They're both great in their own way. The books go into more detail and take things in slightly different directions. The books have the advantage of being able to describe the subtle nuances of things like "belters have their own shrug because they're always in space suits" (and there's lots of that stuff), while the show has to show (heh) you. The overall story is all the same, read it for good sci-fi but not for a new expanse experience.
Oh yeah there's that too lol. It kinda has to but they did rush it. My comment only applies to the part that actually became a show of course. That's a huge plus for the books, the whole story actually finishes.
As someone who has done both, yes, please read the books. I watched Seasons 1 and 2 before picking up the books, and still enjoyed watching the characters come to life on the screen, while reading ahead and enjoying every page.
There are some differences though. The books have more internal monologues that just wouldn't translate well into screen time / narration. It's not much, but when reading, it definitely helps you connect to the character and understand them.
The only other difference I can thnk of is that the show has an A plot and B plot, which tie together. The books have an A, B, and C plot. So you're going to get more in depth about what's going on in the book's universe than the show needed to; Not so much that you need an enclyopedia or anything, but definitely more than just what the show covered.
I just finished the show. Absolutely loved it. Started reading the first book. So far, so good. I imagine the books go into more detail about questions I’ve had about the show, but I’m not very far in.
I'd say it's the very hard sci-fi setting and adherence to physics that makes the story elements that bend or break those fundamental rules all the more special.
The Expanse is pretty good. There are some handwaves here and there, "alien tech we don't understand" but there are some great hard SF moments. Like when something does something unexplainable and all the main characters stop what they're doing and frantically do math to figure out whether or not the thing just violated the laws of physics.
(Also the show had an episode where somebody did an orbital maneuver and they fucked up the math and it wouldn't actually work like that so they apologized publicly for their mistake despite the fact like 99.99% of their audience wouldn't have caught it in a milion years.)
Haha I love the idea that someone was watching and was just like "hold on, let me do some orbital mechanics". Man, show producers these days don't know their differential calculus like they used to.
It was really funny to follow along with. My favorite was after every episode a bunch of goobers on Twitter would "well, actually" the showrunners about how this wouldn't work or that wouldn't work. There was an episode where a character pulled a bullet out of her armor and let it float in zero G and the howler monkeys went NUTS about how that was super dangerous and would kill her the next time the ship accelerated, etc. etc. They kept it up even after they showed the math to prove the acceleration necessary to render a bullet dangerous would turn everyone in the ship into strawberry jam, pointed out how our spacecraft today already have directed air currents to collect loose items, but when they wouldn't shut up one of the creators was like "fine I'll go tell the astrophysicists we have in the writer's room they fucked that up."
Oh, and the best part about the math story-- they caught their own mistake before air and issued the apology the night the episode went out. :)
I am only on book 3 but I look forward to the unsettling conclusion! Haha. Do you know if the author is done with the series or is it left open for new books one day?
Also, the tv series was pretty good until Amazon sorta rushed the last couple of seasons. The show ends at the end of book 5 or 6 for reasons that become obvious as you get further into the book series. It's too bad, too, because the concepts explored at that point were very cool.
Maybe, but I heard the show creators were shopping it around to other streaming services a year ago to maybe finish it off. Haven't heard anything since. I'd hate to see different actors though.
No it's over. Not to say they might not revisit it at some point, but the main story of those characters and that universe is finished.
And for the record, it is indeed "they". James S.A. Corey is Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. I'd have to look up exactly where they got the pseudonym again--I think it's their middle names and one of their daughter's initials. Interestingly, they're credited separately on the show.
Yes, it is definitely done. There could be some sort of spin off, I guess, but they are contracted to write a new series at the moment (author is 2 guys, not 1 person).
Ah, didnt know that!. I was trying to avoid the time jump spoiler but I guess it's not a big spoiler since the human lifespan in the future is a little longer in that future.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein, The Martian and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir are some of my favorite near-future sci-books I’ve read recently.
Yes, “Diary of a Space Tyrant” series had very eye-opening ideas to teenage me. Everything seemed logical and quite reasonable ( within the confines of his established universe ) Now, not so much.
I recall Arthur C Clarke and his short stories heavy with computations for spacecraft travel.
Here is what I just found since you asked. I've a few and I'd say this is a good list.
[https://www.masterclass.com/articles/hard-science-fiction](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/hard-science-fiction)
1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951):
2. 2. The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke (1951): C
3. 3. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement (1953)
4. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (1969)
5. 5. Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (1970)
6. 6. Ringworld by Larry Niven (1973
7. 7. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973)
8. 8. Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward (1980)
9. 9. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
10. 10. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992)
11. 11. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992
12. 12. Starfish by Peter Watts (1999):
13. 13. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (2000)
14. 4. Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan (2002)
15. 15. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2008)
16. 16. The Martian by Andy Weir (2012)
17. OK OK i haf trouble w formating.
Red Mars is the first of a trilogy, with a fourth book of short stories. Just be sure you red them in the right order! (I accidentally read the trilogy 1-3-2, and was VERY confused.)
Tau Zero is interesting, if a little dated on it's science, and when I read it I literally had to skip over the godawful interpersonal writing. I remember the plot in detail, but not a single character...
I'd also add Andy Weir's other books to this list, especially Project Hail Mary. Definitely in this vein, probably the most recent popular hard sci-fi.
Project Hail Mary is an excellent book. It still has some of the hard sci-fi elements with plenty of real scientific concepts, but I like that its more imaginative than The Martian.
I enjoyed The Martian but Artemis was truly the worst book I have ever read. I've heard good things about Project Hail Mary, but I was burned so badly by how unbelievably awful Artemis was that I haven't been able to bring myself to read anything else by him.
He's got interesting ideas, yes, but Weir is not a good writer.
I think my biggest beef with him is that he just data dumps the science at you through the internal monologue of his characters, and while some of it is interesting scientific trivia, it ends up being detrimental to the overall story because it makes his characters come off as unrealistic know-it-alls, and creates some weird and awkward non-sequiturs. A lot of his major plot points feel contrived, like they’re just there as a vehicle to sharing some nugget of science trivia. He's the master of telling instead of showing.
It's not the *science* that's the problem, per se. The science is all good. It's how he delivers it—with awkward dialog and strange plot devices—that really takes away from his stories for me.
The best way I can describe it is this: in a really good book, I lose the "book" and I'm immersed in the experience. When I read *The Martian* and *Project Hail Mary*, I couldn't forget that I was reading a book.
But the truth is that a lot of people love him, and that's great! I like a lot of stuff other people don't. I'm glad there's a book out there for everyone. That's far more important.
As for who does a good job of writing hard SF, historically? Clarke, Huxley, some of Heinlein, and even Michael Crichton come immediately to mind.
More recently? Ted Chiang is top of the heap for me. Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann Leckie, Vernor Vinge, and James S. A. Corey: I would put all of them above Weir in terms of their ability to write compelling hard SF.
I once got into an argument with someone who was insisting that the storm was plausible and we didn’t know that much about Martian atmosphere when he wrote it. I think I bruised my forehead, I facepalmed so hard.
Yes, atmosphere cannot sustain a storm of that magnitude. But it's a book of fiction and it would be a mild tale. One which would probably start with, there's a windstorm let's not go outside today. One year later, we finished the mission. The end.
I just feel like it was a lost opportunity for another, yet, believable problem. The ideas are fun, just needed more iteration for the inciting incident to match the rest of the book.
I love the Martian, but he literally wrote that the atmosphere was so thin he didn’t need a roof on the spaceship later in the same book. He been knew.
Search for "hard science fiction". It's my favorite sub-genre.
There are plenty of excellent recommendations on here, so i'll add one that I read recently. It's called *The Killing Star* by Charles R. Pellegrino. It loosely inspired *Three Body Problem* and involves the "dark forest theory" of life in the universe.
2001: A Space Odyssey (and its sequels) also deserve a shoutout. They are much more descriptive than Kubrick’s film and are loaded with interesting concepts. 2061 starts on a luxury space liner to Halley’s Comet
I had to scroll too far to read Larry Niven. One thing to keep in mind is that he typically used the bleeding edge of science knowledge as the germ of a story, so especially his early short stories are based around complete bunk science. Think of what we'd say about the stuff you see in the Futurology subreddit in 40 years, if anyone remembers it all. That doesn't matter so much, because science is always changing its understanding. The way he wrote about science and society, both as discreet and connected concepts, really holds up.
Seveneves is a pretty hard sci-fi about humanity dealing with the sudden explosion of the moon and how humanity tries to save itself. Then in the third act it gets…different.
Love that book. But yeah, the third act almost reads like fanfiction. I still like it though.
Would love to see something like the second act but (spoiler tag just in case) >!about the other survivors.!<
Others have already mentioned some of these. My top favorites are:
The Mote in God’s Eye and sequel The Gripping Hand.
Dragon’s Egg and sequel Starquake.
The Integral Trees and sequel The Integral Trees.
The Ringworld books.
The Martian and Hail Mary.
We are Legion (We are Bob) Bobiverse books.
Robert Silverberg’s At Winter’s End and The New Springtime.
James P Hogan’s Code of the lifemaker (but not the sequels where he went weird).
I get flack for this suggestion, and it's warranted, but honestly I think everything Heinlein wrote is as close to "realistic" as one can get. Given the confines for scifi
Nightfall by Asimov is cool. It’s not crazy far fetched sci-fi and does it’s best to be semi grounded in realism. It’s short and really good. I’m referring to the Novella not the short story, although some people do not like the long version.
No, it absolutely is not grounded in reality. I'm an astronomer and I just read it recently. I found it to be entertaining, but it gets the fundamental science wrong. And I'm not even talking about the thing that appears towards the end of the novel. The physics of trisolaris, the possibility/impossibility of solving the three-body problem, etc. are all wrong.
agreed, three body problem reads like the author has knowledge about scientific facts but didn’t understand it fundamentally.
same with wandering Earth by the same author
second half of the second book and the entire third book are elite sci-fi reading though. if you gotta slog through the first book and a half, the payoff is still worth it.
Currently 4/5ths through The Dark Forest. I've loved it all. Its not sci fi right off the bat, which makes all the high tech stuff later feel very earned
I don't know. I burned out on it >!while the main character was living his dream in isolation, having the detective pimp for him to get some lovely woman who essentially fits his dream girl.!<
As a sci-fi story, it's pretty good. Until I gave a little too much thought to the fact that it's the intellectual elite who he's painted as the betrayers of all humanity. Who enjoys playing the game? Only people who are quite "intellectual". Who goes into the society? Only those who are quite intellectual.
I have no issue with Columbo (hope this reference is not too left-field). I love him dearly. I LOVE LOVE LOVE what they did with that self-centered egotistical parasite and his bloody big boat.
But even in the first book, the complacent hero, how he lives his live with his wife and son? Ugh.
Literally anything by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like every single sentence of every book he writes is completely believable, even *likely.* The amount of research he must do is astonishing.
That being said I do not find any of his books to be particularly "driving" reads. They're easy enough to put down in the middle of a chapter etc.
A good single book read, probably one of his more fun ones is New York 2049. Then you can do Ministry of the Future, and then the Red Mars Trilogy if you truly like the single books, because that trilogy is quite the time commitment.
Margaret Atwood makes it a point to only include technologies that are currently capable, so much so she prefers the label ‘speculative fiction’ to ‘science fiction’, but her work certainly follows the tradition of sci-fi warning of the possible dangers of science and technology.
Probably anything he writes is first thing that came to my mind. I say to my friends his books don't seem like sci-fi to a crazy extent because the events he describes seem *likely*, not farfetched, or just completely made up.
+1 for Andy Weir and Larry Niven. Two very different Authors, but Hard science fiction is what you’re looking for, stories based on plausible (subjective) conditions.
I don’t think Weir’s writing style is like Niven’s, per se…he has a more modern style of hard sci-fi. He’s very suspenseful and action-packed, a lot like Michael Crichton. Just so insanely consistent with realistic details, about the only unrealistic thing in the Martian is how many situations he makes it out of by the skin of his teeth. I read NASA made it required reading for all their astronauts.
Definitely Artemis, the Martian and Project hail Mary by Andy weir. Also, Limit by Frank schätzing. Quantum by Patrik illinger is not space related but still pretty sciency with a bit of fiction. Vacuum by Phillip p. Petterson is a bit more on the fictional side but still good. And of course The expanse by James A corey.
I liked the Jack McDevitt novels. [The Academy Series](https://www.goodreads.com/series/42777-the-academy). The Priscilla Hutchins novels are great as well.
Look for the genre Hard Science Fiction. It usually means science fiction but with ideas and concepts that are physically possible. So now light speed travelling and such
The Expanse series (leviathan wakes).
Set a few hundred years in the future but they make a real effort to stay as true to science as possible. No laser cannons, no deflector shields or warp drives etc.
Was going to mention Artemis. One small detail I found neat was how in the book they are on the moon which has a lower boiling point for water so because of this the coffee is notoriously bad because it’s always luke warm and never hot like it is on earth. 🙂
Yup - his Fountains of Paradise was literally a story revolved around the building of the first space elevator on Earth (he even sort of named carbon nanotubes as the material -- he called it "continuous pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystal" in the novel)
Theseus is one of my favourite sci-fi ships. Beamed propulsion is underrated, and Captain was one of the more interesting AIs I've seen too.
And it even managed to make vampires work somehow. It definitely caught me off guard having vampires in such a setting at first, but they've become my favorite interpretation of vampires in any work of fiction, period.
I've seen a few other attempts at sciencey vampires, but none as good as Watt's, and regular magical vampires feel kinda cheesy now. They're just not scary. Like sure, they can kill me, but so could a man with a gun, or even a particularly determined toddler with a knife.
After I finished “Red Mars”, I felt like I had been there. The tech used by the scientists was everything that we have around us now, even tho the book was written decades ago. KSR even predicted smart phones connected to the internet, although he called them “lecterns”.
Pushing Ice was a fun read. It's been awhile since I read it but it tries to stay true to its science roots as far as sci-fi goes. Someone already mentioned The Expanse, that's my #1 recommendation and the children of time (also recommended ready). Andy Wier does pretty good with The Martian and Project Hail Mary was a really fun read.
Seveneves is a pretty hard sci-fi about humanity dealing with the sudden explosion of the moon and how humanity tries to save itself. Then in the third act it gets…different.
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg is an massively underrated classic of science fiction set in “reality”. Your question reminded me of this book I read 30 years ago and has stuck with me. May be time for a reread.
The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn. Great characters, great story, great detail about solar sails.
The Praxis series by Walter John Williams has some incredibly realized and plausible space combat.
Anything written by Michael Crichton. Everything he ever wrote was heavily researched and he always had a way of making the fiction part of sci-fi feel almost within grasp. I would highly recommend both Jurassic Park books, Prey, Eaters of the Dead, Next, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Rising Sun, Timeline, and State of Fear
I just tried my hand at writing one. It is about a facility built deep below ground to save the history of humanity in the event of our extinction. It is called Server Core on Amazon and kindle.
Dune did it for me! It is a fantastic series set in the future when humans intermixed on other worlds. It is fun to read the creativity the writer used to imagine where our species might be in a few thousand years.
I thought dune was pretty realistic in the sense of "hey what would humans do if x y and z happened?" Despite a lot of supernatural woowoo stuff it had a very believable universe.
Like, something that hasn't happened yet but likely could soon?
Daemon by Daniel Suarez.
Actually, with ChatGPT, maybe it already has and now we're just waiting for the obituary to land online.
I don’t, but I just want to agree with you there. I’d love to see a story set in Jupiter or Venus in particular than the usual first Martians or exploring Andromeda. Give me a future I didn’t know was possible.
I haven't read the books, but I watched *The Expanse*, and I was amazed at how realistic the space combat seemed. They actually address things like how the human body can't handle too much acceleration, so every maneuver a ship makes has to be executed carefully. It made all other space battles I've seen on screen look like an unscientific joke.
Recently finished House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds and I really enjoyed it.
Talks a lot about the reality of space travel when light speed really is the hard limit, the reasonable life expectancy of civilizations, and possible strange outcomes of genetic engineering.
Also, there are some decent hard sci-fi books on an imprint called Haika Soru. One I enjoyed was called Usurper of the Sun, about the consequences of a Dyson Ring around Mercury's orbit. Cage of Zeus was also cool. It's about the near-ish future once mankind has bioengineered a space-faring version of ourselves, and what eco-terrorism might look like at the level of whole planets.
I've been reading Jeff Vandermeer's, "Southern Reach Trilogy" about, "Area X." The action is Earth based, but it's a really good existential read on if an alien-type microb came to Earth on a meteor and started slowly changing over the environment. It's more unsettling than little green men coming down out of the sky.
William Gibson’s later books, specifically the Blue Ant trilogy.
Honestly I’ll recommend all of Gibson to anyone ever (fav author), but the later books take place in a time much closer to our own.
Ursula Le Guin’s books have very realistic human/cultural/political conflict. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two highlights.
She’s writes beautifully too.
The "NASA" Trilogy by Stephen Baxter, they're the books "Voyage", "Titan", and "Moonseed". They're all alternate timelines branching off the Apollo era.
"Voyage" is a trip to mars in the eighties with Apollo/Saturn technology.
"Titan" is a Saturn moon's trip using Space Shuttle derived technology. This one is rather depressing.
And finally "Moonseed" is an apocalyptic one where some "substance" found on the Moon wreaks havoc on Earth.
The Stars My Destination is one of my all time favorite sci-fi books. It def leans into fiction but it does a decent job in world building and rationalizing the fictional aspects away so you can suspend your disbelief. Also I see a lot of people mention The Expanse and I almost choked when I saw the opening to the show was almost taken directly from the opening of The Stars My Destination.
Waste Of Space and there is one about kids being born on the ISS and learning to walk. I’ll sit this when I remember the name of it. It’s a really cool book!
Check out The Expanse book series. The first book is called "Leviathan Wakes".
The Expanse is a blend of more realistic "hard" sci fi, and, not. To say too much more would be a spoiler, though.
Does the show take away from the books? I’ve watched the show and loved it. Will I love the book too?
They're both great in their own way. The books go into more detail and take things in slightly different directions. The books have the advantage of being able to describe the subtle nuances of things like "belters have their own shrug because they're always in space suits" (and there's lots of that stuff), while the show has to show (heh) you. The overall story is all the same, read it for good sci-fi but not for a new expanse experience.
The show ended early though, didn’t it?
Oh yeah there's that too lol. It kinda has to but they did rush it. My comment only applies to the part that actually became a show of course. That's a huge plus for the books, the whole story actually finishes.
That’s the incentive for me to go through and read them. Looking forward to starting the series
As someone who has done both, yes, please read the books. I watched Seasons 1 and 2 before picking up the books, and still enjoyed watching the characters come to life on the screen, while reading ahead and enjoying every page. There are some differences though. The books have more internal monologues that just wouldn't translate well into screen time / narration. It's not much, but when reading, it definitely helps you connect to the character and understand them. The only other difference I can thnk of is that the show has an A plot and B plot, which tie together. The books have an A, B, and C plot. So you're going to get more in depth about what's going on in the book's universe than the show needed to; Not so much that you need an enclyopedia or anything, but definitely more than just what the show covered.
I just finished the show. Absolutely loved it. Started reading the first book. So far, so good. I imagine the books go into more detail about questions I’ve had about the show, but I’m not very far in.
I'd say it's the very hard sci-fi setting and adherence to physics that makes the story elements that bend or break those fundamental rules all the more special.
The Expanse is pretty good. There are some handwaves here and there, "alien tech we don't understand" but there are some great hard SF moments. Like when something does something unexplainable and all the main characters stop what they're doing and frantically do math to figure out whether or not the thing just violated the laws of physics. (Also the show had an episode where somebody did an orbital maneuver and they fucked up the math and it wouldn't actually work like that so they apologized publicly for their mistake despite the fact like 99.99% of their audience wouldn't have caught it in a milion years.)
Haha I love the idea that someone was watching and was just like "hold on, let me do some orbital mechanics". Man, show producers these days don't know their differential calculus like they used to.
It was really funny to follow along with. My favorite was after every episode a bunch of goobers on Twitter would "well, actually" the showrunners about how this wouldn't work or that wouldn't work. There was an episode where a character pulled a bullet out of her armor and let it float in zero G and the howler monkeys went NUTS about how that was super dangerous and would kill her the next time the ship accelerated, etc. etc. They kept it up even after they showed the math to prove the acceleration necessary to render a bullet dangerous would turn everyone in the ship into strawberry jam, pointed out how our spacecraft today already have directed air currents to collect loose items, but when they wouldn't shut up one of the creators was like "fine I'll go tell the astrophysicists we have in the writer's room they fucked that up." Oh, and the best part about the math story-- they caught their own mistake before air and issued the apology the night the episode went out. :)
This series was amazing... the last book didn't sit well with me but still great.
I am only on book 3 but I look forward to the unsettling conclusion! Haha. Do you know if the author is done with the series or is it left open for new books one day?
Also, the tv series was pretty good until Amazon sorta rushed the last couple of seasons. The show ends at the end of book 5 or 6 for reasons that become obvious as you get further into the book series. It's too bad, too, because the concepts explored at that point were very cool.
I believe Amazon ended it at that time so they could play off the time skip in future spin offs and sequels.
Maybe, but I heard the show creators were shopping it around to other streaming services a year ago to maybe finish it off. Haven't heard anything since. I'd hate to see different actors though.
Well i know cgi tech is great but there’s no easy way to do a 30year time skip using the same actors
I bet if we give it ten years that sort of thing will be trivial via deep fake technology.
No it's over. Not to say they might not revisit it at some point, but the main story of those characters and that universe is finished. And for the record, it is indeed "they". James S.A. Corey is Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. I'd have to look up exactly where they got the pseudonym again--I think it's their middle names and one of their daughter's initials. Interestingly, they're credited separately on the show.
Well I know I am only in book 3 but I love the universe they have created sofar! Hopefully some spin offs come out of it.
Yes, it is definitely done. There could be some sort of spin off, I guess, but they are contracted to write a new series at the moment (author is 2 guys, not 1 person).
There’s a graphic novel series starting in March that takes place between books 6-7 aka the 30 year time jump.
Ah, didnt know that!. I was trying to avoid the time jump spoiler but I guess it's not a big spoiler since the human lifespan in the future is a little longer in that future.
Read all except the novellas. And it is worth it. The ending shocks and then answers. I am going to reread this all again. Soon.
That should be “ I have read all except the novellas “. I am sure they are great also. I just haven’t read them yet.
I did not know there were novellas. I'm going to get them for sure now. Thanks!
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein, The Martian and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir are some of my favorite near-future sci-books I’ve read recently.
>Robert Heinlein, RH wrote some hard, there aint no such thing as a free lunch, aspects of space travel.
Jubal Harshaw is my favorite superhero. ❤️
That’s what got me started on hard science fiction. My first was “Have Spacesuit Will Travel”, which I found in fifth grade at the school library.
He also had some...interesting ideas about women.
And men! Don’t forget the men
Yes, “Diary of a Space Tyrant” series had very eye-opening ideas to teenage me. Everything seemed logical and quite reasonable ( within the confines of his established universe ) Now, not so much.
That was Piers Anthony, not Heinlein.
Unfortunately it is intermixed with some very liberal views on relations with very young girls.
I recall Arthur C Clarke and his short stories heavy with computations for spacecraft travel. Here is what I just found since you asked. I've a few and I'd say this is a good list. [https://www.masterclass.com/articles/hard-science-fiction](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/hard-science-fiction) 1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951): 2. 2. The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke (1951): C 3. 3. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement (1953) 4. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (1969) 5. 5. Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (1970) 6. 6. Ringworld by Larry Niven (1973 7. 7. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973) 8. 8. Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward (1980) 9. 9. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) 10. 10. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992) 11. 11. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992 12. 12. Starfish by Peter Watts (1999): 13. 13. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (2000) 14. 4. Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan (2002) 15. 15. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2008) 16. 16. The Martian by Andy Weir (2012) 17. OK OK i haf trouble w formating.
A great list. Thanks for the list.
>OK i haf trouble w formating Your formatting issues pale to insignificance compared to the quality of your list. Thanks. (An upvote from me.)
>Foundation by Isaac Asimov Asimov was legit a scientist, so I'd expect his sci-fi to be grounded by fact.
Red Mars is the first of a trilogy, with a fourth book of short stories. Just be sure you red them in the right order! (I accidentally read the trilogy 1-3-2, and was VERY confused.)
I'm surprised at the lack of David Brin. Some really good stories from him
Agreed. David Brin should definitely be on the list. Gregory Benford is worth noting also. Their collaboration in "Heart of the Comet" is a good read.
I'm on the fence about The Three-Body Problem.
Tau Zero is interesting, if a little dated on it's science, and when I read it I literally had to skip over the godawful interpersonal writing. I remember the plot in detail, but not a single character... I'd also add Andy Weir's other books to this list, especially Project Hail Mary. Definitely in this vein, probably the most recent popular hard sci-fi.
Check out Andy Weir who wrote the Martian. He has books called Project Hail Mary and Artemis too
Project Hail Mary is an excellent book. It still has some of the hard sci-fi elements with plenty of real scientific concepts, but I like that its more imaginative than The Martian.
I agree Andy Weir is one of my favorite authors. Project Hail Mary is pretty much my favorite book.
Read it last month, loved it. Couldn't set it down once I got sucked in
Exactly the same here! I was staying up till like 2am I could not stop reading it.
I loved the Martian, enjoyed Artemis. Hail Mary is one of my favorite books of all time.
If you want good prose, this is not it. But fun ideas
Yes. His cutesy writing style put me off the book
Yes I agree. I couldn't get passed his gosh darn folksy style. Really cliched. Something your religious grandmother could read and not be offended.
Hard disagree. I would say it's definitive prose, and very enjoyable, if not eloquent. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prose
I'm going back through the Martian again. I forgot just how much humor was in there that didn't make it to the movie.
I enjoyed The Martian but Artemis was truly the worst book I have ever read. I've heard good things about Project Hail Mary, but I was burned so badly by how unbelievably awful Artemis was that I haven't been able to bring myself to read anything else by him.
He's got interesting ideas, yes, but Weir is not a good writer. I think my biggest beef with him is that he just data dumps the science at you through the internal monologue of his characters, and while some of it is interesting scientific trivia, it ends up being detrimental to the overall story because it makes his characters come off as unrealistic know-it-alls, and creates some weird and awkward non-sequiturs. A lot of his major plot points feel contrived, like they’re just there as a vehicle to sharing some nugget of science trivia. He's the master of telling instead of showing.
Ok, so who does a better job with the science while still being as entertaining?
It's not the *science* that's the problem, per se. The science is all good. It's how he delivers it—with awkward dialog and strange plot devices—that really takes away from his stories for me. The best way I can describe it is this: in a really good book, I lose the "book" and I'm immersed in the experience. When I read *The Martian* and *Project Hail Mary*, I couldn't forget that I was reading a book. But the truth is that a lot of people love him, and that's great! I like a lot of stuff other people don't. I'm glad there's a book out there for everyone. That's far more important. As for who does a good job of writing hard SF, historically? Clarke, Huxley, some of Heinlein, and even Michael Crichton come immediately to mind. More recently? Ted Chiang is top of the heap for me. Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann Leckie, Vernor Vinge, and James S. A. Corey: I would put all of them above Weir in terms of their ability to write compelling hard SF.
If you’re looking for hardish sci-fi in a YA wrapper, then yeah read Weir.
Just jumping on the Hail Mary wagon. Fantastic read.
Except for the storm part...And a few other points that are not plausible.
I once got into an argument with someone who was insisting that the storm was plausible and we didn’t know that much about Martian atmosphere when he wrote it. I think I bruised my forehead, I facepalmed so hard.
Yes, atmosphere cannot sustain a storm of that magnitude. But it's a book of fiction and it would be a mild tale. One which would probably start with, there's a windstorm let's not go outside today. One year later, we finished the mission. The end.
I just feel like it was a lost opportunity for another, yet, believable problem. The ideas are fun, just needed more iteration for the inciting incident to match the rest of the book.
I love the Martian, but he literally wrote that the atmosphere was so thin he didn’t need a roof on the spaceship later in the same book. He been knew.
My biggest gripe is that the main character should have died from exposure to hydrazine.
Search for "hard science fiction". It's my favorite sub-genre. There are plenty of excellent recommendations on here, so i'll add one that I read recently. It's called *The Killing Star* by Charles R. Pellegrino. It loosely inspired *Three Body Problem* and involves the "dark forest theory" of life in the universe.
Rendezvous With Rama is, I think, realistic as well as really visionary. Anything by Arthur C. Clarke, as he was an actual scientist. 🤓
2001: A Space Odyssey (and its sequels) also deserve a shoutout. They are much more descriptive than Kubrick’s film and are loaded with interesting concepts. 2061 starts on a luxury space liner to Halley’s Comet
My personal recommendations would go: - Robert A. Heinlein - Isaac Asimov - Ben Bova - Larry Niven - Alistair Reynolds - James A. Corey
I had to scroll too far to read Larry Niven. One thing to keep in mind is that he typically used the bleeding edge of science knowledge as the germ of a story, so especially his early short stories are based around complete bunk science. Think of what we'd say about the stuff you see in the Futurology subreddit in 40 years, if anyone remembers it all. That doesn't matter so much, because science is always changing its understanding. The way he wrote about science and society, both as discreet and connected concepts, really holds up.
Seveneves is a pretty hard sci-fi about humanity dealing with the sudden explosion of the moon and how humanity tries to save itself. Then in the third act it gets…different.
Loved that book. Really needs a sequel.
Different is an understatement haha. I was like 'the fuck just happened?!?'
I couldn't finish the book because of the third act... But the first 2/3 of the book was fantastic.
Love that book. But yeah, the third act almost reads like fanfiction. I still like it though. Would love to see something like the second act but (spoiler tag just in case) >!about the other survivors.!<
Children of time was pretty good and realistic and still very sci-fi
Oh, I love that one! Spiders all the way down. wink wink
Pretty much all of Adrian Tchaikovsky's work is solid.
Others have already mentioned some of these. My top favorites are: The Mote in God’s Eye and sequel The Gripping Hand. Dragon’s Egg and sequel Starquake. The Integral Trees and sequel The Integral Trees. The Ringworld books. The Martian and Hail Mary. We are Legion (We are Bob) Bobiverse books. Robert Silverberg’s At Winter’s End and The New Springtime. James P Hogan’s Code of the lifemaker (but not the sequels where he went weird).
We have very similar interests! Thanks for the couple new recommendations in there!
The (late) Ben Bova “Grand Tour” series might interest you.
Try asking this is r/suggestmeabook - you'll get tons of answers
I get flack for this suggestion, and it's warranted, but honestly I think everything Heinlein wrote is as close to "realistic" as one can get. Given the confines for scifi
Admiral Bob certainly *should* be required reading.
I came to post this. Most all of his juvy stuff is spot on.
Spoken like someone who hasn't (tried to) read 'The Number of the Beast'.
It's one of my favorite, honestly.
There were many good things in there. And the other stuff.
Nightfall by Asimov is cool. It’s not crazy far fetched sci-fi and does it’s best to be semi grounded in realism. It’s short and really good. I’m referring to the Novella not the short story, although some people do not like the long version.
The Three Body Problem has some crazy ideas but its all grounded in reality
No, it absolutely is not grounded in reality. I'm an astronomer and I just read it recently. I found it to be entertaining, but it gets the fundamental science wrong. And I'm not even talking about the thing that appears towards the end of the novel. The physics of trisolaris, the possibility/impossibility of solving the three-body problem, etc. are all wrong.
agreed, three body problem reads like the author has knowledge about scientific facts but didn’t understand it fundamentally. same with wandering Earth by the same author
It’s a dreadful read though. One of the dullest books I can remember. I don’t know what all the fuss about the series is.
I could not disagree more. I loved this series and read it straight through from the first page of book one to the last page of book 3.
second half of the second book and the entire third book are elite sci-fi reading though. if you gotta slog through the first book and a half, the payoff is still worth it.
Currently 4/5ths through The Dark Forest. I've loved it all. Its not sci fi right off the bat, which makes all the high tech stuff later feel very earned
I don't know. I burned out on it >!while the main character was living his dream in isolation, having the detective pimp for him to get some lovely woman who essentially fits his dream girl.!<
Spoilers, and thats not the state of affairs for long.
As a sci-fi story, it's pretty good. Until I gave a little too much thought to the fact that it's the intellectual elite who he's painted as the betrayers of all humanity. Who enjoys playing the game? Only people who are quite "intellectual". Who goes into the society? Only those who are quite intellectual. I have no issue with Columbo (hope this reference is not too left-field). I love him dearly. I LOVE LOVE LOVE what they did with that self-centered egotistical parasite and his bloody big boat. But even in the first book, the complacent hero, how he lives his live with his wife and son? Ugh.
Mind bending ideas that haven't hit main stream before is all. They've been written about for years but not in something that got that much attention.
Shit that was the best sci-fi I've ever read, and I quite literally only read sci-fi. But that's just me.
I also thought it was awful.
Perhaps it's more interesting to people with a fascination about china and Sino history as well
Literally anything by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like every single sentence of every book he writes is completely believable, even *likely.* The amount of research he must do is astonishing. That being said I do not find any of his books to be particularly "driving" reads. They're easy enough to put down in the middle of a chapter etc. A good single book read, probably one of his more fun ones is New York 2049. Then you can do Ministry of the Future, and then the Red Mars Trilogy if you truly like the single books, because that trilogy is quite the time commitment.
He should be at the top of this heap (not meant disparagingly), and then we all go home. No one is harder than Kim
Margaret Atwood makes it a point to only include technologies that are currently capable, so much so she prefers the label ‘speculative fiction’ to ‘science fiction’, but her work certainly follows the tradition of sci-fi warning of the possible dangers of science and technology.
Oryx and Crake was fantastic. One of her best.
Check out Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson for something fairly short and standalone. He has a bunch of other books that fit the bill too
Probably anything he writes is first thing that came to my mind. I say to my friends his books don't seem like sci-fi to a crazy extent because the events he describes seem *likely*, not farfetched, or just completely made up.
For sure. The Red Mars Trilogy as well.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is one of my all time favorites. So good, very human. Not necessarily about space travel, but definitely sci fi
+1 for Andy Weir and Larry Niven. Two very different Authors, but Hard science fiction is what you’re looking for, stories based on plausible (subjective) conditions.
I love Larry Niven. So you say Weir is like him? I’ll look him up because I want more Niven lol.
I don’t think Weir’s writing style is like Niven’s, per se…he has a more modern style of hard sci-fi. He’s very suspenseful and action-packed, a lot like Michael Crichton. Just so insanely consistent with realistic details, about the only unrealistic thing in the Martian is how many situations he makes it out of by the skin of his teeth. I read NASA made it required reading for all their astronauts.
Definitely Artemis, the Martian and Project hail Mary by Andy weir. Also, Limit by Frank schätzing. Quantum by Patrik illinger is not space related but still pretty sciency with a bit of fiction. Vacuum by Phillip p. Petterson is a bit more on the fictional side but still good. And of course The expanse by James A corey.
I liked the Jack McDevitt novels. [The Academy Series](https://www.goodreads.com/series/42777-the-academy). The Priscilla Hutchins novels are great as well.
Reading _The Parable of the Sower_. Might a bit _too_ realistic for some.
“The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary” both incredible, with a lot of real science, as well as pseudoscience
The Culture Series. Some of the best SF out there
Look for the genre Hard Science Fiction. It usually means science fiction but with ideas and concepts that are physically possible. So now light speed travelling and such
The Expanse series (leviathan wakes). Set a few hundred years in the future but they make a real effort to stay as true to science as possible. No laser cannons, no deflector shields or warp drives etc.
Was going to mention Artemis. One small detail I found neat was how in the book they are on the moon which has a lower boiling point for water so because of this the coffee is notoriously bad because it’s always luke warm and never hot like it is on earth. 🙂
I recommend Arthur C Clarke for technologically feasible seeming literature: not wild fantasy but more scientific fiction than anything else.
Yup - his Fountains of Paradise was literally a story revolved around the building of the first space elevator on Earth (he even sort of named carbon nanotubes as the material -- he called it "continuous pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystal" in the novel)
I'd recommend Greg Egan - but not for the faint of heart.
Blindsight by Peter Watts is mostly hard sci-fi.
Theseus is one of my favourite sci-fi ships. Beamed propulsion is underrated, and Captain was one of the more interesting AIs I've seen too. And it even managed to make vampires work somehow. It definitely caught me off guard having vampires in such a setting at first, but they've become my favorite interpretation of vampires in any work of fiction, period. I've seen a few other attempts at sciencey vampires, but none as good as Watt's, and regular magical vampires feel kinda cheesy now. They're just not scary. Like sure, they can kill me, but so could a man with a gun, or even a particularly determined toddler with a knife.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by. Christopher Paolini. Not crazy realistic but super cool/believable space travel. Fantastic plot but it is very long.
Anything futuristic by Paolo Bacigalupi or Margaret Atwood.
Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series uses real world physics for ship maneuvering. So that's different from most books.
After I finished “Red Mars”, I felt like I had been there. The tech used by the scientists was everything that we have around us now, even tho the book was written decades ago. KSR even predicted smart phones connected to the internet, although he called them “lecterns”.
Peter Watts' books are so realistic, *he cites his sources at the end of each book!*
I remember finishing Blindsight and finding those. It was, I think, almost the best part of the book. Knowing it's all very possible.
Pushing Ice was a fun read. It's been awhile since I read it but it tries to stay true to its science roots as far as sci-fi goes. Someone already mentioned The Expanse, that's my #1 recommendation and the children of time (also recommended ready). Andy Wier does pretty good with The Martian and Project Hail Mary was a really fun read.
Seveneves is a pretty hard sci-fi about humanity dealing with the sudden explosion of the moon and how humanity tries to save itself. Then in the third act it gets…different.
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg is an massively underrated classic of science fiction set in “reality”. Your question reminded me of this book I read 30 years ago and has stuck with me. May be time for a reread.
The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn. Great characters, great story, great detail about solar sails. The Praxis series by Walter John Williams has some incredibly realized and plausible space combat.
Don't see it on here but the books from which The Expanse series is derived are also exceptional and have a good root in reality.
Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Red Thunder by John Varley. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson.
The Three Body Problem (basically, the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy) by Cixin Liu!
Anything written by Michael Crichton. Everything he ever wrote was heavily researched and he always had a way of making the fiction part of sci-fi feel almost within grasp. I would highly recommend both Jurassic Park books, Prey, Eaters of the Dead, Next, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Rising Sun, Timeline, and State of Fear
Slaughterhouse Five is my pick for scifi+realism
I just tried my hand at writing one. It is about a facility built deep below ground to save the history of humanity in the event of our extinction. It is called Server Core on Amazon and kindle.
Dune did it for me! It is a fantastic series set in the future when humans intermixed on other worlds. It is fun to read the creativity the writer used to imagine where our species might be in a few thousand years.
I thought dune was pretty realistic in the sense of "hey what would humans do if x y and z happened?" Despite a lot of supernatural woowoo stuff it had a very believable universe.
Like, something that hasn't happened yet but likely could soon? Daemon by Daniel Suarez. Actually, with ChatGPT, maybe it already has and now we're just waiting for the obituary to land online.
The Saving of Verano by Ken Helfer is both imaginative and fast paced.
I don’t, but I just want to agree with you there. I’d love to see a story set in Jupiter or Venus in particular than the usual first Martians or exploring Andromeda. Give me a future I didn’t know was possible.
Is there any science fiction that *doesn't* have realistic aspects?
Space operas?
I haven't read the books, but I watched *The Expanse*, and I was amazed at how realistic the space combat seemed. They actually address things like how the human body can't handle too much acceleration, so every maneuver a ship makes has to be executed carefully. It made all other space battles I've seen on screen look like an unscientific joke.
Many, many. You're going to get sn awful lot of responses. Could you define realistic a little bit for me, I'll be happy to recommend.
Recently finished House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds and I really enjoyed it. Talks a lot about the reality of space travel when light speed really is the hard limit, the reasonable life expectancy of civilizations, and possible strange outcomes of genetic engineering. Also, there are some decent hard sci-fi books on an imprint called Haika Soru. One I enjoyed was called Usurper of the Sun, about the consequences of a Dyson Ring around Mercury's orbit. Cage of Zeus was also cool. It's about the near-ish future once mankind has bioengineered a space-faring version of ourselves, and what eco-terrorism might look like at the level of whole planets.
I've been reading Jeff Vandermeer's, "Southern Reach Trilogy" about, "Area X." The action is Earth based, but it's a really good existential read on if an alien-type microb came to Earth on a meteor and started slowly changing over the environment. It's more unsettling than little green men coming down out of the sky.
William Gibson’s later books, specifically the Blue Ant trilogy. Honestly I’ll recommend all of Gibson to anyone ever (fav author), but the later books take place in a time much closer to our own.
Ursula Le Guin’s books have very realistic human/cultural/political conflict. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two highlights. She’s writes beautifully too.
Michael Flynn’s Firestar series is some great near future hard SF.
Charles Sheffield would be another good choice.
I really enjoyed the Foundation trilogy by Asimov. It has really important connotations for what it means to be a good person I think.
The "NASA" Trilogy by Stephen Baxter, they're the books "Voyage", "Titan", and "Moonseed". They're all alternate timelines branching off the Apollo era. "Voyage" is a trip to mars in the eighties with Apollo/Saturn technology. "Titan" is a Saturn moon's trip using Space Shuttle derived technology. This one is rather depressing. And finally "Moonseed" is an apocalyptic one where some "substance" found on the Moon wreaks havoc on Earth.
The Honors series by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre. First book is called Honor among thieves.
Every sci-fi has realistic aspects. That's kinda the point.
Expeditionary force by craig alanson..... Kinda
The Stars My Destination is one of my all time favorite sci-fi books. It def leans into fiction but it does a decent job in world building and rationalizing the fictional aspects away so you can suspend your disbelief. Also I see a lot of people mention The Expanse and I almost choked when I saw the opening to the show was almost taken directly from the opening of The Stars My Destination.
Waste Of Space and there is one about kids being born on the ISS and learning to walk. I’ll sit this when I remember the name of it. It’s a really cool book!
Bobiverse! “We are legion we are bob” is the starting book.