounting the speed of light, vast distances, space-time distortion to some degree, and plenty of logistics and manoeuvring.

I happened across this book, which seems to be little heard of and really enjoyed it. Premise is great and the science seems solid for the most part. Author seems like he tried hard to stick with things that are not denied by the laws of physics as we know it.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21523077-attenuation---le...

I'd also like to recommend the novel series "The Expanse". While not entirely accurate, at least the start of the series deals with a lot of the near-future limits in space travel: lack of gravity and the consequences thereof for humans, acceleration, radiation etc.

And in the new TV-Adaptation there are fascinating little details like sparrows flying/hovering in 0.3G inside a tunnel inside an Asteroid (Ceres) with an artificially induced spin.

Quantum computing is not on the list. I wrote a novel, Qubit, in which quantum computing plays a central role.

http://www.amazon.com/Qubit-Finn-Mack-ebook/dp/B00F45N40O

Not on the list, and I'm not a physicist so from that standpoint, I may not have gotten everything right. Still, I'd like to think Qubit would pass muster.

It would make sense to keep this list curated, as people who don't have a background in physics and/or astronomy might think a piece of fiction depicts it well, but misses some key aspect.

That said, how does the author accept suggestions or additions?

I have yet to find an author who adheres to actual science and writes a readable story. Some flexibility is required to transform a potential story into a page turner. I'd like to be proven wrong though.

It's dated 2014, which explains the omission of Seveneves.

Lots of Niven in there. Happens to be my favorite writer.

From the myths of the Gods to the Sci-Fi of the modern age. Stories inspire and give life to technological advancement just as much as technological advancement gives rise to stories.