Hard SF discussion

Hi!
Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask but prooviding this kind of information seems to be one of the points of Goodreads.

I read Revelation Space (review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ). The premise was just too sexy to pass on in spite of the page count. But as much as I enjoyed the romp, I'm yearning for something a bit more serious.
A. Reynolds struck me as someone who could write good hard SF. So is there a less fanciful title of his (short stories included) where the tech can be distinguished from magic?
A pet peeve of mine would be infintely powerful tech (like nanotech 3D printers coupled with a crazy energy source) that's not exploited to its potential.

I really liked Century Rain, as the 'big dumb object' idea in that is sublime and it is a really good read. The only other one of his I've read is Terminal World, which does suffer from the 'tech as magic' you mentioned.

I read The Prefect and it's still my favorite. I think it's a more elegant story, kind of a cop drama in space.

I recently finished Blue Remembered Earth. It's quite different for Reynolds, less of a space opera, definitely more serious and featuring harder science. It's a little slower paced too, particularly at the start, but overall I think It's one of his best (a huge fan, I think I've read most of his novels).

I don't have a favorite, but can't think of an A. Reynolds I didn't like. Must be falling behind, however, as I've never even heard of Blue . . . Earth. Stephenson, Reynolds, Mieville, man, these guys have got to slow down!

Thanks for the recommendations people!
And thanks for the warning about Terminal World.

I started The Prefect which wasn't quite was I was looking for but whose premise was intriguing enough. I'll probably return to it someday (I'm currently reading quaint 40 y.o. SF).

Going by the WP summary, Blue Remembered Earth seems to feature transhumans and generally techno-utopianism. I wasn't a fan of Revelation Space's transhumans.
But I guess I could give it a try whenever I find myself in the presence of the tome (whatever happened to posting promotional chapters online?).

I've never read Stephenson or Mieville. They seem cool enough and I'm interested in some of their non-SF themes but I'm kind of wary of young authors and the doorstops they write (though Mieville seems to have written some reasonably-sized books).
I guess I've got somewhat peculiar tastes, seeing that most of my favorites were written decades ago.

Anyone try Pushing Ice? How hard is it?

Outis, I've read Pushing Ice and I enjoyed it (although with a few reservations about the characters). I've also read Blue Remembered Earth and didn't enjoy it half as much (it could have been half the length and would probably still have been fairly slow).

If you like your sci-fi hard, I can recommend Kim Stanley Robinson (try the Mars trilogy) or Stephen Baxter (I really enjoyed Flood and Ark - but he's all-round good). I'd steer clear of Mieville unless you like fantasy dressed up as sci-fi, or really enjoy hundreds of pages of descriptions of cities. (Lovely, lyrical prose, but enough with the cities already!)

I have hard cravings but I unsurprisingly enjoy other things such as SF which is openly fantastic (like Dune).
I'm mostly annoyed by wannbe hard SF which turns out to have preposterous physics, preposterous economics and so on. It seems people had an easier time writing plausible SF back in the day.
Unless something escapes me right now, the Mars trilogy is the most plausible major contemporary work I've read... which is saying something because even the first book was stretching credulity.

I don't recall reading a single Baxter. Forgive my prejudices but he seems suspicioulsy prolific. And none of his SF books I've looked at (including Flood) seemed to have a very appealing or plausible subject matter. Maybe he's got good short stories published somewhere?

Baxter's Xeelee books are definitely out there, but have a ton of science too. I'm in the middle of Ring.

I agree , the Xeelee books are good (largely hard sf space operas), some of his best work. I find his "flood' etc stuff boring and I couldn't force myself to finish the first Mammoth book. Pushing Ice is pretty hard too.

Thanks.
GR's recommendation engine had already picked Chiang's short stories for me actually and I had it on my reading list.
But I see Egan has an old collection I don't recall reading that's highly-rated here. I'll see if I can track it down.

Yeah, for 'hard', try I'd suggest you Diaspora or Permutation City or (for super hard science & maths) Schild's Ladder. Or Teranesia or Zendegi for more character driven stories. They're all great.

I wanted to thank John again for pushing me towards Greg Egan.
I was surprised by how little science there was in Axiomatic (short stories) but he's very good at existential musings, perhaps thanks to his distinct lack of wishy-washyness. Tap this book is you haven't already!
And thanks for the additional recos, WRR. Looking at his most popular novels, I've got to say Incandescence is intriguing.

I hope the sequel to Blue Remembered will be truly hard.
What I can gather of the subject matter strikes me as more interesting.

Outis, You may enjoy the work of Peter Watts. He writes hard, near future sci-fi.

Yes, I recently read Blindsight, and recommend it.

As it happens, I loathe Blindsight. Enough that I'm not tempted to read more Peter Watts.
It's one of the first books I discovered on GR. It seemed an obvious match for me considering my interests.

I don't want to discourage anyone from reading Watts though.
I respect his work and I'm grateful for his decision to make it freely (as in freedom) available.
My main problem with Blindsight is that it's a vehicle for Watts' ideas on some non-scientific topics. And our ideas do not mix well. At all.
I thought Egan did a much better job in dealing with some of those topics in Axiomatic.
Other than that, I didn't think Blindsight was all that hard. Granted, it doesn't have anything nearly as ludicrous as FTL but the setting is nevertheless implausible.

From the horse's mouth:
"The Revelation Space universe is massively good fun to write, and I get plenty of requests for more from it. But it's also a kind of fantasy. Yes, the events in the books and stories are to some degree "realistic" in the sense that there is subservience to Einstein's laws and the worlds and biologies make as much sense as they can, given the premises. But as a possible future it feels like a wildly unlikely thought experiment, a kind of hermetic game detached from any actual speculative foundations. Pushing Ice, on the other hand, for all that it gets into deep cosmological territory, does begin in what (at the time I wrote it) seemed like a plausible idea of the mid 21st century. Even House of Suns, which in terms of its technologies and landscapes is much trippier than the RS books, still feels in some sense like a valid perspective on life in the year six million AD. Century Rain, on the other hand, which I personally am very fond of among my books, is again a kind of fantasy. And Blue Remembered Earth, about which I have said more than enough, is my attempt to be as true as I can be to the real world. It is not about moving tropes around or being in cosy dialogue with the past. When I inserted robots and spaceships into that story, I wasn't thinking about Asimov - I was thinking about the actual robots and spaceships that are already in our world or in the minds of researchers. So, a bit more of that kind of book, anchored to the present and trying to be sincere about the likely direction of things."
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