ITT: What does Veeky Forums think of Hard Science Fiction?

"Ringworld" is marginal.
It's sometimes necessary for even the "hardest" writers to introduce FTL as a "background" element to get the characters in place. I can accept that.
But then we have unimaginably strong materials and teleport discs and reactionless drives and you're pushing the limits.

"A World out of Time" or "The Integral Trees" are harder. Several of the concepts are wrong but they were at least plausible at the time the books were written.

Ender's game, of course, has relativistic slower-than-light ships AND the ansible -- and you can't have both!

physics AND thermodynamics?
not like thermo is part of physics right

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.
>no FTL
>Bussard Ramjets used to travel between stars
>effects of time dilation and relativity shown accurately
The only thing the book kind of fudges is that a Bussard ramjet probably wouldn't work as well as originally hoped.

Echopraxia was better, because it had a hot female vampire. I know, I'm a brainlet etc.

Yet the book ends with the characters reaching the end of the Universe which is the Big Crunch. We know now that the Universe isn't likely to end in a Big Crunch...

>and you can't have both!
Why not?

Autistic genre desu.

An Ansible is a device capable of instantaneous communication. You can't have realistic relativistic travel AND instant communication in the same universe.

Planetes was great hard science, despite the mushy romance

Except for the technobabble which allowed the crew to withstand 10 gee or more. Necessary to keep the proper time down so they'd reach destination still young and fertile.

Can't fault Anderson for that. It was a possibility at the time.

I was enjoying it, but then a spaceship (I recall it looked like an airliner with a row of windows down the side) was alerted they were in the path of a meteor (or maybe space debris)storm. A hatch opens on top and jointed mechanical arms emerge to clamp armor plates all over the outside of the ship.
Suspension of disbelief totally collapsed!!
The armor weighs the same whether it's inside or outside. Stored inside, it takes up cargo space and requires elaborate machinery to install it. Didn't seem to hurt anything by being outside.
I also didn't like that the "garbage collecting" station had some parts with centrifugal gravity and some parts where everyone's floating -- and people just step across. We didn't see any airlocks or relative motion of the sections.

But I guess it was still "harder" than having 20 meter tall powered suits and the pilots can easily jump most of that height to get in or out of the cockpit. :(

Why not?

How about reading the book before commenting on it you useless mouth-breather. Your parents should have drowned you in the river.
I still need to read that one. It seems interesting even if some of the elements are dated.
Echopraxia was just more insane overall. Also I kinda fell in love with the vampire.

Bump

No mentions of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

I am disappointed

Mass Effect

A on the ground and B in a rocket can see both their own clock and the other guy's. As B picks up speed, both will see the OTHER clock running slow. That seems paradoxical, but it's not. In order to compare clocks, they have to be in the same location. Not traveling at the same speed, but in the same place. In order to do that, B's ship must turn around and come back. At the instant of turning, an asymmetry is introduced. B is not longer in an inertial frame. General, not Special, Relativity applies.

Now, if you had an Ansible, A on Earth could transmit a tick every second. B receives it instantaneously, regardless of distance. The clocks can be compared WITHOUT bringing them together.
Without that turnaround we're back with Special Relativity and the situation is symmetrical. But the two clocks can't BOTH be faster/slower than their counterpart.
So now we have a logical paradox. Either Relativity is all wrong (and there's no time-dilation and no twin paradox) or ansibles are impossible.

Same applies to Heinlein's "Time for the Stars". Relativity is real. The twin aboard the starship stays young while his brother grows old. But they can communicate instantaneously via telepathy. All they notice is that the Earthbound twin "hears" the shipboard one thinking/speaking very slowly. And the traveling twin gets nothing but high-pitched squeaks. Heinlein never justifies this except to say that the experiment proved Einstein was wrong and the information gained eventually enabled the construction of FTL ships.

Thank you.

Any love for The Expanse?

Most of the stuff here isn't hard Sci fi.

Also, no Michael chriton, no Gregg bear. I'm dissapointed in you guys.

>Hard Sci Fiction
I like Sci-Fi that makes my Dick Hard

NO. It's not hard sci-fi. The ships don't even have radiators.

Fuck you. The Expanse is the most realistic science fiction series on television to date. Name another...

Mormons can't into space.

>Mormons can't into space.

SUCK. IT. BITCH!

>>on television
where there's your problem. We weren't talking about things that are exclusively on television.

>We weren't talking about things that are exclusively on television.

Okay fine.

What's harder than The Expanse?

The book is shit compared to the book it was based on. Aniara by Martinson.

The entire time I was reading it I was wondering where the cannibal dance fad cults were.

So what, all adaptations suck.

Dragon's Egg and Rocheworld.

>Name another...
Firefly, gotcha

>Firefly, gotcha

Cowboys in Space is more realistic than The Expanse? You're shitting me...

Stargate SG-1
Most episodes of Black Mirror
Lost in Space

>Stargate SG-1
>Lost in Space
>Hard Sci-Fi

Still more realistic than The Expanse.

>Vampires
>Aliums
>Antimatter rockets
>Transhuman brain modification

None of that shit has any realistic scientific basis.

All of that wormhole stuff is harder than the flat-out impossible unlimited 1G rockets without heat radiators that The Expanse is utterly reliant on.

The Expanse is amazing. The only way it could be ruined is if they get bored of in-solar-system action and feel the need to spice it up with some sort of ancient alien interstellar jumpgate tech or something.

Pst, don't read after Abaddon's Gate...

it has ended in a big crunch, just a matter of perspective, what we call the big bang is just a big crunch observed in reverse

Stanislaw Lem
Greg Egan
Gregory Benford(amazing guy, I spoke with him couple of times)
Stephen Baxter(especially Manifold series)
Alastair Reynolds
Greg Bear
Jacek Dukaj

Please name others, I am alwas curious about new authors

What's the name when reality surpasses Hard SciFi, aka the "Five Weeks in Balloon" case?

I'll grant that The Expanse is more realistic than most other SF movie and TV shows.
But that is setting the bar VERY low!!

>rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Notes

hard sci-fi is not actually "science" fiction but more like engineering/political fiction

I am currently reading his rifter series. I also quite like it. AND ITS ALL FREE YEAAA

Any SciFi with bullshits like faster than Light Travel and Time Machines isn't Hard Sci

No politics in "Mission of Gravity" or "Dragon's Egg". (Well, Cheela politics in the latter, but irrelevant to the issues humans face.)

And both books are among the hardest SF ever written.

well I meant engineering and/or politics.
My point was that actually making up novel science can be interesting and the idea behind the story as well.
Look at Greg Egan for example, he modtly tries to be accurate but except there's some twist in how his universes' physics work. Then the whole book is about explorig the effect this has.

Yeah, I read the Clockwork Rocket series. Interesting and informative.
But his latest (?) with two time dimensions...

I expect to be dropped into the middle of the action without warning. That's "the hook".
But I also expect things to start making sense eventually.
Possibly the first time I've ever accused SF of being too "hard".

>But his latest (?) with two time dimensions...
Thanks dude, didn't realize he released something in 2017. It's called Dichronauts apparently.

That's the one.

I can recommend Schild's Ladder and Diaspora by him, those two absolutely blew my mind at the time.

He's good. I liked both.
I just think he goes overboard occasionally. Which is not bad. You don't know where the limits are unless you push them.

I just find it stretching credibility when the Creatures of Planet X (whose greatest achievement to date has been ingenious ways of chipping flint) deduce Relativity over the course of a week. No experiments. Just sheer logic which makes it obvious and inevitable.
Whereas many on Veeky Forums dismiss it as Jewish Physics, so it CAN'T be right. Most stupid posters this side of the Flat Earthers.

...

Bobiverse was pretty interesting. Not the hardest of science when it came to interstellar communication.. But everything else was pretty well grounded in modern science

Bump

Who wants to spend hours reading about rock climbing terminology?

I've always liked Stehen Baxter, particularly his short story collection Phase Space. His stories tend to be about the human implications of some speculation eg in some stories we're living in a simulation which is modified from time to time, in others it's about life forms who existed in the plasma at the very beginning of the universe and who must confront the end of the recombination era when that plasma condenses into gas and the universe becomes transparent. There's always a constant theme of the vast depth of time and space of the universe, but still perceived from a human (or alien) perspective of little organisms trying to make a life for themselves in all this enormity.

Sounds good, I'll have a look at him.
>I just find it stretching credibility when the Creatures of Planet X (whose greatest achievement to date has been ingenious ways of chipping flint) deduce Relativity over the course of a week. No experiments. Just sheer logic which makes it obvious and inevitable.
Yeah, I get what you mean.
In the Orthogonal books there's a thing about the scientists doing biological experiments on themselves, discovering how nerves work, etc.., and it all seems to come out of nowhere, as if there was no prior work done in biology up to that point.

The best thing about Egan is imo the very natural way he describes issues like mind uploading, personality duplication, changing simulation substrate, backups, and things like that. Really drove home the point of functionalism/computationalism to me.

>Bobiverse
That sounds really stupid and the guy doesn't even have a wikipedia page. Quick rundown?

Sounds like a self-published garbage fire.

Here's the summary from Goodreads.com

>Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty. The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.

Best Hard SF movie of all time coming through...

>no seriously, screw you
>closest thing to an exaggeration of real physics was the wind speeds on Mars
>and it's climax was an astronaut and a spaceship doing everything they could to match delta v
>yet it was still a huge international hit

This is what happens when autists try to create art. It's all so fucking meaningless. Just event after event, signifying nothing.

>Just event after event

That's called "a story".

>It's all so fucking meaningless
>signifying nothing

Bullshit. It's established that the entire future of America's manned program is in jeopardy if he dies, due to public backlash. Also, the situation provides a needed opportunity to join up the US program with the Chinese, as shown in the epilogue.

>Bullshit. It's established that the entire future of America's manned program is in jeopardy if he dies, due to public backlash. Also, the situation provides a needed opportunity to join up the US program with the Chinese, as shown in the epilogue.

Those are just fictional events in the storyline. They're not real. What does the story mean for us? What's the human element? This is what makes art.

>physicists and thermodynamic experts
This triggers me

>Robinson Crusoe wasn't "art"
>pretty sure you're just a faggot trolling at this point

>He thinks Robinson Crusoe was "art"

There's no helping some people.

nigger are you serious, robinson crusoe is all about humility, destiny, fate and man's relationship with god. it's a great fuckin novel.

It'll remain famous and renowned long after you've given up on reproducing and die penniless and alone.

Any delineation between "art" and "not art" is arbitrary, you guys are having a very pointless semantics discussion here.

>you will die penniless and alone.

When you put it like that, I suppose Robinson Crusoe is great writing after all. Excellent themes.

dont like it

this

>Alastair Reynolds
>hard sci-fi
Pick one, I quite enjoyed revelation space but its not really hard sci-fi
anyway with poseidon's children Reynolds went full sjw so I dropped him

Genre fiction is invariably shit. It's so weighed down by the straitjacket of its genre that it has no room to spread its wings.

I'm just going to leave this here...

youtube.com/watch?v=qjWEGlot35Y

>anyway with poseidon's children Reynolds went full sjw so I dropped him
yeah the "Africa the leading world superpower" was a bit much

didn't it end in people spamming nano-missile swarms?

Actually, the Egan I had in mind in was
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)

Incandescence is a 2008 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book is based on the idea that the theory of general relativity could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilisation.

And drones. And ridiculously powerful railguns. It's not that unrealistic to pump out of swarms of drones or tiny missiles really that's just a problem of manufacturing capacity

BUMP

>The forcediversitypance.

Gunbuster

Bump

Unironically one of the best series I've ever read.

Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke where my childhood.

It's harder scifi than most of the shit churned out nowadays and its on par with older works people usually class as hard scifi. Sometimes you need one big lie to keep the plot going. For some shows its FTL, for the Expanse its a magic wonder drive that has no waste heat, high thrust and ridiculous specific impulse.
I suggest checking out the manga for planetes. Less focus on the romance and a lot of the dumber stuff like the deploying armor and ninjas are absent.

I would agree but the end of the movie pissed me off. "Hey this stuff he says is dumb and jokes about in the book, how about in order to increase drama we have him actually do it?"

The Expanse is anything but hard sci-fi. Its space opera/adventure/ even crime/detective fiction, author managed to combine all these subgenres in one book, its why the first three books were so successful and the later books are lacking.

Nothing can't naturally move faster than light but nothing says we can't do it artificially. That's the point of science.

It was pretty fun. I'm glad that whore Zo died. It's a real shame he didn't expand on the rest of the solar system more though.

Doesn't it just turn into ersatz Stargate/Revelation Space after the third book?

Yeah, the latest book is bretty gud though.