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Comment by jeroen94704 | Hacker News Reader

Categorizing Heinlein and Clarke as "modern" is a bit unfair to the current crop of SciFi authors, In my view. Authors like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton (all Brits, coincidentally) go way beyond anything Heinlein and Clarke ever came up with. This is not to belittle the accomplishments or significance of either of them, of course, but limiting your scope to those two disregards the tremendous changes in the SciFi field in the last, say, 25 years or so.

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I would add an Aussie to that list - Greg Egan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) - this book was as mind blowing to me as Anathem, and bears multiple readings. I've fallen out of scifi in the last few years, and Egan has sucked me back in.

Thanks, I'll give him a try when I have the chance.

If you haven't read it, the Gap series by Stephen R. Donaldson is really worth a read (though walking around in Donaldson's head for 5 books can make you want to take a shower later).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Donaldson#The_Gap_C...

The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright also makes lots of interesting and thought provoking predictions. It's an astonishingly dense read though, but the ideas will continue to unfold in your mind for a long time afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Oecumene

The Gap series is way too rapey. (and John Wright is a nutcase)

Banks and Hamilton seem a little to close to "Magic" vs scifi IMO. Basicly, plot driven technobabble vs. a look at reasonable possibilities. Ex: A culture knife missile has a rediculusly wide range of weapons with little thought as to why you would use A vs B. Hamiltons first series is about a psychic and his second revolves around ghosts in space causing a zombie apocalypse.

Though if you have a good counter example I am interested.

I'm not sure what you expect of scifi; the same can be said of Heinlein and Clarke (maybe Heinlein a bit more than Clarke).

Night's Dawn (Hamilton's second trilogy) was pretty well done in that respect if you ask me. Sure, the premise is far-fetched, but the background and technology was pretty compelling in my view. Hamilton clearly has a grasp of orbital mechanics, for example. And you gotta admit you would _love_ to get a set of Neural Nanonics installed :).

I don't know, but I just can't fathom classifying Banks and Hamilton as anything other than hard scifi.

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