Wow, you're the first person who's actually recommended a Greg Bear novel. I admit I've never read Darwin's Radio, but Eon, and Blood Music are a couple of my favorite sci-fi books.
"Inherit the Stars" has been one of my favorites since I read it in the early 1980s. No antagonist. No action. Just a fun story. Enjoyed the 2 next sequels too. I've re-read that trilogy several times and love it each time.
It was one of the first sci-fi series I really got into once I progressed past Dr Who novels. Loved it then, still love it 35 years on from my first read.
@@lanokia Similar. I read most of Hogan's books, but the Giants series is his best in my opinion. I've read it several times and it it's like comfort food to me now. :)
@@ronaldbell7429 Yes, I've read most of his books and both of those were great. I've read Two Faces of Tomorrow at least 4 times. Back in the day that "AI" meant self-aware, not simply the illusion of it that Microsoft and Google like to do today.
I'm a big scifi reader and I love that you still show me books that I either never heard of or heard of but never got to. Can't wait to read one of your books
I'm really glad that Inherit The Stars by James P. Hogan is on your list. I was lucky to find it when it was first published in 1977 and it turned me into a fan of Hogan for life. All of the subsequent sequels are very good too, especially the second book, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.
Baxter and Bear are great but I'd like to put in a good word for Peter Watts and his amazing novels Blindsight and Echopraxia, the two most mind-bending super-hard sci-fi novels (with copious references!) I've ever read. All I can say is "wow!"
You cited two of my favorite authors, James P Hogan and Greg Bear. Another by Greg Bear I'd recommend is "The Hammer of God." I won't spoil it, but toward the end this one section was so well-written that I literally felt ill, being able to picture it all. Makes me shudder to think of it, but I've re-read it many times it's that great! Also, "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, in which a race of intelligent beings evolves on the surface of a neutron star. Reviews from other well-known hard sci-fi authors like Asimov and Clarke were very glowing!
@@Sephiroth144 Yes, I was just going to say that The Hammer of God is definitely written by Clarke (though I suppose it's possible that Bear wrote a book with the same name).
Stephen Baxter’s Evolution is my all-time favorite novel. I’m glad you included it in this list because it really deserves more recognition. I haven’t read the others on this list, but I’ll try getting around to them sometime.
@@ThomasPalm-w5y Well, kind of. Baxter himself acknowledged that Evolution was indeed influenced by Last and First Men. But they’re still fundamentally different. - Last and First Men focuses entirely on how humans might evolve in the future as understood by 1930s science. - Evolution focuses mostly on the history of human evolution (and life on Earth in general) after the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as a few fictional animal species that weren’t preserved in the fossil record. It’s not until the last 3 chapters that the book really delves into how humans, along with animals and plants, might evolve in the distant future. It’s still a fascinating read though.
James P. Hogan and Greg Bear are high on my list of favorite sci-fi writers. Code of the Lifemaker and The Two Faces of Tomorrow by JPH and Blood Music by GB are three other fairly hard sci-fi books I've enjoyed very much. The Two Faces of Tomorrow is about mankind's need and attempt to create strong A.I., basically (had that term been invented yet?). However, both Code of the Lifemaker and Blood Music are about intelligence manifesting in unexpected places. I can forgive Bear for likely mischaracterizing quantum physics at the end of his book, and not sticking the hard sci-fi landing, because the rest of Blood Music is kinda mind blowing!
I've had my copy of "Inherit the stars " for decades. A great book. I would also add Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". A hugo winner, back when the award meant something.
I love the Giant’s star series; at least the first three books, I can’t get through the first chapter of the fourth book. The Mote in gods’s eye and its sequel by Niven & Pournelle could perhaps fit in this video. And Greg Bear’s The forge of god and sequel Anvil of stars might also.
@@palantir135 Mote is also in my short list of favorites. There are many good books, but the giants star trilogy and Mote in God's Eye are at the top. Other favorites, on step down include Ender's Game, Ringworld, Battlefield Earth, Foundation series, Dune series, etc.
@@palantir135 I've read most of Greg Bear. Looks like we've read a lot of the great novels from 70s, 80s and 90s. It is HARD to know my top 5 books, and precise order... but I have both Mote in God's Eye and Inherit the Stars in that list of 5.
@ sf top 10. Not in order. Dune Inherit the stars The great explosion; Eric Frank Russels Ring world Rendezvous with Rama Babel 17 Tschai The mote in god’s eye Rissan; Wim Gijssen The empire of the atom + The wizard of Linn And all the other novels that should have been in the top ten like Slan, Durdane etc.
You may want to mention David Brin's 'Earth', that back in 1989 was the most comprehensive forecast for the next 30 years. Mostly optimistic but very grounded in facts
Anathem is an astonishing book that you will loose yourself in. The notion of mathematical perfection being tied to physical space travel is mind blowing. It is like nothing I can easily summarise, almost as if there are layered Platonic realms available for exploring.
Thanks for this video, I will look for "Evolution". Hogan was a highlight in SF during the late 70s and 1980s. I have the Minervan series, plus more. He also wrote at least one hilarious short story, which I enjoyed immensely! "Neander - Tale" I read a lot of Greg Bear, I should reread. "Blood Music" it was strong SF, I preferred the short story version, a little.
"Neander - Tale" I wonder where I can find that. I did a google search without any luck. I liked Hogan (Two Faces of Tomorrow and Twice Upon a Time particularly), but his politics were silly and ruined a few stories for me.
I thoroughly enjoyed Inherit the Stars when it came out and recently re read it and its sequels. Great stuff. I certainly agree that Fire Upon the Deep should be on this list.Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a seminal hard sf novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy would satisfy the requirements of hard SF too.
Hull zero three was one of Greg bears best. As well as Blood Music. I met him many years ago and spent a very pleasant couple of hours chatting with him. RIP. He was a really nice down to earth guy. Got about 12 of his books signed by him too…
GREG EGAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My favorite author of all times 🔥🔥🔥 His novel Schild's Ladder is, in my opinion, his absolute masterpiece. It's pure hard sci-fi, but with deeply touching characters, a beautiful fusion of mathematics, speculative quantum physics and genuine human connection.
Thanks for the Flight of the Aphrodite tip. Read it this week and was a really good read. As for the others, Inherit the Stars is brilliant, read them all when I was younger [too long ago now] and still have them, still read them every so often.
I loved "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter. Fascinating read, one of my favorites of him. Your video is well made. Thank you for sharing. Do you read unknown authors, too?
I think this a first for your recommendations; I haven't read a single one (!), although all five are sitting in my 'to read' queue. 😲 As for my own recommendations, I think that any of Hal Clement's 'weird planet' stories deserve to be remembered (I'm showing my age, again). The scientific accuracy is not so much in the technology, but in the conditions to be found on planets which differ wildly from Earth. 'Mission of Gravity', 'Starlight' and 'Cycle of Fire' come straight to mind but I think my personal favourites are 'Still River' and especially 'Close to Critical. All good stuff.
Hal Clement wrote a lot of my favorite hats sci-fi. His shirt story collections, *Music of Many Spheres* (I think there are three volumes,) are essential. Probably my favorite short story and favorite hard sci-fi story are one and the same: Clement's *Planetfall.*
Everything Baxter writes fills me with hopelessness, dread and alienation. So of course, I've read every book he's ever written. Some, a couple of times. Most hard SF makes me feel like that. Benford, Bear, Clarke, Baxter, have a special talent for sucking the joy out of me. I treat it by reading masses of Neal Asher and Charles Stross. Techno-porn Space Opera and British Cthulhu spy comedy are just the thing.
I really liked Darwin’s Radio. If you want something similar, but with a bit more speculative touch, you might check out Entheòphage by Drema Deóraich - kind of Darwin’s Radio meets Andromeda Strain with a touch of climate fiction and medical mystery
Hi, the writer I'm about to praise may not fit today's genre perfectly, but I can't help but ask - Why does everyone keep overlooking Bruce Sterling? The writer who is at the top of Gibson's thank-you list when you open his Neuromancer. A.Reynolds was another writer heavily influenced by Sterling's work. His complete collection of Shaper/Mechanist universe stories released as Schismatrix Plus is such a masterpiece and a staple of modern scifi and cyberpunk. He deserves more attention. Thanks for the video, cheers!
Yes! I added all five to my list. In august I leave for a roadtrip of eight weeks through the U.S. (while it still is a democracy) a I will download them to my kindle. Thanks Darrel! Kind regards, Jasper I read Quarantine first, no regrets. Wonderful novel, really worth reading. Thanks for your suggestion, Darrel!
@@christophersmith8316 I dunno.. _" _*_soft sci fi_*_ deals more with sociology, history, politics, psychology, and economics [..] _*_hard sci fi_*_ is more concerned with having realistic science based on currently proven facts about the world."_ Question for me would be - why is "futuristic" sociological science not considered realistic when it comes to it? IMHO is above definition (and the one u also make) not holding up to scrutiny. PS: ..unless 'hard SF' has a different definition to the one I found?!
I liked the story when I was a child but "what it actually is about" is exactly what was wrong with it. Hogan basically elaborated this entire huge world that was a confirmation of precisely what the communists believed and which was wrong, which was that people are nothing more than what you raise them to be. Everybody can be content with their role, happy to all connect like a contented jigsaw puzzle. They'll do their part and not vie against one another, and jealousy or envy only exist because the world is flawed. If only we could have raised people without any knowledge of original sin (capitalism), utopia would naturally follow. As I said, I enjoyed the story immensely as a teenager. It took me maybe a day to step back and realize what nonsense it was. "Twice upon a Time" and "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" both by Hogan... both of those are still on my list of great books though.
@@ronaldbell7429 so u didn't notice that the Chironians were ALL packing heat and how they dealt with anyone who ignored their 'natural rights'? - something that libertarians are very big fans of (quite the opposite with communists). Which is why I don't get why 'communists' thought that this story was about them - a complete misinterpretation IMHO. The story has got a problem, two actually: 1) the motive of the Terran elites that want to 'posses' & 'control' is not conclusively justified, which would had been very easy to do (nature of individual life and how evolution works) 2) how they track who owes whom what also is not further detailed, but I bet even Chironians will not give away their personal lifetime to freeloaders all the time. The minimum that is being abundantly available from the machines, sure.. but not stuff that requires humans to provide.
@ ronaldbell7429 I suggest to read it again and see how it interprets if looked at with a libertarian / capitalist mindset. The Chironians exchange resources with each other voluntarily and on equal footing - free market capitalism, just no currency (on the surface). The thing that is not explained is how they communally get to the rules that govern them.. what is OK and what isn't. Libertarians expect that societal groups can do that with no or minimal political structure. But even as I write this I'm reminded of Rand and her being supportive of Police and Military.. so I'm not really sure that 'libertarians' have really figured that one out. Personally I'm 99.9% convinced that ANY society comes with a majority that enforces IT's common rules against a-social individuals and minorities.. this is what the monopol on force is and what is 'the state' (the rule enforcing service provider in libertarian speak). The book doesn't touch on that subject at all - just like libertarians are very vague about this part. They brush over this with (god given) 'natural rights' and won't go any further than that - been there, experienced that plenty.
Great video thanks. I read Darwin’s Radio when it came out and liked it very much. I’m definitely interested in Inherit The Stars now (although it’s a little expensive that one, I’m seeing). Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement would fit on this list well too. I’d like to also recommend a quite overlooked movie called Moon, from 2009 with Sam Rockwell that is a great hard sci-fi flick 👍🏻
Good video, especially since I haven't read any of the books reviewed. I have read some of the authors. I've read Greg Bear's Blood Music twice. It's a fun book.
I tried looking up these books on audible and most don't have audiobooks available... Surprised that Stephen Baxter only has 3 audiobooks available there!
Thank you for the great video and reccommendations. I first read "Inherit The Stars" about 1980 and have the the first two sequels. I am reading Baxter's "Evolution", now. I have been sidetracked by Crouch' "Upgrade", riveting and very technical as well, and the illegal forced genetic "evolution" is very detailed, and seems thoroughly researched. I have not read the others, I will scrounge my local SF bookstore!
I have a copy of Darwins Radio, and yes its a great plot indeed. Didnt know about Quarentine by Egan🤔..,looks very interesting; will try to get one copy
Nice list. I just picked up the hardback of Greg Bear's _Darwin's Radio_ in a charity shop for 50p. It is also possible to write philosophical and thought-provoking science fiction with less scientific accuracy: Stanisław Lem's _Cyberiad_ is deeply philosophical, but not hard SF, and it was one of my gateway books into science fiction a few years ago when I decided to try getting into the genre. Even though I quickly noticed it was not representative of anything else, it guided me neatly into the New Age era of SF where I feel I belong as a reader. When it comes to hard sci-fi, it certainly helps to give a story a high verisimilitude if it intends to make you buy into the what-if's and intellectual contemplations the story provokes.
I would highly recommend Inherit the Stars and its two sequels, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giants' Star. There's a fourth book in the series but I found the first three intriguing and quite enjoyable.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson and Anathem by Neal Stephens are about as hard as the genre gets. Darwin’s radio was great but I think Hull Zero Three and Blood Music were way better. I met Greg Bear back in the 80’s as a mullet-haired apprentice boilermaker when I skipped work to go to a book signing by him at a nearby shopping mall and I was the only one there! ( the mall was in a suburb of Melbourne not particularly well known for high levels of literacy lol) anyway I wound up spending something like two hours speaking to him about science fiction and he told me he’d signed away the rights to blood music and they were going to use the same cgi team that did the James Cameron movie The Abyss. It would have been so cool. One of the first novels in the genre to deal with the Singularity. Anyway he was actually a really nice guy and was happy to chat away with a spotty young kid in greasy overalls (I did actually know what I was talking about even back then lol) especially when I told him I had a first edition copy of The Mote In Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle! AnywayRIP Greg. Thanks for the chat mate. Also not a fan of Stephen Baxter. He’s massively overrated. Just my opinion…
If you want to read the hardest of hard SF, you need to read more Greg Egan. He has created plausible universes based on entirely different physics than ours, and makes them work incredibly well. And he's a bit eccentric, claiming there is no true picture of him on the internet. Personally, I think he's an AI masquerading as a human. :)
Thanks for this! I recently discovered Freehold by Michael Zimmerman. I found it extremely well written and very Heinlienesque. Not surprising since I discovered the book because of an Afterword he wrote in the Kindle version of Stranger in a Strange Land which I recently re-re-re-read after not having picked it up in a very long time.
Thanks for the tips - I'll probably chase up Inherit the Stars and The Flight of the Aphrodite. I have Darwins Radio in my collection and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I grew up reading SF, with John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury, Asimov, A.E. van Vogt and many more. I have a question - some years ago I read a short story about a soldier that is sent undercover behind enemy lines to discover the secret of a new form of ammunition that releases a very loud sound that causes massive damage. I cannot remember the title or the author. Would you or anybody on this channel know this story?
Very very few books get me to read them more than once. Top of my list is Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, about the emergence of a human hive. Not Star Trek's Borg, but much more basic and primal.
... I was going to make a joke about "darn, should this scale not be called 'Moh' scale"... and then I found out that TV Tropes had done that and Wired had written on it.
My definition is different. Hard sci-fi concentrates on the science, soft sci-fi concentrates on relationships and personal stories with the science as background, but still in a feasible universe. Everything else is just fantasy not soft sci-fi! Most of what's called sci fi now Is either fantasy or mysticism.
Kudos for mentioning Stephen Baxter; few people do because there's this lame belief that his characters are wooden, even though no one should read Baxter for his characters but for the concepts; characters are for soap operas or general fiction dramas; sci-fi and fantasy are about the exotic...
My novel, Book of Answers, is like Baxter but without hard science. My book is a tongue in cheek look at human devolution through the perspective of a lost hippie immortal and the aliens the intelligent designer hires to find him and that takes ten million years. And so it goes
His text definitely follows a rigidly-defined structure and there is a lot of repetition of certain words and phrases, in virtually every video I’ve seen on this channel.
Wow, you're the first person who's actually recommended a Greg Bear novel. I admit I've never read Darwin's Radio, but Eon, and Blood Music are a couple of my favorite sci-fi books.
"Inherit the Stars" has been one of my favorites since I read it in the early 1980s. No antagonist. No action. Just a fun story. Enjoyed the 2 next sequels too. I've re-read that trilogy several times and love it each time.
It was one of the first sci-fi series I really got into once I progressed past Dr Who novels. Loved it then, still love it 35 years on from my first read.
@@lanokia Similar. I read most of Hogan's books, but the Giants series is his best in my opinion. I've read it several times and it it's like comfort food to me now. :)
He did two others that I liked more than that: Twice Upon a Time, and The Two Faces of Tomorrow.
@@ronaldbell7429 Yes, I've read most of his books and both of those were great. I've read Two Faces of Tomorrow at least 4 times. Back in the day that "AI" meant self-aware, not simply the illusion of it that Microsoft and Google like to do today.
@@windfire5380 Did you come up with a rigorous definition of self awareness and some way of proving humans have it?.
Didn't think so.
I'm a big scifi reader and I love that you still show me books that I either never heard of or heard of but never got to.
Can't wait to read one of your books
I'm really glad that Inherit The Stars by James P. Hogan is on your list. I was lucky to find it when it was first published in 1977 and it turned me into a fan of Hogan for life. All of the subsequent sequels are very good too, especially the second book, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.
I am gonna look hard for that one
Baxter and Bear are great but I'd like to put in a good word for Peter Watts and his amazing novels Blindsight and Echopraxia, the two most mind-bending super-hard sci-fi novels (with copious references!) I've ever read. All I can say is "wow!"
You cited two of my favorite authors, James P Hogan and Greg Bear. Another by Greg Bear I'd recommend is "The Hammer of God." I won't spoil it, but toward the end this one section was so well-written that I literally felt ill, being able to picture it all. Makes me shudder to think of it, but I've re-read it many times it's that great!
Also, "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, in which a race of intelligent beings evolves on the surface of a neutron star. Reviews from other well-known hard sci-fi authors like Asimov and Clarke were very glowing!
Forward wrote excellent aliens, but his humans would need to evolve to become wooden!
Do you mean "The Forge of God"? Pretty sure "The Hammer of God" was an Arthur C. Clarke joint...
@@Sephiroth144 Yes, I was just going to say that The Hammer of God is definitely written by Clarke (though I suppose it's possible that Bear wrote a book with the same name).
I would also recommend “Blindsight” by Peter Watts. It’s the book that got me into hard sci-fi.
Stephen Baxter’s Evolution is my all-time favorite novel. I’m glad you included it in this list because it really deserves more recognition.
I haven’t read the others on this list, but I’ll try getting around to them sometime.
So an update of "Stapledon's "Last and First Men" from 1930?
@@ThomasPalm-w5y Well, kind of. Baxter himself acknowledged that Evolution was indeed influenced by Last and First Men. But they’re still fundamentally different.
- Last and First Men focuses entirely on how humans might evolve in the future as understood by 1930s science.
- Evolution focuses mostly on the history of human evolution (and life on Earth in general) after the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as a few fictional animal species that weren’t preserved in the fossil record. It’s not until the last 3 chapters that the book really delves into how humans, along with animals and plants, might evolve in the distant future. It’s still a fascinating read though.
Same - have gifted Evolution to many friends!
I agree about "Evolution". The only books that have ever enthralled me as much were "Ringworld" and Bester's "The Stars My Destination."
I’m not sure if this is considered hard sci-fi but Robert Sawyer’s Flashforward is a great read that kept your attention until the end.
I assume that’s the book that inspired the TV show?
James P. Hogan and Greg Bear are high on my list of favorite sci-fi writers. Code of the Lifemaker and The Two Faces of Tomorrow by JPH and Blood Music by GB are three other fairly hard sci-fi books I've enjoyed very much. The Two Faces of Tomorrow is about mankind's need and attempt to create strong A.I., basically (had that term been invented yet?). However, both Code of the Lifemaker and Blood Music are about intelligence manifesting in unexpected places. I can forgive Bear for likely mischaracterizing quantum physics at the end of his book, and not sticking the hard sci-fi landing, because the rest of Blood Music is kinda mind blowing!
I would love to see a video on military sci-fi or space operas that are not the normal candidates.
I'm a fan of Beutner's Orphanage series as well as Campbell's Lost Fleet series.
Although only a duology, Westerfeld's Risen Empire is well done.
Wonderful list, thank you for this. Can’t wait to check out Evolution and Flight of the Aphrodite.
I love that these aren't all new releases. There are so many great SF books to read!
I've had my copy of "Inherit the stars " for decades. A great book. I would also add Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". A hugo winner, back when the award meant something.
I really struggled with A Fire Upon the Deep, but really enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky.
i just finished a fire upon the deep. certainly not a bad book, but somehow not really my cup of tea. not sure i‘ll give the prequel a shot.
@@nyps Each to his own. It tied for the Hugo with Connie Willis "Doomsday Book". Maybe that would be more to your tastes?
@@jaimeosbourn3616 i just read a summary and it does sound interesting. thanks a lot for the suggestion! :)
@@nyps Glad to help
All written down! Love Greg Bear!
I love the Giant’s star series; at least the first three books, I can’t get through the first chapter of the fourth book.
The Mote in gods’s eye and its sequel by Niven & Pournelle could perhaps fit in this video.
And Greg Bear’s The forge of god and sequel Anvil of stars might also.
@@palantir135 Mote is also in my short list of favorites. There are many good books, but the giants star trilogy and Mote in God's Eye are at the top. Other favorites, on step down include Ender's Game, Ringworld, Battlefield Earth, Foundation series, Dune series, etc.
@ yes, love the Moties. Al you named here I read.
Do you know Babel 17 by Samuel Delany?
Greg Bear’s The forge of god. And it’s sequel.
@@palantir135 I've read most of Greg Bear. Looks like we've read a lot of the great novels from 70s, 80s and 90s.
It is HARD to know my top 5 books, and precise order... but I have both Mote in God's Eye and Inherit the Stars in that list of 5.
@ sf top 10. Not in order.
Dune
Inherit the stars
The great explosion; Eric Frank Russels
Ring world
Rendezvous with Rama
Babel 17
Tschai
The mote in god’s eye
Rissan; Wim Gijssen
The empire of the atom + The wizard of Linn
And all the other novels that should have been in the top ten like Slan, Durdane etc.
This is wonderful. Thanks for the recommendations, especially the way you presented them.
You may want to mention David Brin's 'Earth', that back in 1989 was the most comprehensive forecast for the next 30 years. Mostly optimistic but very grounded in facts
Thank you for this video. Stephen Baxter and Greg Bear are two of my favorite authors.
Evolution and Anathem sit side by side on my shelf. Maybe some day i'll be brave enough.
Anathem is an astonishing book that you will loose yourself in. The notion of mathematical perfection being tied to physical space travel is mind blowing. It is like nothing I can easily summarise, almost as if there are layered Platonic realms available for exploring.
Thanks for this video, I will look for "Evolution".
Hogan was a highlight in SF during the late 70s and 1980s. I have the Minervan series, plus more. He also wrote at least one hilarious short story, which I enjoyed immensely! "Neander - Tale"
I read a lot of Greg Bear, I should reread. "Blood Music" it was strong SF, I preferred the short story version, a little.
"Evolution" arrived today. 600 pages, I will start after finishing a re read of "Odd John."
"Neander - Tale" I wonder where I can find that. I did a google search without any luck. I liked Hogan (Two Faces of Tomorrow and Twice Upon a Time particularly), but his politics were silly and ruined a few stories for me.
@@ronaldbell7429 F&SF Dec. 1980. On the Internet Archive. It is also in the "Comic Fantasy II" anthology by Mike Ashley, where I have it!
@@joebrooks4448 You're awesome. I'll track it down.
I thoroughly enjoyed Inherit the Stars when it came out and recently re read it and its sequels. Great stuff. I certainly agree that Fire Upon the Deep should be on this list.Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a seminal hard sf novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy would satisfy the requirements of hard SF too.
A reviewer once said that Greg Egan burns through more strange and bizarre ideas in one chapter than most other authors do in their entire careers.
Have read "Darwin's Radio" a couple times. I agree with your assessment. Will look forward to reading the rest of the list.
Hull zero three was one of Greg bears best. As well as Blood Music. I met him many years ago and spent a very pleasant couple of hours chatting with him. RIP. He was a really nice down to earth guy. Got about 12 of his books signed by him too…
@planetdisco4821 Blood Music was really thought provoking for me as well.
GREG EGAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My favorite author of all times 🔥🔥🔥
His novel Schild's Ladder is, in my opinion, his absolute masterpiece. It's pure hard sci-fi, but with deeply touching characters, a beautiful fusion of mathematics, speculative quantum physics and genuine human connection.
Thanks for the Flight of the Aphrodite tip. Read it this week and was a really good read. As for the others, Inherit the Stars is brilliant, read them all when I was younger [too long ago now] and still have them, still read them every so often.
Brilliant list. I need to get started with Darwin's Radio. Cheers.
Bear with me, but I don't think I can bear to read Bear because his prose is a bear to get through.
Relief. I'm not the only one.
I loved "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter. Fascinating read, one of my favorites of him.
Your video is well made. Thank you for sharing.
Do you read unknown authors, too?
I think this a first for your recommendations; I haven't read a single one (!), although all five are sitting in my 'to read' queue. 😲
As for my own recommendations, I think that any of Hal Clement's 'weird planet' stories deserve to be remembered (I'm showing my age, again). The scientific accuracy is not so much in the technology, but in the conditions to be found on planets which differ wildly from Earth. 'Mission of Gravity', 'Starlight' and 'Cycle of Fire' come straight to mind but I think my personal favourites are 'Still River' and especially 'Close to Critical. All good stuff.
Hal Clement wrote a lot of my favorite hats sci-fi. His shirt story collections, *Music of Many Spheres* (I think there are three volumes,) are essential. Probably my favorite short story and favorite hard sci-fi story are one and the same: Clement's *Planetfall.*
Everything Baxter writes fills me with hopelessness, dread and alienation.
So of course, I've read every book he's ever written. Some, a couple of times.
Most hard SF makes me feel like that. Benford, Bear, Clarke, Baxter, have a special talent for sucking the joy out of me. I treat it by reading masses of Neal Asher and Charles Stross. Techno-porn Space Opera and British Cthulhu spy comedy are just the thing.
Hogan's "Star Child" is one of my favorites. "Code of the Lifemaker" is good, too, and along similar lines.
I really liked Darwin’s Radio. If you want something similar, but with a bit more speculative touch, you might check out Entheòphage by Drema Deóraich - kind of Darwin’s Radio meets Andromeda Strain with a touch of climate fiction and medical mystery
Haven't read anything by Hogan before. Thanks for all these Hogan recs!!!
Hi, the writer I'm about to praise may not fit today's genre perfectly, but I can't help but ask - Why does everyone keep overlooking Bruce Sterling? The writer who is at the top of Gibson's thank-you list when you open his Neuromancer. A.Reynolds was another writer heavily influenced by Sterling's work. His complete collection of Shaper/Mechanist universe stories released as Schismatrix Plus is such a masterpiece and a staple of modern scifi and cyberpunk. He deserves more attention. Thanks for the video, cheers!
Yes! I added all five to my list. In august I leave for a roadtrip of eight weeks through the U.S. (while it still is a democracy) a I will download them to my kindle. Thanks Darrel! Kind regards, Jasper
I read Quarantine first, no regrets. Wonderful novel, really worth reading. Thanks for your suggestion, Darrel!
Voyage from Yesteryear by J.P.Hogan is my all time fav due to what it actually is about.
Great book, but not really hard SF. It is more of a clash of cultures book, societies under strain. A dual first contact book.
@@christophersmith8316
I dunno..
_" _*_soft sci fi_*_ deals more with sociology, history, politics, psychology, and economics [..] _*_hard sci fi_*_ is more concerned with having realistic science based on currently proven facts about the world."_
Question for me would be - why is "futuristic" sociological science not considered realistic when it comes to it?
IMHO is above definition (and the one u also make) not holding up to scrutiny.
PS: ..unless 'hard SF' has a different definition to the one I found?!
I liked the story when I was a child but "what it actually is about" is exactly what was wrong with it. Hogan basically elaborated this entire huge world that was a confirmation of precisely what the communists believed and which was wrong, which was that people are nothing more than what you raise them to be. Everybody can be content with their role, happy to all connect like a contented jigsaw puzzle. They'll do their part and not vie against one another, and jealousy or envy only exist because the world is flawed. If only we could have raised people without any knowledge of original sin (capitalism), utopia would naturally follow. As I said, I enjoyed the story immensely as a teenager. It took me maybe a day to step back and realize what nonsense it was. "Twice upon a Time" and "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" both by Hogan... both of those are still on my list of great books though.
@@ronaldbell7429 so u didn't notice that the Chironians were ALL packing heat and how they dealt with anyone who ignored their 'natural rights'? - something that libertarians are very big fans of (quite the opposite with communists).
Which is why I don't get why 'communists' thought that this story was about them - a complete misinterpretation IMHO.
The story has got a problem, two actually:
1) the motive of the Terran elites that want to 'posses' & 'control' is not conclusively justified, which would had been very easy to do (nature of individual life and how evolution works)
2) how they track who owes whom what also is not further detailed, but I bet even Chironians will not give away their personal lifetime to freeloaders all the time. The minimum that is being abundantly available from the machines, sure.. but not stuff that requires humans to provide.
@ ronaldbell7429
I suggest to read it again and see how it interprets if looked at with a libertarian / capitalist mindset.
The Chironians exchange resources with each other voluntarily and on equal footing - free market capitalism, just no currency (on the surface). The thing that is not explained is how they communally get to the rules that govern them.. what is OK and what isn't.
Libertarians expect that societal groups can do that with no or minimal political structure. But even as I write this I'm reminded of Rand and her being supportive of Police and Military.. so I'm not really sure that 'libertarians' have really figured that one out.
Personally I'm 99.9% convinced that ANY society comes with a majority that enforces IT's common rules against a-social individuals and minorities.. this is what the monopol on force is and what is 'the state' (the rule enforcing service provider in libertarian speak). The book doesn't touch on that subject at all - just like libertarians are very vague about this part. They brush over this with (god given) 'natural rights' and won't go any further than that - been there, experienced that plenty.
good work nigel. inherit & aphrodite added on the tbr. darwin already was as i loved blood music and this seems similar. 🎉
Great video thanks. I read Darwin’s Radio when it came out and liked it very much. I’m definitely interested in Inherit The Stars now (although it’s a little expensive that one, I’m seeing). Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement would fit on this list well too. I’d like to also recommend a quite overlooked movie called Moon, from 2009 with Sam Rockwell that is a great hard sci-fi flick 👍🏻
Good video, especially since I haven't read any of the books reviewed. I have read some of the authors. I've read Greg Bear's Blood Music twice. It's a fun book.
I have enjoyed Greg Egan's book Quarantine.
Thank you for sharing all of these gems here.
I tried looking up these books on audible and most don't have audiobooks available... Surprised that Stephen Baxter only has 3 audiobooks available there!
Got me a couple of new things to read. Thanks for that. An addendum I'd like to point out is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.
I'm almost done with this series and will be sad when it is over. Highly recommend it.
Evolution is a great read, one of my all time faves.
Thank you for the great video and reccommendations. I first read "Inherit The Stars" about 1980 and have the the first two sequels. I am reading Baxter's "Evolution", now. I have been sidetracked by Crouch' "Upgrade", riveting and very technical as well, and the illegal forced genetic "evolution" is very detailed, and seems thoroughly researched.
I have not read the others, I will scrounge my local SF bookstore!
I have a copy of Darwins Radio, and yes its a great plot indeed. Didnt know about Quarentine by Egan🤔..,looks very interesting; will try to get one copy
Nice list. I just picked up the hardback of Greg Bear's _Darwin's Radio_ in a charity shop for 50p.
It is also possible to write philosophical and thought-provoking science fiction with less scientific accuracy: Stanisław Lem's _Cyberiad_ is deeply philosophical, but not hard SF, and it was one of my gateway books into science fiction a few years ago when I decided to try getting into the genre.
Even though I quickly noticed it was not representative of anything else, it guided me neatly into the New Age era of SF where I feel I belong as a reader.
When it comes to hard sci-fi, it certainly helps to give a story a high verisimilitude if it intends to make you buy into the what-if's and intellectual contemplations the story provokes.
I read Darwin’s Radio a bunch of years ago when I was on a Greg Bear streak. I’m thinking I need to read that one, and a couple others of his, again.
Hi love SYFY tanks to you I have discovered some great books I have a question ware do you get your background the look amazing
Thanks for making this video!
I would highly recommend Inherit the Stars and its two sequels, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giants' Star. There's a fourth book in the series but I found the first three intriguing and quite enjoyable.
3:52 K.S Robinson's Mars trilogy is one of the all time classics. Too bad Mars is uninhabitable (no magnetosphere, don't ya know).
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson and Anathem by Neal Stephens are about as hard as the genre gets. Darwin’s radio was great but I think Hull Zero Three and Blood Music were way better. I met Greg Bear back in the 80’s as a mullet-haired apprentice boilermaker when I skipped work to go to a book signing by him at a nearby shopping mall and I was the only one there! ( the mall was in a suburb of Melbourne not particularly well known for high levels of literacy lol) anyway I wound up spending something like two hours speaking to him about science fiction and he told me he’d signed away the rights to blood music and they were going to use the same cgi team that did the James Cameron movie The Abyss. It would have been so cool. One of the first novels in the genre to deal with the Singularity. Anyway he was actually a really nice guy and was happy to chat away with a spotty young kid in greasy overalls (I did actually know what I was talking about even back then lol) especially when I told him I had a first edition copy of The Mote In Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle! AnywayRIP Greg. Thanks for the chat mate.
Also not a fan of Stephen Baxter. He’s massively overrated. Just my opinion…
Damn my TBR just got 5 books longer 😡
If you want to read the hardest of hard SF, you need to read more Greg Egan. He has created plausible universes based on entirely different physics than ours, and makes them work incredibly well. And he's a bit eccentric, claiming there is no true picture of him on the internet. Personally, I think he's an AI masquerading as a human. :)
For lesser known I'll put in Patrick Chiles' near future Perigee, Farside, and Frontier.
7:45' is this picture from some comic book? If yes, what is it?
Thanks for this! I recently discovered Freehold by Michael Zimmerman. I found it extremely well written and very Heinlienesque. Not surprising since I discovered the book because of an Afterword he wrote in the Kindle version of Stranger in a Strange Land which I recently re-re-re-read after not having picked it up in a very long time.
Darwin's Radio, and its sequel Darwin's Children were a compelling read to me. I thought it was well-researched and well-written.
Awesome list
A Darwin's Radio cameo out of nowhere! I can't recommend this novel a lot. I think about the story quite often ❤
Thanks for the tips - I'll probably chase up Inherit the Stars and The Flight of the Aphrodite. I have Darwins Radio in my collection and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I grew up reading SF, with John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury, Asimov, A.E. van Vogt and many more.
I have a question - some years ago I read a short story about a soldier that is sent undercover behind enemy lines to discover the secret of a new form of ammunition that releases a very loud sound that causes massive damage. I cannot remember the title or the author. Would you or anybody on this channel know this story?
Very very few books get me to read them more than once. Top of my list is Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, about the emergence of a human hive. Not Star Trek's Borg, but much more basic and primal.
Add "Sister Alice" by Robert Reed to your list.
Thanks for this video!
Well done, I'd had given the same ratings
Very good! Both due to me agreeing with you on the 4 I've already read, and because it means that the fifth (TFOFTA) must be very good as well! 🙂
Hi, if you have read non English Sci Fi, can you please make some recommendation videos?
I would suggest Linda Nagata
Baxter’s characters are the Achilles heel
Evolution was tons of fun. Love the Killer Bs (Bear, Benford, Brin) altho their stuff isnt so hard sf
Great choices - although I found "Darwin's Radio" to be impenetrable - and a case of making the reader suffer for the research the author's done.
I remember thinking "Did he accidentally send his biochemistry thesis to his publisher instead of his professor?"
@@stevenscott2136 LOL! Yes, this!
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space
Glad someone brought this up, I would have otherwise! It's my favourite scifi series.
👍✌🖖🥃(Good Job,Peace,Live Long, and have a Drink(responsively of course))
... I was going to make a joke about "darn, should this scale not be called 'Moh' scale"... and then I found out that TV Tropes had done that and Wired had written on it.
What will happen if I don't read it?
Terrible things, one must imagine
My definition is different. Hard sci-fi concentrates on the science, soft sci-fi concentrates on relationships and personal stories with the science as background, but still in a feasible universe. Everything else is just fantasy not soft sci-fi! Most of what's called sci fi now Is either fantasy or mysticism.
"Quarantine" has a similar premise to "Spin," which is also a great hard sci-fi novel (first of a trilogy).
Kudos for mentioning Stephen Baxter; few people do because there's this lame belief that his characters are wooden, even though no one should read Baxter for his characters but for the concepts; characters are for soap operas or general fiction dramas; sci-fi and fantasy are about the exotic...
My novel, Book of Answers, is like Baxter but without hard science. My book is a tongue in cheek look at human devolution through the perspective of a lost hippie immortal and the aliens the intelligent designer hires to find him and that takes ten million years. And so it goes
♥
were these reviews written by ChatGPT?
His text definitely follows a rigidly-defined structure and there is a lot of repetition of certain words and phrases, in virtually every video I’ve seen on this channel.
Who can say. For all I know you’re just a chatbot? 😂
@@ianmills5210 “For all you know” is not very much.
Really? SOME of us know what a Nebula Award is! Sorry- never cared for Greg Bear's stuff.
I love your insights and content, but I hate the AI-generated "art"
Sub-genrefication is dumb