
Ask HN: What are less known hard Sci-Fi books to read? - lostmsu
From the popular ones I&#x27;ve read quite a few from Ian Bank&#x27;s Culture series, but en summe they feel a bit like spy stories with a bit of cyberpunk sprinkled around.<p>The Three-Body problem was good, but still very pale in comparison to Permutation City, which I just discovered recently.<p>Anything along the lines of Permutation City, Asimov&#x27;s works, Lem, or something like Martian Chronicles (e.g. about facing a totally different culture).
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ThePhysicist
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.

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austincheney
Agreed. I highly recommend:

* Eon - Greg Bear

* A Deepness In The Sky - Vernor Vinge

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Wildgoose
"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.

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sfifs
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.

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lgl
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](https://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_index.asp)

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qubex
_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](https://www.gregegan.net)

~~~
joycian
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.

~~~
qubex
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.

~~~
joycian
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.

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

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etherio
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](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.

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

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chadcmulligan
The paratwa trilogy by Christopher Hinze? Genetically bred assasins

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

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

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fiftyacorn
Becky Chambers books are a good read -

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

A Closed and Common Orbit

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joycian
The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.

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steve_g
Inverted World by Christopher Priest.

An oldie, but a weirdie.

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Mustan
The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

