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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Only tangentially related to the title, but one thing that I have noticed about space scifi is that it is very difficult to find novels that do not venture into very fantastical elements and instead would root themselves into known science and engineering. Almost every novel seems to be filled with aliens of all sorts, FTL, omnious superhuman AIs, nanobots that are practically magic, and whatnot. The thing I found so refreshing about The Martian (despite its other shortcomings) was how everything was just so believable; pretty much the same as what Musk is promising to deliver in the very near future. Why can't more novels be like that?

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I'd check out The Expanse. The core is a world rooted in relatively real-world engineering, and the fantastical builds pretty slowly (and is generally terrifying).

The Expanse is a low-down and dirty description of near future humanity running headlong into an Outside Context Problem.

I'll second this. I love how they depict space travel and combat.

William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy was set in the present day and has no fantastical technology. (He did predict YouTube a couple years ahead of time, though, and got the cultural impact almost exactly right.)

What you are describing is 'Hard Science Fiction', and yes, a lot of scifi has very fantastical elements. Some use "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" as an excuse, but I think the reality is that it is easier to write compelling stories and create spectacle if you can ignore the limits that 'Hard Science Fiction' puts on you, because you can just make shit up. So there is more of it. Also, you are describing realistic, near future fiction, and that by definition will not have a shelf life of more than a few years and decades will be the outlier. Almost the entire Cyber Punk genre is now really Alternate History. I haven't seen a cathode ray tube in years.

I don't think it is particularly new. Maybe its more obvious now because there is more bleed between Science Fiction and Fantasy as separate genres. You had your Azimovs and Clarks, but you also had your Dicks, Zelaznys and Moorcocks.

FWIW, even the author of the Martian admits that there's a fair bit of fantasy involved in it as well - namely the cosmic radiation shielding problem and the "Mars' atmosphere would never create wind storms of that magnitude".

Hard SF definitely exists, it's just (like other literary subgenres) a bit less popular and prolific.

Eye of the beholder and whatnot, but AFAIR Andy Weir admitted that the two things you mentioned (and I think one other thing I'm forgetting) are literally the only bits of fantasy involved. Everything else was meant to be Hard SF.

Well I meant more using no frills near future as general setting and feeling, rather than hard 100% accuracy

Near future doesn't last long, because it quickly becomes the present and the past. A book set 20 years in the future will likely only remain plausible for a handful of years, at which point the idea of everyone having a flying car looks silly, or someone invents the mobile telephone and your plot no longer holds together.

Greg Bear is a good option if you like hard sci-fi. I really liked Forge of God and Anvil of the Stars. There are a few of the themes you talk about but in a more realistic sense.

Kim Stanley Robinson does it well. I highly recommend the Mars trilogy, it's the definition of hard sci-fi in my mind now.

Mars trilogy is a classic, and I will not dispute that. But I read the first part, and I felt like I got quite enough of it. The science bits, especially in the beginning, were nice enough, but I recall them becoming more handwavy as they fell more to the background. At points it felt like reading Atlas Shrugged when you really were only interested in railways and trains

Really interesting/inspiring read, but also super tedious and goes on long strides about rocks and geology.

it's lengthy, but for me, those parts seemed justified as character-building; Robinson gets pretty deep into describing characters who are very, very into rocks and geology, among other things. I definitely see what you mean, though.

In retrospect, I enjoyed the rocks/geology part, it gave me something to dream about when I drive in desert landscapes and picture myself walking on Mars sometime in the future, running or flying in low gravity, or sailing..!

But back in the moment, I fell asleep many times trying to go through those passages.

Anyhow, I agree that this trilogy is really good work, on so many levels. It gets me thinking nearly everyday, years later, about what I'd need to prepare for as an eventual, hopeful colonist.

That's funny: for me, that book made it really clear that I don't want to even daydream about going to Mars. Too restrictive. Don't have quite that amount of pioneer spirit and ability to commit. But I can see how others might!

You might enjoy honor Harrington by David Weber. There is FTL, but it still takes significant time to get anywhere, and that plays a big role in the story. Communication also takes as long as ships would take, so it's not instantaneous either. The physics of space and space travel also play a role in combat.

https://www.baen.com/on-basilisk-station.html

Some authors hear you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction

Oh, that does hit the mark. The word mundane seems quite apt. Too bad the publications section is bit thin

The blog of the movement, while it stopped in 2012, seems to contain short reviews indicating whether certain SF works qualify: http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/

You have to have a very firm grounding in science to write that. The sort of person who has that is not often the kind of person who also masters the skills needed to write a good book.

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