Hard Science Fiction

I grew up on Lem, so I'm going to recommend his books.

"His Master's Voice" is what you get if you take Sagan's Contact and turn the realism to eleven.
"The Invincible" is part exploration, part militaristic adventure, with musings about nanomachines and the signature down-to-earth no-heroism approach of his more serious books. A military ship lands on a planet in a search-and-rescue mission.
"Solaris" is another one in the oft-explored theme of attempting contact with alien intelligence. The crew of a space station above a planet covered in a seemingly alive ocean goes crazy, or do they?
"Return from the stars". The theme is similar to "a soldier returns from war to find the world he knew gone", only it's an astronaut returing after decades-long exploratory journey.
"Fiasco" another one in the "Contact for pessimists" theme. This time it's more of a Star Trek setup - the technologically-advanced humans arrive at an alien planet.

 

Robert L. Forward

I have recently enjoyed The Forever War and Tau Zero for their portrayals of FTL travel consequences.

 

I didn't see him mentioned, but Greg Egan's novels are the first things I think of when it comes to hard science fiction. The recent Orthogonal trilogy was excellent. He maintains a web site here: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ .

 

Some good science fiction movies::
*Primer - If you watch the movie once and said that you understood the whole fiasco,you would be lying.
*Timecrimes
*Pi

 

I'm pleased to see that someone else besides me has seen Primer (https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Shane-Carruth/dp/B0007N1JC8/). It's one of my favorite movies. And it's enhanced by the knowledge that it's the project of a couple of engineers that produced it for pocket change.

 

Greg Egan! I like Ben Bova as well (he's got a good grasp on the near-future political culture of Earth), but Greg Egan is hands-down the master of hard sci-fi. He writes the hardest science fiction out there, period. Check out "Schild's Ladder" (named after a construction in differential geometry!) and "Diaspora". He doesn't hesitate to use terms like "set of measure zero", and will gladly go into the gory details of 5-dimensional wormhole travel. He's also a brilliant mathematician / physicist as well as a writer.

And yeah, Primer is a must-see.

 

Hard SF. Just off the top of my head: Larry Niven, Jack McDevitt, most of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, David Brin.

 

I'd like to third Greg Egan.
I recently read Schild's Ladder and loved it. One of those books where I'd say to myself okay I'm going to read 1 chapter and go to sleep. Next thing I knew it was 2am lol

 

Here is a free science fiction book called Fine Structure. I read it in a book club a couple of years ago and LOVED it. Check it out, it's free! (and has a lot of physics in it)

Here's the teaser:

Every year, a random person on Earth is struck by lightning and gains superpowers.

Each new superhuman is twice as powerful as the previous one.

This has been going on for ten years.

http://qntm.org/structure

 

About 1962 somebody gave me two bushels of sci-fi paperbacks and i read them all over a summer.

Robert Sheckley's short stories stand out in my memory as spectacularly creative.
"Beachcomber" and "Specialist" in particular, with "Watchbirds" becoming more relevant every year as surveillance technology progresses.

Early Theodore Sturgeon was delightful for his character development but i dont like his later stuff.
His "Ether Breather" (Butyl and the Beast?) made me laugh till my sides hurt.
"Widget, Wadget and Boff" ranks among my top 5 sci-fi stories ever.

Asimov is well, just the master.

That's my opinion.

 

how about the Andromeda Strain Book and movie. Can not get harder than that.

 

Space Tug by Murry Leinster [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Tug_(novel)] is a nominally juvenile novel but is also lots of fun for adults. It involves the operation of a space station, and the plot is, as much as anything, a series of cleverly expressed physics puzzles. IIRC this is actually the second book in a three book series.... this one just comes to mind for some reason.

Half the fun of this book is trying to work solutions out before the specifics are revealed in the plot.

There is a Librivox audio version of it available for download, which I recommend if you like audio books.

https://librivox.org/space-tug-by-murray-leinster/

Looking around a bit, there is also a Project Gutenberg version of it (and the other two in the series as well as a bunch more by the same author... including his adult works).

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7321

Further digging: Bunch of his books are available in audio form at librivox. Here is a link to the relevant catalog page there: https://librivox.org/author/479?pri...=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results


Highly recommended. Lots of fun for the physics minded.

diogenesNY

 

It was published 3 years before Sputnik! Was the physics accurate??

 

Most of the issues were not concerned with the 'rocket science' part of the process but with a lot of smaller human level concerns with living and operating on the station. One of my favorite issues deals with what happens if you threw something (a tin can, say) directly 'down' towards earth from the platform.

Short answer: as far as I could tell, yes.

diogenesNY

 

I just remembered Catherine Asaro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Asaro).