Ask HN: What are less known hard Sci-Fi books to read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are less known hard Sci-Fi books to read?

26 pointslostmsu18 comments

From the popular ones I've read quite a few from Ian Bank's Culture series, but en summe they feel a bit like spy stories with a bit of cyberpunk sprinkled around.

The Three-Body problem was good, but still very pale in comparison to Permutation City, which I just discovered recently.

Anything along the lines of Permutation City, Asimov's works, Lem, or something like Martian Chronicles (e.g. about facing a totally different culture).

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Check out the nominations to sci-fi awards (e.g. Hugo or Nebula). The winners get most of the publicity but there are many great works that don’t win but are still quite good. The nominations are sometimes hard to find, the Verge e.g. has articles with the complete (?) lists for recent years and Wikipedia has a list of nominees and winners over the years as well.

Agreed. I highly recommend:

* Eon - Greg Bear

* A Deepness In The Sky - Vernor Vinge

"Blindsight" by Peter Watts is just amazingly good, as are his other works. He does have a bleak view of humanity though.

Also check out his friend and fellow Canadian Karl Schroeder's "Candesce" series of books set in an enormous globe of air floating in space. Feels like fantasy, but isn't.

Vernor Vinge has already been mentioned. "A Fire Upon The Deep" is one of my favourite novels. He was a professor of Computer Science and he also popularised the concept of the coming Technological Singularity.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. It's definitely where I feel our modern tech world is heading... We're halfway there with ubiquitous mobility, personalized medicine and every year, I see AR heading there.

While the plot is somewhat meh - the description of the techno society and how it changes out life is uniquely prescient I think - much more so than cyberpunk heros like Gibson or Stephenson etc. I re-read it about once a year.

Hope you read the entire Three body problem trilogy as I'm not quite sure how well it stands by reading only the first book as it's been a while since I've read them, but it's a brilliant trilogy. Totally agree with you on Permutation City, really awesome. And as somebody else already suggested, you should really read Diaspora for some more Greg Egan goodness.

I have some generic sci-fi recommendations, although some are probably not considered "hard" sci-fi and most are pretty well known but here they are anyway.

- Children of Time/Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

- Hyperion by Dan Simmons

- Accelerando by Charles Stross

- House of Suns/Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds

- Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton

- The Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor

Cheers

EDIT: also, here's a good website to track the winners for most sci-fi awards:

https://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_index.asp

Permutation City is one of Greg Egan’s better-known works, and I strongly suggest you look into the rest of his ouevre which (aside from his Orthogonal trilogy) tends to be of a consistently high standard.

https://www.gregegan.net

Why did you single out Orthogonal as lesser? I found those better than some of his other books (Quarantine, Teranesia and Distress). I would say Diaspora is his best by miles, with Schild's Ladder.

In general, I like the physics discovery books more than the books focusing on subjective quantum mechanics (especially Quarantine), although they are still well done.

I didn’t single out Othogonal for being (necessarily) lesser, I singled it out for being mainfestly different from most of his other stuff, in the sense that it occurs in a Universe with physical laws evidently different from that of our own (though his most recent book Dichronauts, which I have not yet read, also follows in this trend of “what-if” counterfactual speculation).

To be honest I also found the concluding book of Orthogonal to be rather disappointing, but that’s personal preference.

I would have most certainly not drawn attention to the different nature of Orthogonal if I hadn’t had the feeling that the original poster is seeking for “hard sci-fi” that presents avenues for what our futures in this universe may be, as opposed to what other universes may be like.

I understand, there is indeed a large difference between Orthogonal and the rest in the sense that it might be technically a fantasy series instead of hard science fiction. However, the exploration of the alternate physical laws gave me the same thrill that other hard science fiction evokes. In some sense, the changed mechanics gave me more insight into physics as a whole (especially with Egan's fantastic online appendices, which might be my favorite aspect of his style).

I forgot it above, but I think Incandescence is the "our universe" counterpart to Orthogonal and it is quite good.

I'm an Egan fan and really liked Blindsight by Peter Watts.

You already know Greg Egan, so I would very much recommend Diaspora. Really amazing book. I wrote about it here: http://uzpg.me/literature/2019/04/29/diaspora.html

> (e.g. about facing a totally different culture).

I would also recommend The Player games by Iain Banks. Not hardsf per-say but really nice and complex story.

If you're prepared to call Lem hard sci-fi you might also accept Jack Vance. I also suggest the Strugatsky Brothers' Roadside Picnic.

The paratwa trilogy by Christopher Hinze? Genetically bred assasins

reddit.com/r/printsf is a gold mine for book recommendations

Probably not so lesser known but the mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is very good

Becky Chambers books are a good read -

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

A Closed and Common Orbit

The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Inverted World by Christopher Priest.

An oldie, but a weirdie.

The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

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