As an example, I love the Martian, and I think a lot of older books from authors like Asimov are heavily into engineering / competence porn. Other favs in this category include the standalone novel Rendezvous with Rama to leave you wishing for more, most of the Culture series for happy utopian vibes, Schlock Mercenary for humor, Dahak series for fun mindless popcorn.
Edit: I’m so happy to have found a replacement for r/books and the rest of them.
I’m sure you’ve read or heard this before, but project hail mary is great. The whole bobiverse series was incredibly satisfying to read and the 5th book is out recently in the form of an audio book. Low pressure, low commitment series thats just full of engineering porn.
Yeah, I loved pretty much all of Andy Weir. I should get back to the Bobiverse. I tried it once and couldn’t get into it for some reason. I don’t recall the exact details now, and maybe I was misunderstanding something, but there was some stuff about his drones destroying entire solar systems for raw minerals, that just seemed plain nonsensical to me? I guess with all the good things people are saying about it I should go back and figure out what rubbed me wrong the first time.
I’m stuck on Bobiverse too. This whole section on the Archimedes alien did me in.
there was some stuff about his drones destroying entire solar systems for raw minerals, that just seemed plain nonsensical to me?
Not sure what exactly seems nonsensical to you but it’s a well known concept that is also explained thoroughly in the books. You might want to read up on von Neumann probes.
Like I said, I possibly misunderstood or missed something. I’m familiar with the concept of Von Neumann probes, but an entire solar system to build a small handful of probes seems overkill. How big are these probes? If it turns out to have been a gazillion probes, or they’re jupiter-sized, then I guess that’s where my misunderstanding was.
Yeh, I guess you really did miss something. I’m sure the purpose of mining a solar system was not to make more simple probes.
Good to know. I’ll slot Bobiverse in once I’m done with Greg Bear
Holy shit, new bobiverse? Thanks for the knowledge.
I really wanted to love “Project Hail Mary”, but Andy Weir can’t write characters and that killed it for me for some reason
Can you elaborate on what specifically bothered you? I didn’t notice anything when I read it but it was a good while ago
It’s been a while too.
I think I felt that the dialogue was kind of flat and I was upset at how human the alien was.
The Expanse is a great at engineering read. Doubly so for a space opera. Lots of very legit science in the science fiction there.
Oh yes, I love the Expanse. For some reason it doesn’t quite strike me as engineering / competence porn though, maybe because there’s a big focus on the human side.
Yeah it’s most definitely a space opera. There’s so much good science in there though.
You just reminded me I have to get caught up with that series again so I can read the last book. I powered through the whole series before the last book was released and now I kind of forget what was going on, to jump in again.
I kind of forget what was going on
Protomolecule. Lots and lots of protomolecule.
It’s so easy to read, worth starting over. If you read fast you’ll get through it all in a couple months.
Kim Stanley-Robinson
His Mars trilogy and Science in the Capital are amazing.
He is my favorite hard science fiction writer for the blend of tech, politics, critiques of capitalism, and drama. His novels after those trilogies are good but some people find them fairly long winded and boring in parts… actually I do too, ah well.Thanks! I bounced off the Mars trilogy. All the petty human drama and politics just felt way too much like current news (which is probably a compliment to his writing skills, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time). I think I probably need a very relaxed state of mind to be able to dive into it.
I recently found the Bobiverse to be a light-hearted read in this category.
Engineer becomes von Neumann probe and has to solve quite a lot of interesting issues while bootstrapping and dealing with settling in the galactic neighbourhood
Enjoyed project hail mary, but bobiverse didn’t quite do it for me. >!Atheist gets recruited by religious cult. Proceeds to go to planet of the apes to play god. I found it to be mostly ok up to that point though. !<
Religion as portrayed in this book makes the characters very one dimensional. It’s also peppered with references to popular culture, which doesn’t really do that much for me.
Wow you read a lot more into the religious theme than I did. I found it an exploration of the engineering behind almost every SciFi trope rather than playing god.
And as an atheist I found the religious characterisation entirely adequate, it is a minor part of the characters personality, and it’s only in the obnoxious ones that it becomes dominating. Which is quite close to how it is in my daily life.
But yes, the whole series is made within and to serve nerd culture, it is a long long stream of references and in-jokes at multiple levels, including the main premise. It just happens to also be intelligently written.
I wouldn’t say that there’s a major religious theme. It’s just that Bob doesn’t interact with that many characters except himself, so those interactions felt more important to the plot. Then again, I wouldn’t say that the Brazilian navy AI was a very multifaceted character either.
I found it to be mostly ok up to that point though.
I’m a bit confused by this statement. The religious cult stuff takes place in like the first 15% of the first book and is then essentially dropped. What part were you ok with then? Just the 10 pages of Bob 1.0 before he got hit by a car?
!Didn’t make it clear, but I was mainly referring to the storyline on the inhabited planet. I got annoyed by the main character essentially slaughtering natives and then at some point admitting to himself that he knew nothing about them as a species. Towards the end of that plot line there was some negotiation with the cult leader back on earth, at which point I was quite fed up.!<
There were a lot of fun aspects too though, like bob discovering stuff and making gadgets.
I should get back to the Bobiverse. I tried it once and couldn’t get into it for some reason. I don’t recall the exact details now, and maybe I was misunderstanding something, but there was some stuff about his drones destroying entire solar systems for raw minerals, that just seemed plain nonsensical to me? I guess with all the good things people are saying about it I should go back and figure out what rubbed me wrong the first time.
It sounds like you accidentally starter with a later book because what you’ve described is a major plot story being built up for a bit.
From this thread I think you might enjoy it :)
Yeah I’ll give it another look :)
I’m on the third book now. It’s great nerd/competence porn. I set the 10 minute timer and put my ear buds in at night as I go to bed. I’ve usually drifted off by minute 9, but not because it’s boring or anything, it’s just good listening.
Hard scifi by Greg Egan is a trip and you’ll never be the same afterwards. Permutation City and Diaspora are my favorites.
For more modern take, Children of Time is beautifully narrated and I could listen to it all day for years and never get tired of the narrator.
For a universe that keeps on going with problem solving Vorkosigan Saga is very feel good and I think in line with a book like the Martian albeit a bit less hard though solid on its approach to deduction and wit.
Yep! Everybody here keeps mentioning Greg Egan and I’ll give him a shot. The rest I’ve read and love. Thanks!
If you end up searching online for that kind of things, “hard science fiction” is the phrase that’s usually used for it.
A lot of good recommendations here. Some endorsements and other recommendations:
- Project Hail Mary by Weir is a no brainer choice if you liked The Marian. He gets the science right.
- Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is amazing, and the first of a trilogy, so more to read.
- The whole Expanse series, by James Corey is good and he does a good job with the science, especially the celestial mechanics.
- The Uplift series (starting with Sundiver) by David Brin is great, and Brin is will known for hard SF. It’s from the 80s.
- Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, is great and the first of a series as well.
- Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, is great, with a good science background, though it’s more genetics than engineering. Really cool story though.
- I also agree with the recommendation on Saturn’s Children, by Charles Stross. Also the first of a loose series.
On the flip side, I really didn’t care for Three Body Problem, and though the Bobiverse books seem fun, I’m not sure I’d call them firmly hard SF.
The Three Body Problem is bad. The hype for the book is a good example of “The Emporer’s New Clothes”.
I was surprised at how little I liked it given the hype.
I did enjoy the parts about the Cultural Revolution and some of the dialog from Da Shi. That’s about it.
It’s a little bit of a slog. There are a lot of cultural references, plot devices, characters, and ways of moving through the story that are literally foreign to the western mind. Odd injections of what feels like philosophy. At least the version I read. Once you get used to it it gets better.
I have finished the series and absolutely loved it.
Could you please explain why you consider it bad?
I found the third book very weak, albiet with some interesting ideas.
Also, made it clear that he can’t write women at all.
I found them overall fine to good, except the main character’s chapters in the final 2/3rd of Book 3 which were just kinda bleh by the end.
Book 1 was strong idea explored well.
Book 2 felt good at the time, but I think feels weaker in hindsight but was some more interesting ideas.
I loved it for the game theory, ideas, and what-if aspects. The characters however, were flat 2D cutouts. I can’t say how much of that was due to translation issues, if any.
Thanks! There a few that I hadn’t heard about!
Oh, certainly. In case it’s helpful, here’s a post I made last spring with notes from a year of reading - it’s pretty much all SF and fantasy. Many of the books mentioned in this thread are there. I’ve been reading about the same amount since, and will probably do another post on the anniversary of that one.
I haven’t read Beggars in Spain or Saturn’s Children yet, will take a look!
I’d love to hear what you think, I enjoyed both quite a lot.
The first two thirds of Seveneves is really good at exactly what you describe. Once you get to the third part (you’ll recognize it) just pretend the book ended before that.
I liked the third half. But it’s quite a shift
Seveneves was a wild ride, and I appreciated the way its scope broadened, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it.
I was the opposite. The first 2/3 was a slog to get through to reach the inevitable. If people enjoy doomsday scenarios it’ll work for them, thouugh. The last 1/3 was when everything got really interesting for me and ended way too soon.
“Quarter Share: Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper” is a good one. It’s usually not at high stakes as 'The Martian", but it’s a journey across a well developed science fiction galaxy with a thoughtfully detailed societies and economies. And keep an eye out for the author, Nathan Lowell, here on the Fediverse. He seems nice.
“The Long Earth” is another in that the starting premise is deceptively simple, and then every social, economic and political upheaval stems directly from the single core science fiction premise.
I really loved the concept and worldbuilding of the Long Earth. However I felt that the books didn’t focus as much on the nitty-gritty as I’d like, instead becoming really metaphysical. I’d have loved to see how every aspect of society changed over time, but instead got a human interest story about a few people. Fun, but ultimately I felt like a lot of potential was wasted.
Solar Clipper looks like some nice cozy slice of life SF, will put that on my list for when I’m in the mood for that :)
Agreed on “The Long Earth”. It was fun, but on the light side of what the premise begs for.
I keep hoping we get more entries that explore the possibilities even further.
Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves has a lot (A LOT) of orbital mechanics jargon if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I skipped most of it.
His explanations are why I read any of his books. I find his prose dry and bland, even if he’s telling an interesting story. I stay for the fun facts.
Murderbot series has a tremendous amount of tech.
Heads up — Murderbot series can be fun, but I’d say it’s more “robocop” than hard sci fi.
I’d say it definitely counts as competence porn though, it’s got tons of high-stakes hacking and problem solving.
and the hacking portion isn’t completely ridicilous, because it’s intentionally kept rather vague, which i appreciate a LOT!
none of “i’m past the firewall!” movie dialogue bs, and mostly just neat little “hey! this system has a known exploit, lucky!” which is honestly sooo refreshing!
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars is pretty hard-scifi.
Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space not so much but very entertaining.
Edit: for light reading Stross’s Saturns Children is fun.Thanks! I bounced off the Mars trilogy. All the petty human drama and politics just felt way too much like current news (which is probably a compliment to his writing skills, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time). I think I probably need a very relaxed state of mind to be able to dive into it. As for Rev Space, I’ve read about half of it before losing track of the various threads and time jumps.
I agree with that. Red Mars was great but the second one felt like he only expanded on all the least exciting parts of the first book, so I didn’t finish it.
I bulled my way though all three.
There was enough story for one novel, padded out with crap to fill enough books for a “clever” post on the titles.
If someone’s looking for a good Mars read: Moving Mars by Greg Bear.
Allow me to chime in with a science fiction favorite: A Canticle For Leibowitz By Walter M Miller. It’s a collections of three interrelated novellas set a few thousand years apart… but there are themes and one character present in all three. Compelling characters and lots of humor make this a must read.
Anyone else read it?
Thanks, I’ll put it on my list!
It’s a brilliant book, though I have yet to read the sequel. Can’t recommend it enough.
Isn’t that funny — me too. I’m not sure why I keep putting it off. Perhaps because it was finished by another author… the guy who wrote “They’re Made of Meat.” His name escaped me presently.
It’s one of my favourites.
FIAT LUX!
Yep. This is a good one. And if you like Babylon 5, watch Deconstruction of Falling Stars (S04E22) which has a nod to the book.
Interesting. I didn’t get into that show but perhaps I’ll give it another try.
Do you like protagonists that use their wits to beat a scenario or the hard science more?
For example a fun read that’s, in my opinion, best experienced as an audiobook is the dungeon crawler carl. It’s definitely a good example of the first type. It’s not realistic. It’s literally real life made into a D&D game (LitRPG) it is just one scenario after another of Carl just finding ways to manipulate and play with the “rules” of the messed up game.
If you’re more into the hard science than The Expanse as others have said. Or maybe even the Revelation Space series where it is future tech but relativistic time plays a part. Less of the “one person/group against all odds” but a good read nonetheless.
More looking for the 2nd at the moment. Though yes I did enjoy DCC and all the other series you mention, I’ve read them all (well maybe not all of Rev Space, at some point I lost track of the timeline and gave up).
I checked the good reads list of top rated hard science and saw a few items I can recommend.
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Altered Carbon. A fun and intense read. Future hard science. If people’s consciousness could be transmitted/used for interstellar travel kind of thing then the scenarios listed here adhere to their own crazy rules.
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Three Body Problem. First book is amazing. The sequels are good enough but the translations are a little rougher but the story carries through.
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Enders Game. Tactical and hard science aspects to it. Gets more metaphysical later in the series.
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Contact. Absolute gem that I re-read a few years back.
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Ancillary Justice. More future/hard science but worth mentioning in any list I’m willing to put Altered Carbon in. It has a viewpoint and it’s use of alternate societal perspectives (from a society that is uniform in so many ways to organic “ship” drones to questions about what is a person/identity) all wrapped in a great sci-fi story
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The moon is a harsh mistress. A little dated and the way women/people are referenced shows it (much like foundation) but a solid one that is a little more hard science and may be more in line with what you’re thinking of.
Going over this list I realize how hard it is to find true hard science (Martian) that doesn’t lean into the more future tech but consistent physical laws (Expanse) to way future nano tech or consciousness transfer (Altered Carbon, etc)
Thank you Szeth-nimi! I did enjoy Season 1 of Altered Carbon Netflix, so the books should be worth a look. I fully agree with all your other recs (though I have issues with the character writing in Three Body Problem), unfortunately I’ve read all of them :D
And now that you mention it, you’re right about how tough it is finding modern-day hard science fiction. I think you managed to put your finger on one of the things I wanted but couldn’t verbalise.
Yeah. Three body problem is a well done translation of a Chinese authors work and so I suspect there’s some things that just culturally come across easily. Nothing makes that more obvious than the sequels where it feels like it wasn’t as painstakingly done to try to convey such things like the first.
I will say I really enjoyed the paper ménagerie by Ken Liu (the aforementioned translator) and it was a unique look from a different cultural perspective.
Back on topic to sci-fi. Do you prefer singular protagonist in a limited scale of time (person/crew) fighting against some local challenge (Martian/Expanse) or larger sweeping epics spanning centuries and a lot of perspectives (Dune, Foundation)?
More human/realistic perspectives (Martian) or are you open to Alien/Non-human perspectives (ex. protomolecule perception about the gates reopening)
Back on topic to sci-fi. Do you prefer singular protagonist in a limited scale of time (person/crew) fighting against some local challenge (Martian/Expanse) or larger sweeping epics spanning centuries and a lot of perspectives (Dune, Foundation)?
More human/realistic perspectives (Martian) or are you open to Alien/Non-human perspectives (ex. protomolecule perception about the gates reopening)
Eh. I loved all your examples? Lol. Especially alien perspectives if done right are always interesting. Like Blindsight, Mote in Gods Eye, and Children of Time. I love great worldbuilding and internally-consistent plots, and I usually find petty drama and politics cringey.
Different perspectives from not alien but not human (unless otherwise specified not hard sci-fi)
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Klara and the Sun (story of an android coming to awareness of themselves, to their purpose as a friend for a child, to attachment and love as well as dealing with the inevitable changes and loss as the child grows up)
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Several short stories by Ted Chiang
Exhalation, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (technically hard sci-fi), The Great Silence
Kind of human
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Murderbot Diaries (Autonomous killing machine/human cyborg going rogue that is learning what it is to be human, and just wants to watch serials and be left alone)
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Ancillary Justice (Ships with remote/linked instances in control of human bodies and what happens when one of those “remotes” is all that’s left of that consciousness. Navigating the line of human/machine/etc.). Not political per-se but resonates with various political perspectives on autonomy/society vs individualism/ etc.
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Dogs of War. Bio weapons part animal human hybrids and wars, morality, doing what your meant to do and made to do vs becoming aware of your actions and what is right/wrong.
Dogs of War
Ooh, more Tchaikovsky. How did I miss that one? I’ve been meaning to check out Ted Chiang, this is probably as good a time as any. I’ve enjoyed every one of the recs you’ve made so far that I’ve read, I’ll definitely check out the rest!
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I had to check i wasn’t in a brandosando instance with this blatant fan interplay
What starvin’ interplay, you storming voidbringer?
The term “air sickness” comes to mind
+1 for Contact and A moon is a harsh mistress.
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Just hit me. More modern time… historical fiction at the start and blends into more sci-fi as the series goes on.
Neil Stephenson: Crypto series
Cryptonomicon Reamde Fall: or dodge in hell
Oof, Stephenson is heavy! Anathem took me a fortnight to get through. I’ve read a few of his works and they’re good, but man they take a lot of mental effort (maybe it’s just me?)
They can be. Anathem was a bit more of a slog that sped up.
I found cryptonomicon to be slow at first (but not like Anathem) but it sped up quickly.
It goes back and forth between “modern” early 00’s? And WW2.
Stephenson is the kind of author you start a book and after a bit you’re like… ok… I don’t think this is for me… wait… what? And then you’re hooked.
Anathem is one of the worst that was like that. Snow Crash would be the polar opposite and one of the rare ones that just jumps straight into the world building.
Unrelated: I just finished Wind and Truth. So weird to think somebody got me hooked on Sanderson about 2 years ago and I’ve burned through all his books (except for Reckoners and the Alcatraz books). The first because I haven’t tried one but seems a bit more youth oriented and the latter because it is more youth oriented than my usual tastes.
Stephenson is the kind of author you start a book and after a bit you’re like… ok… I don’t think this is for me… wait… what? And then you’re hooked.
Yeah, I liked the books but they really do need a bit of determination to get started.
Alcatraz is definitely for a much younger crowd, but Reckoners might be worth a shot. The worldbuilding is great, classic Sanderson. The YA part comes through as a teenage MC and easier language, but it’s still plenty interesting. A lot of parallels to Mistborn.
I recently read “Blindsight” by Peter Watts which was about how first contact could work with an entirely alien species. It goes deep into both the physical and social sciences involved, and was a fun journey as well.
Nice to see r/printSF is alive and well on Lemmy. 😄
While Blindsight is an amazing book, I’m not sure it’s got much in the way of competence porn. Some fantastic psychological science speculation for sure, though.
Nice to see r/printSF is alive and well on Lemmy. 😄
RIGHT‽‽‽
printSF
If Captain Picard can read physical books in his ready room in the 24th century, I can quite well read them in the 21st, thank you very much!
(I don’t actually begrudge people who prefer reading on Kindles, but I like the feel of real books)
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds fits pretty well. I like the progression of figuring out how to survive and thrive as their situation changes. I also quite like how the book deals with questions like how sentient species might interact despite the vast gulf of distance and time that exist between their civilizations.
That looks really interesting, definitely gonna check it out, thanks!
