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Comment by ericfrenkiel | Hacker News Reader

If you read the article and enjoyed the idea of immense mountains being just centimeters tall, I highly recommend a scifi novel called “Dragon’s Egg” by Robert L. Forward. He actually wrote a scientific research paper on neutron stars and turned the paper into a novel! Hard science fiction at its best and makes nuclear chemistry and physics delightfully approachable.

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Seconded.

Likewise, Stephen Baxter's "Flux". (Even crazier, here the lifeforms dwell inside the neutron star, in the neutron superfluid.)

I really liked the idea of the book but to be honest I didn't like the story so the book was pretty disappointing.

To each his own! I found the way the author mapped human evolution into a familiar-but-different life form based on nuclear chemistry just so “far out” that it was a fun read.

"Hard" science fiction...

Yes, “hard” scifi is a sub-genre that adheres to physics as much as we know it to be true - no faster-than-light travel, for instance. Arthur C. Clarke and his 2001 series as well as Nivens and his Ringworld series would be good examples, whereas Dan Simmons and his Hyperion Cantos trilogy, while extremely well-written, wouldn’t qualify.

I just tried to make a dumb joke about this very hard material on the star.

I deserve the downvotes. I'm not even a real dad.

> Nivens and his Ringworld series would be good examples

Nivens features several not-quite-scientific features, though he does a better job than many at keeping them constrained. I still wouldn’t consider him a hard science fiction author.

I think Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke (as mentioned), and Michael Crichton are better examples of hard science fiction.

Niven has FTL all over, and lots of psychic powers type stuff to boot.

I’ll never understand the voting patterns here. The plot of Ringworld is literally predicated on a second generation FTL dive. I love the series and it’s semi-hard sci-fi, but the whole thing is predicated on a hyperdrive, and how a civilization with it would build and live differently from a vastly powerful species without it.

don't forget Peter Watts.

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