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For many people, "hard sf" is the entire genre, the only thing they think of when they hear the term "science fiction." From Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to Star Wars, hard SF to many people means spaceships, robots, and aliens. Yet a lot of great hard SF is set on Earth, a futuristic Earth where the tech is so entwined that, like in any real SF tale, if you starting pulling out, things fall apart.
As with all our bookstore pages, below is a small sampling of
books to get you started in this wide-ranging genre.
One of Anderson's early works, about four men sent aboard a deep space vessel for a routine mission. But of course, if it was routine, you would have no story, so things get interesting when things go wrong.
The first book in the trilogy voted the greatest of all time, ranking even above Tolkien, this is Asimov's masterpiece of future history. The other two books are:
One of the grand masters of science fiction, Asimov set many standards in SF when it comes to robots. His three laws of robotics seem to be so commonsense and immutable that they wind up in many other works as sort of the standard for robot behavior.
If you are into serious tech, Bear is your guy. In this outing he takes nanotechnology to whole new heights. In the process he does what really good SF does: examine the nature of life, the universe, and everything.
Bear has established himself as one of the masters
of the new generation of SF writers. In Darwin's Radio he blends far
past and modern high-tech into a mystery nobody wants to talk about, and that
for his characters is a matter of life and death.
Card's breakthrough novel sends a group of small, super-intelligent boys to a
no-sissies-allowed military training program that pits them against each other
in increasingly complex and dangerous war games. The ending, of course, is not
much of a surprise if you were paying attention, but Ender Wiggin is an
endearing character and the reader is easily sucked into his world and his very
real problems.
This Hugo-winning novel is part of Cherryh's series of novels about the Company wars, Earth against its former colony, Cyteen. As with all of her SF, her strength lies in her ability not only to bring us engaging characters caught up in compelling and dangerous situations, but to view the conflict from non-human viewpoints. She is a master at envisioning other mindsets and her SF always feels very real. This complex weaving of the devolving war and the fight for the station above the single world where mankind has found other intelligent life reminds us that our problems have a way of sucking in all the bystanders.
Other books in the series:
40,000 in Gehenna
Cyteen
Finity's End
Merchanter's Luck
Regenesis
Rimrunners
Tripoint
This, and its companion sequel Hellburner
You really haven't seen SF until you view the world from alien eyes, and Cherryh does it better than anyone. This 4-book series is a high-speed romp from one end of Compact space to the other, as the feline hani crew of the Pride of Chanur tried to extricate themselves from an act of kindness that lands them in politics that could tear the very delicate web of inter-species alliances to hell and gone. Pyanfar Chanur is a well-respected merchant captain minding her own business when a stray human takes refuge on her dock, touching off the biggest manhunt in history, involving several species, hundreds of ships, and a bewildered crew trying to figure out how to extricate themselves from other people's power games with their ears, their ship, and their clan intact.
This book also includes:
Chanur's Venture
The Kif Strike Back
For some weird reason, the fourth book of the
original series and the sequel, which takes place a couple of years later, are
combined in a second volume, Chanur's Endgame
Chanur's Homecoming
Chanur's Legacy
Our candidate for
the best title ever was also the inspiration for the movie Bladerunner.
Dick was a master at envisioning the future. This grim vision of an Earth
devastated by world war, mass immigration to Mars, and androids feared by the
general population and smart enough to blend in when paranoid humanity tries to
eliminate them is truly a classic.
Drake epitomizes military science fiction, being a Vietnam vet himself and deeply understanding of toll that war takes. This volume is the first of three compiling the many stories that comprise the Hammer's Slammers universe he has created.
This is one of those books that publishers kick
themselves over, for after a dozen rejections, it won both the Hugo and Nebula
awards. Caught in a war that stretches endlessly thanks to the time dilation of
space travel, a weary soldier watches Earth age beyond imagining while he fights
on and on. Universally hailed as visionary, but with a very human touch, this is
one of those must-reads if you really want to explore hard SF.
The grand master dishes up classic
SF in this one, dealing out revolution on oppressed Luna. It combines an
original dialect style with a fully-imagined future where former convicts have
adapted to lunar gravity and cannot return to Earth, and thus remain, economic
slaves to unfeeling masters back home.
Another Hugo-winning classic, this also examines the effect of war on the
average soldier forced to fight it, in conditions not at all conducive to
survival. Beyond the excellent battle scenes, it is an examination of why the
war is being fought at all, and the nature of duty and humanity. Don't settle
for the movie; read the original.
One of the true
classics of science fiction, with a hapless hero raised, literally, by Martians,
and therefore entirely ignorant of the culture of his heritage. The inevitable
culture clash was intended to cast a strong spotlight on human prejudices, and
succeeded well enough to entail severe tinkering with the plot in order to get
it published, and decades of discussion since.
Turned down by 20 publishers, this one blazed its own trail once it got into print. The story of mankind thousands of years in the future, with families ruling entire worlds and politics built around the scarce and expensive spice that allows interstellar travel, delves into very interesting territory indeed. Paul Atreides is the fulfillment of an aggressive breeding program carried out over hundreds of generations, but his destiny will be much different than the one so many are determined to force upon him.
It has spawned many sequels, all of which are still in print:
Children of Dune
Dune Messiah
God Emperor of Dune
Heretics of Dune
Chapterhouse of Dune
The Ship Who Sang
Best known for her soft SF Pern novels with their magnificent, bio-engineered
dragons, McCaffrey has also written a great deal of hard SF, of which The
Ship Who Sang is one of the best. In a future where birth defects are all
but unknown, severely deformed children can be trained as "shell
people", serving mankind in a variety of ways, including as the living
brain encapsulated inside a starship. Young Helva's touching search for a worthy
"brawn" is highly original and satisfying science fiction.
This anthology of military science fiction is dedicated to women in the military, and written exclusively by women authors, with the exception of the introduction, which was written by David Weber, author of the best-selling Honor Harrington series.
He says of it: "This collection has a lot going for it. There's not a single piece here that isn't well worth reading.
Modesitt's work runs a wide gamut, and often entwines deep worldbuilding
with a gifted hero struggling to find himself. Exiled for daring to love the
wrong woman, feared for his extraordinary esper abilities, Martin Martel must
master himself before he can master the inequities that have turned him into a
rebel. To do that, he must unravel the secrets of the gods on the world where he
finds himself adrift.
A military veteran herself, Moon has made military SF her own in her Vatta's War series. This is the first in the 5-book series that combines a plucky heroine, Kylara Vatta, with family politics, interstellar commerce, and pure survival on wits, courage, and daring. Kylara's scramble to survive after parties unknown stage a sneak attack on her family sees her in command of a run-down privateer lurking in space, figuring out her next move and thwarting her enemies. Good stuff.
Continued in:
Marque and Reprisal
Engaging the Enemy
Command Decisions
Victory Conditions
Hard SF necessarily entails a focus on the technology that makes the story
work. Niven's wildly original Ringworld immerses itself in the idea of a
enormous ring, 6 million times the surface of Earth, rather than in the
characters sent to explore it. If you like aliens and new concepts in technology
and interesting imaginings of how things "could" be, this one's for
you.
It's always nice to see women writing
in what has traditionally been the male-dominated field of hard science fiction.
Rusch wraps deep moral questions around the exploration of ancient technology,
including a dive into a 5,000 year old wrecked spaceship. Her protagonist, Boss,
is a loner with haunting memories that make her question the very technology she
has come to discover.
What can we say? One of the best hard SF books is also one of the
earliest, published in 1818 when Shelley was 21. As with any SF tale, the
science is the underpinning, without which there is no story at all. Dr.
Frankenstein's obsession with defeating death culminates in the creation of a
monster whose humanity we must acknowledge even as we are appalled by the manner
of its creation. The book is timeless for its examination of morality and what,
exactly, makes us human.
Simmons is nothing if not imaginative. This is hard SF with a twist, simultaneously recreating the Trojan War with recreated heroes and weaving a tale that leaps from Earth to Mars to Jupiter and back. And then there are the faux Greek gods, the sentient robots, and the scholarly hero who sends things spinning off in entirely new directions. Complex and interesting.
Verne remains the great-granddaddy of science fiction, with an imagination that spanned the universe and speculations that proved out a hundred years after he was born. This 2-in-1 volume combines the first novels to take readers to the great orb in the sky that has dominated so much of human literature. As always, Verne writes with verve and a solid grounding in the science of his day, taking a Frenchman and a couple of adventurous Americans on a voyage of exploration outside Earth's atmosphere.
Weber invented an instant cult hero in Honor Harrington in this first book of his extended series built around her. This is space opera combined with great kick-ass military SF, as Honor gets her first command and then proceeds to make potent enemies with her success.
This 3-in-1 volume combines some of Wells' best work. His ideas are so original and so timeless that each one of these books lives on in the movies through countless remakes. Not to mention that Wells and Verne are the source inspiration for the new and exploding steampunk genre.