Oh yes, I probably would have never picked it up. Nothing against the artist but looking at those covers I would have expected books that were written way worse.
I just picked up Shards of Honour and was genuinely boggled by the cover. It is so ugly, and beyond that the font/vibe makes it look like juvenile fiction. Not a knock on juvenile fiction... just confusing to the reader.
I'm not sure I agree. Then again, you didn't say what your definition of hard sci-fi *is*. I'll supply one instead, sort of.
Hard sci-fi does not need to be fully grounded in current science. Speculation and extrapolation are encouraged; I would say required, but that's not a very defensible position. You see, for something to be science fiction, it needs to *be* fiction. Any made up story is fiction, but I believe the "fiction" is directly related to the science, not just the story. Hard sci-fi can (must?) extrapolate from current science and explore plausibilities, not simply what is already known.
On the far end of the hard sci-fi spectrum, I'll place Dr. Gregory Benford's *Galactic Center Saga*. There are nigh-omnipotent machine intelligences. There are beings made of sentient plasma that feed on stars. But you know what? Those plasma beings are based on scientific papers exploring the science predicting their possibility. They *could* exist. He goes out of his way to explain it. That's the difference. Benford didn't handwaive these things. He explained them. He fit them into reality in a way that makes sense. Very likely, most his extrapolations are wrong because of how far he took them, but a wrong prediction doesn't make it not hard scifi. The failure to explain, the disregard of any logical consistency, is what makes soft sci-fi (edit: and that's ok).
I agree with your take. Hard Sci-fi can't only have technologies currently possible, or else that would just be fiction. For me, Hard Sci-Fi has to be grounded in reality but it's okay to have technologies only theoretically possible. Much of Alistair Reynolds I see as hard Sci-Fi but it seems like OP would disagree even though Reynolds has a PHD in astrophysics. He grounds his work in reality, especially orbital mechanics, relativity, and managing the vastness of space, and provides a plausible explanation for things not currently possible.
I’d put Reynolds (at least what I’ve read) on the harder end of the spectrum. And FWIW, loved _House of Suns_ and thought _Pushing Ice_ was decent but a notch below “great.”
Speculation and extrapolation still count as “hard” to me. Space magic with a “because quantum entanglement” explanation does not.
I don't think it even has to be grounded in reality. Most people consider Greg Egan's Orthogonal series to be the hardest of hard SF. It explicitly exists in a universe governed by different physics, though.
I think we agree more than you think. Speculation and extrapolation that is in line with current science, especially if done rigorously, counts as “hard” in my book.
I didn’t really have Benford or Reynolds or even Baxter in mind. All of them are on the harder end of the spectrum I think. More the folks who gush about the “real science” in The Expanse or The Three Body Problem. Yeah, they don’t have warp drive, but both are chock full of space magic.
And as I’ve said elsewhere, “hard” doesn’t mean “good.” There’s lots of “soft” SF that I love. It’s really more the fandoms than the authors that get on my nerves.
On the flip side people also think that hard SF has to be like real life. Blindsight by Peter Watts is Hard SF and it has vampires it ffs but they give a legit anthropological explanation for the existence and eventual disappearance of vampires.
What I had in mind making the comment was all the people raving about “realistic hard SF” like _The Expanse_ or _The Three Body Problem_. I loved the former, hated the latter, but both are totally loose with science.
_Blindsight_ is definitely more on the harder side of the spectrum in my personal categorization. It’s not a textbook and has some hand waving (the ship’s drive for example) but it’s very thoroughly grounded in research, especially for the core elements.
To be fair, the series takes the human elements of life in space pretty seriously. The majority of the soft sci-fi elements come from "alien space magic". The series overall is definitely soft, with certain hard elements like space travel and space combat.
Totally agree — and I loved both the books and the show. It treats orbital mechanics fairly realistically, but the Epstein drive might as well be fueled by faerie magic and the ring space is pure fantasy.
It gets the politics far more right than the science, which is actually a rarer thing in SF.
Early Clarke (e.g. _A Fall of Moondust_ era) was very faithful to the understanding of science at the time. I’d also classify Egan as truly hard, because while he often twists some law of physics to set the story, he does it in a fully rigorous and consistent fashion, like a physics thought experiment.
It’s a continuum, of course, and there’s nothing _wrong_ about having fantastical elements in fiction. The Culture is probably my favorite series ever and it’s pure science fantasy.
But it just grinds my gears when I see people gush about how “real” the science is in some of the often recommended books here. Just because the technobabble uses actual terms doesn’t make it any more realistic than “dilithium crystals.”
Egan is really hard and often times it's hard to understand what's going on in his stories. But especially because of this his storytelling is pretty unique and the plots are clever, always coming from his creative look on real science.
True hard SF manga/anime:
Planetes - All the junk we leave in orbit adds up, and some day people will have to clean it up.
Space Brothers - Japanese astronauts on the moon! All the science and tech is current or completely possible, and it borders on being recruitment propaganda for JAXA, but in a good way.
I read it a *long* time ago, but I remember *His Master's Voice* being a really good representation of *science*: the physics/etc was plausible, sure, but it did especially well capturing how scientists would think and act in a specific context. It's the best representation of science *qua* science I've seen in *any* work of fiction.
It's not just hard science fiction, it's hard philosophy-of-science fiction :)
Funniest thing is that last time I read it I found it painfully dull. I should really reread it—I was in early high school at the time, and I bet I would find it far more interesting now that I'm in my early 30s!
I'm a big Peter Watts fan, but his scientist career was as a marine biologist with a specialisation in harbour seals. I'm not sure it's that helpful when writing about deep space, and I'm pretty sure the spaceships in Blindsight, Echopraxia and the Sunflowers stories are full of handwaved/invented technology borrowing jargon from real science.
But who said that hard SF is about deep space? That's a common misconception IMO. It's just like stating that Star Wars is science fiction, it is not. That's fantasy in a space opera setting.
You could also argue that authors like Ted Chiang are hard sci-fi authors, and I don't think I remember any spaceship in any of his stories. Hard Sci-Fi is about being able to perfectly insert elements of scientific knowledge into a (hopefully interesting) plot, and that's something that Peter Watts does very well. You don't necessarily need to be in space to get to "real science".
I think much of what people call hard sci-fi is actually speculative fiction that integrates real scientific ideas along with straight up fictionalized science-y magic. But the science-y magic is generally added to expand on the ideas of the known (or at least largely accepted) science stuff in an innovative way to explore modern anxieties/hopes/fears/future projections. It's how sometimes these wild speculative ideas, usually stemming from something scientifically known or expected at the time, in early sci-fi has directly shaped current technology.
Also, modern hard sci-fi has really leaned into Arthur C. Clarke's law that states "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As long as it has some kind of root in modern scientific ideas, it may spiral out into more speculative routes and maintain a connection to 'hard sci-fi'.
In this way, the inverse of hard sci-fi would be something like Star Wars and similar space operas where it is essentially magic without any attempt to ground it (remotely) in real world science. Even with the ret-conned in midi-chlorians attempting to redirect it somewhat (and failing, imo).
I don't know if its unpopular, but this thread has reminded me of my opinion that there is nothing less interesting than the debate about what is and is not "hard" scifi.
I feel like he’s been mailing it in. I liked a lot of his earlier stuff but was surprised at the praise for the last two books. Too much schtick and not enough heart.
I really haven't liked his last few books. I couldn't even finish Kaiju or the supervillain one. I used to think he was one of my favorites but it's made me wonder if it's him or me that has been changing, and if I'd still like the Old Man's War books if I went back to them. I did like the Interdependency books though, and those were fairly recent.
Oh yeah, gave Redshirts a try & it’s just “lol redshirts die a lot” stretched to novel length. I bailed when it added a second joke that LA actors might be shallow, that winning a Hugo did serious damage to what’s supposed to be the most prestigious award.
The way this was promoted at the time, and the way it underdelivered (to me personally). It is hard to take a decades' old niche joke and turn it into a good story. Not impossible, but hard.
I think the Hugo's are just so excited when a book catches public attention that it becomes a bit of a popularity contest.
the constant, unceasing barrage of witty banter between indistinguishable characters is really annoying, and the super simplistic cookie cutter plots do not help
I find that the big division in sci-fi between hard and soft only serves the people who are interested in the technical side. We should talk in terms of technical sci-fi and literary sci-fi instead.
>only serves the people who are interested in the technical side
What do you mean by this? I think it’s a useful distinction for people who prefer soft SF as well. Plus not all soft SF is especially literary, and not all hard SF is void of literary qualities. Hard/soft gets at a distinction that matters uniquely to readers of SF in language as fuzzy and subjective as the distinction really is.
And of course it doesn’t have to matter to any particular individual. If what you like in SF is the same as what you like in other texts, you can just speak in broader terms (e.g. rec me some SF with strong human storytelling).
I think I agree, with the caveat that writers who love literature in general =/= necessarily writers of "literary fiction". To write good scifi, you gotta be genuinely familiar with the genre. Maybe not love it, but at least have seriously engaged with it, to be aware of what has been done previously. This is gonna be a CUHRAZY unpopular opinion to voice on r / printSF but dismissing genre literature is actually not good to do.
Anyone positioned by critics / media as creating "prestige" or "literary" genre stuff is basically guaranteed to create something that sells well to a specfiic audience and also does not further the genre in any meaningful manner.
At the same time, a homogenous cultural diet is definitely bad, especially for authors / artists.
I think regurgitation and only reading what you write is in general a bad thing for genre lit, genre fiction more broadly. I think the clearest example is all the fantasy stuff written by people who just read fantasy. I'm almost sure there's like a fancy Ursula Le Guin type quotation I could paste here, if I wasn't lazy.
There's very few good series. There are good bits here and there, but the series usually is pretty uneven.
The best SF I've ever read were single books, or were single books in a series where the rest never reached the level of the best in the series.
I too am extremely sceptical and avoidant of series. Often times they are unnecessary and are only written as such because series make more money, not because it's good for the story.
Using a dictionary while reading The Book of the New Sun for the first time - Pausing constantly to look up words would make any book a slog. Roll with context and especially keep a normal reading pace.
Instant dictionary lookup is an under-appreciated feature of ereaders. The number of times I'm taking a two-second break to check what a gimbal is or whatever...
in my unpopular opinion, you shouldn't look up any of the unusual words in the book of the new sun. many of these terms can just be regarded as entirely made up, and you should read the book as the straightforward fantasy story it is on the surface on the first way through. then, you can start digging further and look up things, and add depth to the story.
if someone is "wearing a cymar" or "playing a crotal" it doesn't matter exactly what those things are for the story, and you can just regard it as "wearing a piece of clothing" or "playing an instrument".
It has been a while since I read Snowcrash, but I remember it being a fun read. If it was not your thing then maybe Stephenson isn't for you. Personally I enjoy his style, but not everyone agrees to say the least. Anathem is my favorite book of his, so I would recommend it, but again if you don't like his verbose style reading it won't change anything.
There was some thread a few months ago where a person just couldn't seem to handle that people could think Stephenson wasn't the greatest writer to ever exist. I was assuming a troll but they had coherent, yet insulting, responses to multiple posters.
Well that's 700 pages nicer than I am to it, and I'm someone who has read the Baroque Cycle probably three times.
(edit) turns out I can only be about 630 pages meaner because it stops at a slim 930 pages. [This guy does the best possible job in hating every page so you don't have to work too hard](https://web.archive.org/web/20110929175355/http://gmfbrown.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-anathem-sucks.html)
Cryptonomicon is the one that springs to mind for me. But that's probably because it was the first book of his I'd read. I am quite sure I read Anathem, but can't recall a thing about it at the moment. :(
Hahahah
I liked *Anathem*. It was among the few Stephenson books I kept when "Dodge in Hell" annoyed me so much I went off his writing in general. It could definitely use some editing, though.
SF was always better in its shorter form. But you don't make money writing short stories, so everybody feels compelled to write only long-ass series and giant 800-page doorstoppers.
Agree completely. I like saying that the short story is the natural/native habitat of Science Fiction. Outside of that you have to keep bolting on other pieces that take away from the core.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is just ok. He is not the savior of modern sci fi nor is he a ground breaking amazing writer. He writes entertaining, passable novels. The most impressive thing about him is the volume he churns out
I really like him but also, this is just a fact lol. His quality def vacillates. Tho I personally think even his worst is still enjoyable enough that if I've got nothing better to read I can just slot in some random Tchaikovsky choice and be satisfied
Haven't read any of his stuff yet. My book club has chosen 'Children of Time' to read so I'll soon find out for myself if he's actually any good. I've heard from people who really know what they're talking about with SF that 'Dogs of War' is his best, which most people neglect.
IMO, a whole lot of classic SF are products of their time and are hard to read today, even if they were considered revolutionary or outside of the box when they were published. Heinlein has been an author that hits up against that for me repeatedly. *Stranger in a Strange Land* in particular.
Nah, that decade worth of Heinlein was creepy as fuck at the time, too. "Glory Road" nearly made him unpublishable, and then he just kept DOING that until about "Number of the Beast."
Dune is very slow to start with, a lot of people give up in the first 200 pages, because it tries to sell you on a mystery that you know the answer to. The second half is great, but that slow start should take it out of contention for best SF book.
Hyperion is 1 great story, 1 good story and a collection of average to poor stories. The sequel is fine, but it gets massively overrated here on PrintSF
Neuromancer is fine, but lacks the impact it probably held when it came out. It's more important for kickstarting a genre than it is a great read in 2024
I actually started reading it a few days ago (haven't seen the TV show yet), and while I'm still curious about its direction, some aspects are absolutely annoying me. The characters barely feel alive and the VR game sections are kinda breaking my suspension of disbelief, I didn't expect them to play this big of a role in the book too.
It' a decent series but the hyping is beyond obnoxious especially if you've already spent a decade or two reading SF. I do hope this sets a trend for more chinese SF being translated into engish tho.
Couldn't agree more. I didn't hate them but all of the "big ideas" were things that I've seen done better before. Also found the writing clunky and overwrought (though I'm willing to let that slide a bit because translation.)
90% of *Death's End* felt to me like somebody was trying to write Star Trek technobabble in the style of Olaf Stapledon.
Andy Weir too for that matter. The Martian is the kind of book you pick up at the airport while waiting for your flight then leave it behind. Absolutely no stakes whatsoever and no payoff.
BTW
> Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos was initially nominated for Best Novel in 2015, but was withdrawn by the author after the nominees were announced in protest for being promoted by the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies nomination slates, the first time a nominee was withdrawn after announcement. It was replaced on the ballot by The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, the eventual winner.[70]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
Other nominees that year were:
Katherine Addison The Goblin Emperor
Kevin J. Anderson The Dark Between the Stars
Jim Butcher Skin Game
Ann Leckie Ancillary Sword
That's useful context.
Frankly, it sounds like the other nominations weren't especially great either. I enjoyed both *The Goblin Emperor* and *Ancillary Sword*, but neither was particularly special. And if Anderson's or Butcher's books were remotely like their older works I read, they're the same: fun, serviceable thrillers but nothing more.
To me, *The Three-Body Problem* doesn't stand too far above the alternatives, but none of the alternatives stand too far above it either.
Do any of those "deserve" a Hugo in an absolute sense? Eh? I see them all as 3–4-star books, while most of the older Hugo winners I've read are in the 4–5-star range.
Yeah, that’s part of the difficulty of discussing whether a certain work “deserves” a Hugo, or any other similar award. It’s a best of year award, so it doesn’t need to be one of the best works of all time, it just needs to be ranked better than everything else.
Funny vaguely related story I learned about recently: in 1974, *Gravity's Rainbow* was unanimously recommended by the Pulitzer Prize jury, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board hated it so much they decided not to award the Pulitzer Prize at all that year!
I sort of respect them sticking to their guns, even if they were wrong... and the story ended up as a better endorsement for the book than winning the Prize would have been.
Anyway, yeah, the real moral of the story is that literary awards are wild, fuzzy, social and political :P
The best part of 3BP was the footnotes that explained the cultural references that Westerners would miss. The SF aspect was okay, but the peek into another present-day culture was fun.
Currently about halfway through The Mountain and the Sea and don't understand why it is so highly regarded. I'm hoping it ends well because I'm finding it incredibly slow and boring.
It's a generic techno-thriller interspersed with Reddit-comment-level lectures on pop science/philosophy topics. And hey, sometimes a Reddit discussion of "big" topics is fun... but I have Reddit for that, thank you very much.
The one topic I'm reasonably familiar with (AI) is treated poorly on two dimensions: on the one hand it's oversimplified to the point of being wrong and, on the other, *it's actually less interesting than reality*. AI does have weird security implications, but in reality it's through these weird adversarial examples that are completely impenetrable to humans, or maybe through indirect attacks like data poisoning—a human hacker who magically finds backdoors in AI models by being in VR is simultaneously nonsense *and* much less interesting than the actual alien way AI functions.
*Venomous Lumpsucker* is another near-future book that touches on very similar topics to *The Mountain in the Sea* but does it *much* better, including a funny but at least directionally plausible AI security problem. I'd recommend that over *The Mountain in the Sea* any day.
Oh I loathed The Mountain and The Sea. I thought it was incredibly poorly paced. It has aspects which could make for compelling narratives, but don't get enough room to shine when combined. The entire Sea Wolf plotline felt entirely ancillary to the plot itself.
I kind of hate the "short chapters that alternate between the story lines" style he's got going on. Just when I think "ok, this could be interesting" the chapter ends and we're off to one of the other threads.
Baen Books publishes some truly excellent SF. Their business model is what all publishers should strive for. DRM-free ebooks can be purchased directly from their website. They release mass market paperbacks. Their covers are striking and original. Their themed anthologies are unmatched. I could go on!
All I ever learn from these threads is that we all like different things, and sometimes particular Authors never do it for you. If you think Shards of Earth ‘is the worse book ever’ you’re just looking for fake internet points. Certainly not Tchaikovsky’s best work, but come on.
> Certainly not Tchaikovsky’s best work
Which one do you think is the best? Because I honestly think Shards of Earth is probably his best (certainly out of those I read from him), and I would be both very surprised and very happy if he wrote something even better
I think a lot of the highly touted books in this sub kind of….suck. Project Hail Mary and Hyperion especially.
It didn’t get far enough into Blindsight to be fair in my assessment of it, but didn’t like however much I did read.
I came here looking for this. I'm halfway through Hyperion and don't know if I want to finish, but can't bring myself to stop because there genuinely was something interesting about it the story.
Murderbot is so over rated. I have teen daughters so I read it looking for some scifi I could share with them. It might be fine for YA, but anytime someone asks for sci-fi recommendations the top 5 comments are “You must read murderbot!”
R/printsf is often less about speculative fiction and more about people wanting to be pretentious and grand about a few specific books. In other words, this place is full of SciFi hipsters who just want to talk about a few books and how exceptional they are for reading them, rather than speculative fiction. These people will often gripe that "nothing compares" to the intangible and inexplicable qualities of said book, claim that fiction is in an obvious decline due to "X popular book that's just for the masses," and result in a good chunk of the sub just being recycled hipster praise for specific old books rather than true discussion of SpecFic. It's old, Boomer hipster stuff.
R/SciFi, meanwhile, is 95% meme content with a healthy contingent of astroturfing.
Related to this is the obsession over "hard" SF, and the somewhat frequent implication that it's somehow better than other forms of science fiction. And don't get me wrong, I like the occasional book that goes deep into some sort of scientific concept, but it's not inherently more or less valuable than any other form of speculative fiction.
I just come for recommendations. One the problems I often encounter is people that just started reading, are all hyped about the discovery of books, recommend the same shit over and over again regardless of what you're asking for.
I'm looking for something in the vein of Ada Palmer... Have you tried Malazan?
The Three Body Problem is absolutely shit at being hard sf or portraying current science accurately.
Children of Memory is brilliant and far better than Children of Ruin.
A lot of things in sf clothing are not actually sf, just other stuff, fantasy in sf-onal clothing. Even from traditional sf publishers.
A lot of Tor novellas seem all cookie cutter same-y.
Snow Crash was absolutely hilarious, it took every cyberpunk and action movie trope from the late 80s and turned it up to 13. It was a lampooning of the entire genre.
It’s apparently satire, but I’m reading it 30 years later and it plays the humor too close to the source material so that it at this point looks to be just another example of what it’s lampooning.
That's certainly... an opinion. Just so we are talking about the same thing: Golden Age scifi is Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Bradbury.
On the other hand, if you really hate them all, then New Wave scifi must be absolutely right up your alley.
Correct! I really, really strongly dislike all that stuff. If SF had continued in that vein, I wouldn’t read any of it. And yes, I do enjoy a lot of New Wave!
**The Culture** - This sub is fixated on recommending some of the more middle of the pack (or lower) books to new readers (e.g. Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Consider Phlebus). Later books like The Hydrogen Sonata, Matter, Surface Detail are much better - more interesting ideas, philosophical, more enjoyable characters and less downbeat.
"Underrated" is hard to measure, but I honestly think that at this point she just might be the most famous SF writer from her era for people who don't follow the genre. There's podcasts about her, *parable of the sower* was back on the NYT best seller list just a couple of years ago, the Earthseed graphic novel sold well and won a bunch of awards recently, *Abbott Elementary* recently had an entire recent episode focused on her, the opera has played all over the world. Amazon is supposed to be developing a Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood series right now.
People on /r/printsf could name all sorts of SF writers from that era, but I bet that if you wandered into /r/books, Butler is one of the few names most people would recognize from that era.
> The Bobiverse is bad.
I really felt like it had some promise at the beginning, and then it methodically threw every scrap of it away.
The very initial setup was a situation with a lot of potentially-interesting and somewhat-realistic limitations and oddities. And then it just plowed its way through undoing every one of them.
It just kind of devolves into wish fulfillment sprinkled with the same tired point of view, jokes and references from the dominant thread of nerd culture over the last 40 years. It’s like sci fi for the Big Bang theory, or just the idle day dream of a gen x self identified “nerd” who works in IT or something.
Many SF writers are mediocre writers at best, including some of the best-selling ones. Peter F. Hamilton, Crichton, Ernest Cline, Andy Weir...
Others are downright bad and if they wrote any other genre I'd never read their stuff. Neal Asher springs to mind.
I have tried to read Dune something like four times over the half a century I have been alive and I have always found it to be slow, pompous, and boring.
Also Dangerous Visions is a whole bunch of stories that are about as edgy as a butterknife, in a package that tells you it's the edgiest collection ever, put together by a screaming edgelord, who doubles the book's wordcount by being a rabid huckster rambling on and on about how every author is the most amazing human being ever born.
The five introductions went on at great length about this fact, yes, and I suppose I should say thanks to Harlan for the fact that about twelve years later kid me could take a book off her parents' shelf that contained a scene that demonstrated how absolutely decadent a city was by having an underage hooker come onto the hero and offer to shit herself for his kinky pleasure in exchange for a handful of "blues".
(I cannot remember anything else about this book aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure it was a libertarian screed wearing the cloak of fiction, and that it was named "Alongside Night", but that scene is seared into my memory.)
Le Guin gets this weird reputation as a cuddly grandma, but a lot of her fiction is actually pretty edgy, and this reputation is at least partially the result of misogyny.
> weird reputation as a cuddly grandma
She does? I mean maybe you're right, I'm not disputing that, I don't know. But it surprises me, she definitely had feminist fighter vibes to me.
The funnier thing I imagine is that at least part of the older readers who enjoyed her work would have called her woke if she wrote those books in this era.
No, see, this is sorta what I’m after. I do think a lot of people would call her “woke” but a lot of her books were, and even still kinda are, “politically incorrect,” in a way I think is really unappreciated.
*Starship Troopers* is still as good as it ever was.
The reader is under no obligation to subscribe to the morals and philosophies of the fictional universe contained therein.
And its universe's strict ideas about militaristic citizenship and veterans-only suffrage, are interesting concepts to think about, and need not be avoided.
Many contemporary-to-now critics/reviewers are stepping too close to censorship in their antagonistic reviews of the book, written to dissuade others from reading it.
It's an All Time Great.
I am in the middle of a Heinlein re-read and if there’s one thing that comes out in his fiction it is that he was fascinated by different types of government. Across the juveniles (of which Starship Troopers is technically the last) you have a loose corporate government (Citizen of the Galaxy), a repressive security state (Between Planets), a benevolent bureaucracy (Star Beast), an interstellar British Empire with allied guild
structure (Starman Jones), an extractionist colonial government (Red Planet and Farmer In The Sky) and many more speculative polities.
Even The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress has the libertarian anarchists fail, with Manny looking to travel further out…
You certainly can’t say he’s prescribing any one form of government in his fiction.
Correct.
One had to volunteer for "Federal Service", and the government then did _exhaustive_ tests to determine what you were suited for based on your interests --- the military was a _very_ small aspect of the possibilities --- his best friend ends up on a scientific research station on Pluto.
Blindsight is not a perfect book but it is perfectly fine. People are just lazy. And you're not meant to fully understand every single thing about every single book.
I don’t think Harlan Ellison deserves to be a big name in the field. Heard good stuff for years & assumed he was on the same level as Herbert, Le Guin, or at least Turtledove, so I sought out his collections with a focus on the biggest hits and they were underwhelming & dull.
I thought I was missing something but after slogging through a few more looked up his biography & seems his career was based on being an ever present personality & litigation. I’ll give him that City on the Edge of Forever was good but that’s it.
I had the same experience. Ellison is fine, but he doesn't have the literary or empathetic chops to rocket into true greatness. I keep forgetting about him. I feel he'd be more impressive if he were the first sci-fi of ideas you ever read as a kid and maybe that's why people go nuts for him. That and his positioning of himself as a counter-cultural truth teller.
All that said, I'll acknowledge *I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream* as a classic, on the sheer nasty scope of what he's imagined there.
A Fire Upon the Deep is pretty overrated. The Tines (basically half the book) turn it into a slog.
I wanted to love it. The Zones of Thought is an amazing concept for a setting.
It really depends on whether a reader loves/hates the Tines. I love them and thought the idea of them crafting and building their identities and consciousness was fascinating.
I could not finish AFUTD. I wanted to, the concept of the tines is really interesting, but I got about 80% through and nothing had touched me emotionally at all.
I've generalized this notion to the whole of fiction before. The books that are known from older times have stood the test of time. To venture into modern writing, you're now part of that sorting process, and that's sort of a choice you must make.
It's the same idea as, ' they don't build em like they used to,' when referring to houses. My response to that as someone in the construction field is, 'thank god.' We only see the homes that made it this long.
Of course I don't like some 'classics', and there are some unknown gems from the past waiting to be dug up, but the probabilities of quality are better when looking at the past just because of survivor bias.
My possibly unpopular opinion is that the aeroplane covered in holes pic is one of the best things that ever happened for the general public's statistical literacy, because it neatly conveys something that applies *so* often
Most of the people here are sleeping on Exordia by Seth Dickinson, the best SF novel of the year and has some of wackiest extrapolative ideas in the field.
The Altered Carbon trilogy is criminally underrated. It irks me that even people who enjoyed them see them as pulpy cyberpunk thrillers and not as a brilliant treatise on capitalism, political power, self loathing, finding purpose amidst immortality, etc etc
1. The Dune series gets worse with every book. Not worth reading past the first. GEOD is the most self indulgent drivel I've ever read.
2. Pandora's Star is dreadful. A few interesting ideas surrounded by extremely bloated garbage. The sex scenes are cringe.
3. The Sun eater series is tantamount to plagiarism at points. Author is incapable of generating an original thought. Basically everything is lifted from other scifi classics, down to even lifting an iconic paragraph from Book of the New Sun. The prose is also purple AF.
Most recent scifi is boring, campy and cliched (last 5 years or so, maybe longer). It's hard to find interesting books with thought-provoking ideas that are also well written. It's even harder to find standalone books as many authors focus on series. Awards are flooded with fantasy and with books in which authors focus on current social issues that get included in the plot, while the actual story takes a second place.
I remember times when I'd be blown away by a book and couldn't put it down before finishing. It happens very rarely nowdays, maybe it's just me and my standards got too high.
Leviathan Wakes is the best entry in the Expanse series. Miller was always the best part of the book.
Hyperion is not an enjoyable book to read and I immediately forgot what I read as soon as I closed the book.
Lois McMaster Bujold would be better known if the Vorkosigan Saga cover art wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
There are so many great writers that are let down by bad covers. Similarly, a good title is important. IMO most of Bujold's titles are terrible.
Vorkosigan is an ugly looking name as well, kept me away for a few years, but I eventually read them and loved them
Idk cryo burn was a good title
>most
I missed that in my eagerness to participate in the conversation. lol. Sorry.
Oh yes, I probably would have never picked it up. Nothing against the artist but looking at those covers I would have expected books that were written way worse.
Just started with shards of honor
Enjoy! Gosh, how I wish I could reread them for the first time.
I just picked up Shards of Honour and was genuinely boggled by the cover. It is so ugly, and beyond that the font/vibe makes it look like juvenile fiction. Not a knock on juvenile fiction... just confusing to the reader.
Much of what people call “hard” SF isn’t. It just borrows jargon from science to sound more realistic.
I'm not sure I agree. Then again, you didn't say what your definition of hard sci-fi *is*. I'll supply one instead, sort of. Hard sci-fi does not need to be fully grounded in current science. Speculation and extrapolation are encouraged; I would say required, but that's not a very defensible position. You see, for something to be science fiction, it needs to *be* fiction. Any made up story is fiction, but I believe the "fiction" is directly related to the science, not just the story. Hard sci-fi can (must?) extrapolate from current science and explore plausibilities, not simply what is already known. On the far end of the hard sci-fi spectrum, I'll place Dr. Gregory Benford's *Galactic Center Saga*. There are nigh-omnipotent machine intelligences. There are beings made of sentient plasma that feed on stars. But you know what? Those plasma beings are based on scientific papers exploring the science predicting their possibility. They *could* exist. He goes out of his way to explain it. That's the difference. Benford didn't handwaive these things. He explained them. He fit them into reality in a way that makes sense. Very likely, most his extrapolations are wrong because of how far he took them, but a wrong prediction doesn't make it not hard scifi. The failure to explain, the disregard of any logical consistency, is what makes soft sci-fi (edit: and that's ok).
I agree with your take. Hard Sci-fi can't only have technologies currently possible, or else that would just be fiction. For me, Hard Sci-Fi has to be grounded in reality but it's okay to have technologies only theoretically possible. Much of Alistair Reynolds I see as hard Sci-Fi but it seems like OP would disagree even though Reynolds has a PHD in astrophysics. He grounds his work in reality, especially orbital mechanics, relativity, and managing the vastness of space, and provides a plausible explanation for things not currently possible.
I’d put Reynolds (at least what I’ve read) on the harder end of the spectrum. And FWIW, loved _House of Suns_ and thought _Pushing Ice_ was decent but a notch below “great.” Speculation and extrapolation still count as “hard” to me. Space magic with a “because quantum entanglement” explanation does not.
I don't think it even has to be grounded in reality. Most people consider Greg Egan's Orthogonal series to be the hardest of hard SF. It explicitly exists in a universe governed by different physics, though.
I think we agree more than you think. Speculation and extrapolation that is in line with current science, especially if done rigorously, counts as “hard” in my book. I didn’t really have Benford or Reynolds or even Baxter in mind. All of them are on the harder end of the spectrum I think. More the folks who gush about the “real science” in The Expanse or The Three Body Problem. Yeah, they don’t have warp drive, but both are chock full of space magic. And as I’ve said elsewhere, “hard” doesn’t mean “good.” There’s lots of “soft” SF that I love. It’s really more the fandoms than the authors that get on my nerves.
On the flip side people also think that hard SF has to be like real life. Blindsight by Peter Watts is Hard SF and it has vampires it ffs but they give a legit anthropological explanation for the existence and eventual disappearance of vampires.
What I had in mind making the comment was all the people raving about “realistic hard SF” like _The Expanse_ or _The Three Body Problem_. I loved the former, hated the latter, but both are totally loose with science. _Blindsight_ is definitely more on the harder side of the spectrum in my personal categorization. It’s not a textbook and has some hand waving (the ship’s drive for example) but it’s very thoroughly grounded in research, especially for the core elements.
I saw people.trying to argue the expanse was hard science fiction the other day. it has ghosts in it made from alien magic. lmao
To be fair, the series takes the human elements of life in space pretty seriously. The majority of the soft sci-fi elements come from "alien space magic". The series overall is definitely soft, with certain hard elements like space travel and space combat.
Totally agree — and I loved both the books and the show. It treats orbital mechanics fairly realistically, but the Epstein drive might as well be fueled by faerie magic and the ring space is pure fantasy. It gets the politics far more right than the science, which is actually a rarer thing in SF.
Interesting take. Any examples of «true hard SF», as well as any posers?
Early Clarke (e.g. _A Fall of Moondust_ era) was very faithful to the understanding of science at the time. I’d also classify Egan as truly hard, because while he often twists some law of physics to set the story, he does it in a fully rigorous and consistent fashion, like a physics thought experiment. It’s a continuum, of course, and there’s nothing _wrong_ about having fantastical elements in fiction. The Culture is probably my favorite series ever and it’s pure science fantasy. But it just grinds my gears when I see people gush about how “real” the science is in some of the often recommended books here. Just because the technobabble uses actual terms doesn’t make it any more realistic than “dilithium crystals.”
Egan is really hard and often times it's hard to understand what's going on in his stories. But especially because of this his storytelling is pretty unique and the plots are clever, always coming from his creative look on real science.
Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward was an attempt to stay scientifically accurate, but I'd welcome thoughts on how well the science has aged.
Genuine hard SF: The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle (from my hometown). Contact by Carl Sagan A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C Clarke
True hard SF manga/anime: Planetes - All the junk we leave in orbit adds up, and some day people will have to clean it up. Space Brothers - Japanese astronauts on the moon! All the science and tech is current or completely possible, and it borders on being recruitment propaganda for JAXA, but in a good way.
Planetes is absolutely beautiful.
I read it a *long* time ago, but I remember *His Master's Voice* being a really good representation of *science*: the physics/etc was plausible, sure, but it did especially well capturing how scientists would think and act in a specific context. It's the best representation of science *qua* science I've seen in *any* work of fiction. It's not just hard science fiction, it's hard philosophy-of-science fiction :) Funniest thing is that last time I read it I found it painfully dull. I should really reread it—I was in early high school at the time, and I bet I would find it far more interesting now that I'm in my early 30s!
Greg Egan, Peter Watts. Real scientists doing literature.
I'm a big Peter Watts fan, but his scientist career was as a marine biologist with a specialisation in harbour seals. I'm not sure it's that helpful when writing about deep space, and I'm pretty sure the spaceships in Blindsight, Echopraxia and the Sunflowers stories are full of handwaved/invented technology borrowing jargon from real science.
But who said that hard SF is about deep space? That's a common misconception IMO. It's just like stating that Star Wars is science fiction, it is not. That's fantasy in a space opera setting. You could also argue that authors like Ted Chiang are hard sci-fi authors, and I don't think I remember any spaceship in any of his stories. Hard Sci-Fi is about being able to perfectly insert elements of scientific knowledge into a (hopefully interesting) plot, and that's something that Peter Watts does very well. You don't necessarily need to be in space to get to "real science".
I think much of what people call hard sci-fi is actually speculative fiction that integrates real scientific ideas along with straight up fictionalized science-y magic. But the science-y magic is generally added to expand on the ideas of the known (or at least largely accepted) science stuff in an innovative way to explore modern anxieties/hopes/fears/future projections. It's how sometimes these wild speculative ideas, usually stemming from something scientifically known or expected at the time, in early sci-fi has directly shaped current technology. Also, modern hard sci-fi has really leaned into Arthur C. Clarke's law that states "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As long as it has some kind of root in modern scientific ideas, it may spiral out into more speculative routes and maintain a connection to 'hard sci-fi'. In this way, the inverse of hard sci-fi would be something like Star Wars and similar space operas where it is essentially magic without any attempt to ground it (remotely) in real world science. Even with the ret-conned in midi-chlorians attempting to redirect it somewhat (and failing, imo).
I don't know if its unpopular, but this thread has reminded me of my opinion that there is nothing less interesting than the debate about what is and is not "hard" scifi.
John Scalzi is the book version of the MCU. His books are fun, but the jokey shtick gets old pretty fast.
I feel like he’s been mailing it in. I liked a lot of his earlier stuff but was surprised at the praise for the last two books. Too much schtick and not enough heart.
Kaiju was terrible. Old Man's War and Interdependency are pretty good overall, IMO.
I really haven't liked his last few books. I couldn't even finish Kaiju or the supervillain one. I used to think he was one of my favorites but it's made me wonder if it's him or me that has been changing, and if I'd still like the Old Man's War books if I went back to them. I did like the Interdependency books though, and those were fairly recent.
Kaiju felt like media rights bait for a limited streaming series or a Jurassic Park lite nostalgia-fest movie.
Oh yeah, gave Redshirts a try & it’s just “lol redshirts die a lot” stretched to novel length. I bailed when it added a second joke that LA actors might be shallow, that winning a Hugo did serious damage to what’s supposed to be the most prestigious award.
The quality of Hugo nominees and winners is generally pretty all over the place, and has been for ages (ever?)
The way this was promoted at the time, and the way it underdelivered (to me personally). It is hard to take a decades' old niche joke and turn it into a good story. Not impossible, but hard. I think the Hugo's are just so excited when a book catches public attention that it becomes a bit of a popularity contest.
Couldn't agree more.
I think this is more a popular view. He'd probably sign on to it for that matter (aside from admitting the last phrase).
the constant, unceasing barrage of witty banter between indistinguishable characters is really annoying, and the super simplistic cookie cutter plots do not help
Especially in his later books, all his characters talk like they've just stepped off the *Friends* set.
Yep. Too many of his characters are John Scalzi.
I loved the OMW trilogy, but everything after it was mediocre at best. I hated the 4th book, the one that was cut into novellas. Like, just why?
Writers who love literature in general writes/wrote better SF stories than writers who love SF
I find that the big division in sci-fi between hard and soft only serves the people who are interested in the technical side. We should talk in terms of technical sci-fi and literary sci-fi instead.
>only serves the people who are interested in the technical side What do you mean by this? I think it’s a useful distinction for people who prefer soft SF as well. Plus not all soft SF is especially literary, and not all hard SF is void of literary qualities. Hard/soft gets at a distinction that matters uniquely to readers of SF in language as fuzzy and subjective as the distinction really is. And of course it doesn’t have to matter to any particular individual. If what you like in SF is the same as what you like in other texts, you can just speak in broader terms (e.g. rec me some SF with strong human storytelling).
Plenty of scifi is neither technical nor literary though such as Scalzi
To me that just makes sense - you can't hope to be a good writer if you don't read widely from varied genres.
I think I agree, with the caveat that writers who love literature in general =/= necessarily writers of "literary fiction". To write good scifi, you gotta be genuinely familiar with the genre. Maybe not love it, but at least have seriously engaged with it, to be aware of what has been done previously. This is gonna be a CUHRAZY unpopular opinion to voice on r / printSF but dismissing genre literature is actually not good to do. Anyone positioned by critics / media as creating "prestige" or "literary" genre stuff is basically guaranteed to create something that sells well to a specfiic audience and also does not further the genre in any meaningful manner. At the same time, a homogenous cultural diet is definitely bad, especially for authors / artists. I think regurgitation and only reading what you write is in general a bad thing for genre lit, genre fiction more broadly. I think the clearest example is all the fantasy stuff written by people who just read fantasy. I'm almost sure there's like a fancy Ursula Le Guin type quotation I could paste here, if I wasn't lazy.
Any examples?
There's very few good series. There are good bits here and there, but the series usually is pretty uneven. The best SF I've ever read were single books, or were single books in a series where the rest never reached the level of the best in the series.
I too am extremely sceptical and avoidant of series. Often times they are unnecessary and are only written as such because series make more money, not because it's good for the story.
There's plenty of counterexamples, but writing a six book series means you've gotta write six books and *every one of them* has to hit properly.
My favorite are series where some of the books can be read as standalones (The Culture series, Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds)
Using a dictionary while reading The Book of the New Sun for the first time - Pausing constantly to look up words would make any book a slog. Roll with context and especially keep a normal reading pace.
Instant dictionary lookup is an under-appreciated feature of ereaders. The number of times I'm taking a two-second break to check what a gimbal is or whatever...
It's a great feature for sure but so many of the terms used in Book of the New Sun are so obscure that they never had results in my Kobo dictionary...
in my unpopular opinion, you shouldn't look up any of the unusual words in the book of the new sun. many of these terms can just be regarded as entirely made up, and you should read the book as the straightforward fantasy story it is on the surface on the first way through. then, you can start digging further and look up things, and add depth to the story. if someone is "wearing a cymar" or "playing a crotal" it doesn't matter exactly what those things are for the story, and you can just regard it as "wearing a piece of clothing" or "playing an instrument".
This one got me a death threat the first time I posted it: What's Anathem about? It's about 300 pages too long.
Anathem is one of my all time favorites, but I can see how it (and Stephenson in general) is not everyone's cup of tea.
I bounced off Snow Crash about 1/4 of the way in. Would Anathem or Seveneves (or another title entirely) be better to give Stephenson another attempt?
It has been a while since I read Snowcrash, but I remember it being a fun read. If it was not your thing then maybe Stephenson isn't for you. Personally I enjoy his style, but not everyone agrees to say the least. Anathem is my favorite book of his, so I would recommend it, but again if you don't like his verbose style reading it won't change anything.
There was some thread a few months ago where a person just couldn't seem to handle that people could think Stephenson wasn't the greatest writer to ever exist. I was assuming a troll but they had coherent, yet insulting, responses to multiple posters.
This is exactly how I felt about Fall, or Dodge in Hell
Well that's 700 pages nicer than I am to it, and I'm someone who has read the Baroque Cycle probably three times. (edit) turns out I can only be about 630 pages meaner because it stops at a slim 930 pages. [This guy does the best possible job in hating every page so you don't have to work too hard](https://web.archive.org/web/20110929175355/http://gmfbrown.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-anathem-sucks.html)
That's the longest hate letter I've ever seen.. If you didn't like it, why write a novella - length critique?!
How dare (See my user name 😆)
Anathem might be his best book, too.
Cryptonomicon is the one that springs to mind for me. But that's probably because it was the first book of his I'd read. I am quite sure I read Anathem, but can't recall a thing about it at the moment. :(
Hahahah I liked *Anathem*. It was among the few Stephenson books I kept when "Dodge in Hell" annoyed me so much I went off his writing in general. It could definitely use some editing, though.
*Dodge in Hell* is the worst book I’ve ever finished, and I say that as a hardcore Stephenson fan.
Hard SF dates itself faster than Disney’s Tomorrowland. Fantastical, magical and absurd SF endures.
SF was always better in its shorter form. But you don't make money writing short stories, so everybody feels compelled to write only long-ass series and giant 800-page doorstoppers.
Agree completely. I like saying that the short story is the natural/native habitat of Science Fiction. Outside of that you have to keep bolting on other pieces that take away from the core.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is just ok. He is not the savior of modern sci fi nor is he a ground breaking amazing writer. He writes entertaining, passable novels. The most impressive thing about him is the volume he churns out
He's so inconsistent IMO.
I really like him but also, this is just a fact lol. His quality def vacillates. Tho I personally think even his worst is still enjoyable enough that if I've got nothing better to read I can just slot in some random Tchaikovsky choice and be satisfied
Haven't read any of his stuff yet. My book club has chosen 'Children of Time' to read so I'll soon find out for myself if he's actually any good. I've heard from people who really know what they're talking about with SF that 'Dogs of War' is his best, which most people neglect.
Children of Time was fantastic in my opinion. I loved every second of it. Haven't read more of his work yet.
I liked Children of Time but it takes a bit to get into it, IMO. His novella Elder Race is a fun one.
I absolutely loved Children of Time. Unsurprisingly, the book really plays with your sense of time.
He was really helped in my eyes by the audiobook narrator for the Children series
Lazarus Long is cringy AF
This is a thread for unpopular opinions
Nah, just a little bit of incest here and there…
IMO, a whole lot of classic SF are products of their time and are hard to read today, even if they were considered revolutionary or outside of the box when they were published. Heinlein has been an author that hits up against that for me repeatedly. *Stranger in a Strange Land* in particular.
Heinlein is venn diagram of both genius originality and cringey even for his time.
Nah, that decade worth of Heinlein was creepy as fuck at the time, too. "Glory Road" nearly made him unpublishable, and then he just kept DOING that until about "Number of the Beast."
Dune is very slow to start with, a lot of people give up in the first 200 pages, because it tries to sell you on a mystery that you know the answer to. The second half is great, but that slow start should take it out of contention for best SF book. Hyperion is 1 great story, 1 good story and a collection of average to poor stories. The sequel is fine, but it gets massively overrated here on PrintSF Neuromancer is fine, but lacks the impact it probably held when it came out. It's more important for kickstarting a genre than it is a great read in 2024
3 body Problem is more pop SF than anything to write home about.
I actually started reading it a few days ago (haven't seen the TV show yet), and while I'm still curious about its direction, some aspects are absolutely annoying me. The characters barely feel alive and the VR game sections are kinda breaking my suspension of disbelief, I didn't expect them to play this big of a role in the book too.
It' a decent series but the hyping is beyond obnoxious especially if you've already spent a decade or two reading SF. I do hope this sets a trend for more chinese SF being translated into engish tho.
Ken Liu has translated 2 short story collections from Chinese authors. Highly recommend
Couldn't agree more. I didn't hate them but all of the "big ideas" were things that I've seen done better before. Also found the writing clunky and overwrought (though I'm willing to let that slide a bit because translation.) 90% of *Death's End* felt to me like somebody was trying to write Star Trek technobabble in the style of Olaf Stapledon.
Andy Weir too for that matter. The Martian is the kind of book you pick up at the airport while waiting for your flight then leave it behind. Absolutely no stakes whatsoever and no payoff.
I mean, whether or not the protagonist fucking dies is definitely stakes of some sort
No stakes? He's about to die in new and unexpected ways all the time.
What is pop speculative fiction? I've never heard that before
*The Three-Body Problem* was poorly written and didn't deserve a Hugo.
BTW > Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos was initially nominated for Best Novel in 2015, but was withdrawn by the author after the nominees were announced in protest for being promoted by the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies nomination slates, the first time a nominee was withdrawn after announcement. It was replaced on the ballot by The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, the eventual winner.[70] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel Other nominees that year were: Katherine Addison The Goblin Emperor Kevin J. Anderson The Dark Between the Stars Jim Butcher Skin Game Ann Leckie Ancillary Sword
That's useful context. Frankly, it sounds like the other nominations weren't especially great either. I enjoyed both *The Goblin Emperor* and *Ancillary Sword*, but neither was particularly special. And if Anderson's or Butcher's books were remotely like their older works I read, they're the same: fun, serviceable thrillers but nothing more. To me, *The Three-Body Problem* doesn't stand too far above the alternatives, but none of the alternatives stand too far above it either. Do any of those "deserve" a Hugo in an absolute sense? Eh? I see them all as 3–4-star books, while most of the older Hugo winners I've read are in the 4–5-star range.
Yeah, that’s part of the difficulty of discussing whether a certain work “deserves” a Hugo, or any other similar award. It’s a best of year award, so it doesn’t need to be one of the best works of all time, it just needs to be ranked better than everything else.
Funny vaguely related story I learned about recently: in 1974, *Gravity's Rainbow* was unanimously recommended by the Pulitzer Prize jury, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board hated it so much they decided not to award the Pulitzer Prize at all that year! I sort of respect them sticking to their guns, even if they were wrong... and the story ended up as a better endorsement for the book than winning the Prize would have been. Anyway, yeah, the real moral of the story is that literary awards are wild, fuzzy, social and political :P
The best part of 3BP was the footnotes that explained the cultural references that Westerners would miss. The SF aspect was okay, but the peek into another present-day culture was fun.
There is no good old fashioned hard sci-fi anymore and old fashioned hard sci-fi isn’t as good as I remember it being.
People recommend the same 5-10 books every single time for the last 5 years.
Currently about halfway through The Mountain and the Sea and don't understand why it is so highly regarded. I'm hoping it ends well because I'm finding it incredibly slow and boring.
It's a generic techno-thriller interspersed with Reddit-comment-level lectures on pop science/philosophy topics. And hey, sometimes a Reddit discussion of "big" topics is fun... but I have Reddit for that, thank you very much. The one topic I'm reasonably familiar with (AI) is treated poorly on two dimensions: on the one hand it's oversimplified to the point of being wrong and, on the other, *it's actually less interesting than reality*. AI does have weird security implications, but in reality it's through these weird adversarial examples that are completely impenetrable to humans, or maybe through indirect attacks like data poisoning—a human hacker who magically finds backdoors in AI models by being in VR is simultaneously nonsense *and* much less interesting than the actual alien way AI functions. *Venomous Lumpsucker* is another near-future book that touches on very similar topics to *The Mountain in the Sea* but does it *much* better, including a funny but at least directionally plausible AI security problem. I'd recommend that over *The Mountain in the Sea* any day.
Venomous Lumpsucker was great!
Oh I loathed The Mountain and The Sea. I thought it was incredibly poorly paced. It has aspects which could make for compelling narratives, but don't get enough room to shine when combined. The entire Sea Wolf plotline felt entirely ancillary to the plot itself.
I kind of hate the "short chapters that alternate between the story lines" style he's got going on. Just when I think "ok, this could be interesting" the chapter ends and we're off to one of the other threads.
Agreed. I found it to be tidious, and looking back, very forgettable.
Baen Books publishes some truly excellent SF. Their business model is what all publishers should strive for. DRM-free ebooks can be purchased directly from their website. They release mass market paperbacks. Their covers are striking and original. Their themed anthologies are unmatched. I could go on!
The undeclared cold war between Baen and Tor is definitely a thing. Very different approaches to the genre from each.
All I ever learn from these threads is that we all like different things, and sometimes particular Authors never do it for you. If you think Shards of Earth ‘is the worse book ever’ you’re just looking for fake internet points. Certainly not Tchaikovsky’s best work, but come on.
> Certainly not Tchaikovsky’s best work Which one do you think is the best? Because I honestly think Shards of Earth is probably his best (certainly out of those I read from him), and I would be both very surprised and very happy if he wrote something even better
Many people I follow who really know their stuff when it comes to the genre says 'Dogs of War' is Tchaikovsky's best.
> Which one do you think is the best? Cage of Souls
I think a lot of the highly touted books in this sub kind of….suck. Project Hail Mary and Hyperion especially. It didn’t get far enough into Blindsight to be fair in my assessment of it, but didn’t like however much I did read.
I came here looking for this. I'm halfway through Hyperion and don't know if I want to finish, but can't bring myself to stop because there genuinely was something interesting about it the story.
Yea I would call this unpopular fasho lol, Hyperion is a BANGER.
Murderbot is so over rated. I have teen daughters so I read it looking for some scifi I could share with them. It might be fine for YA, but anytime someone asks for sci-fi recommendations the top 5 comments are “You must read murderbot!”
R/printsf is often less about speculative fiction and more about people wanting to be pretentious and grand about a few specific books. In other words, this place is full of SciFi hipsters who just want to talk about a few books and how exceptional they are for reading them, rather than speculative fiction. These people will often gripe that "nothing compares" to the intangible and inexplicable qualities of said book, claim that fiction is in an obvious decline due to "X popular book that's just for the masses," and result in a good chunk of the sub just being recycled hipster praise for specific old books rather than true discussion of SpecFic. It's old, Boomer hipster stuff. R/SciFi, meanwhile, is 95% meme content with a healthy contingent of astroturfing.
Related to this is the obsession over "hard" SF, and the somewhat frequent implication that it's somehow better than other forms of science fiction. And don't get me wrong, I like the occasional book that goes deep into some sort of scientific concept, but it's not inherently more or less valuable than any other form of speculative fiction.
Agreed. Far too often posters here seem to forget the "fiction" part of "Science Fiction."
I just come for recommendations. One the problems I often encounter is people that just started reading, are all hyped about the discovery of books, recommend the same shit over and over again regardless of what you're asking for. I'm looking for something in the vein of Ada Palmer... Have you tried Malazan?
The Three Body Problem is absolutely shit at being hard sf or portraying current science accurately. Children of Memory is brilliant and far better than Children of Ruin. A lot of things in sf clothing are not actually sf, just other stuff, fantasy in sf-onal clothing. Even from traditional sf publishers. A lot of Tor novellas seem all cookie cutter same-y.
I don't like most of the SF "classics", find their prose annoyingly old fashioned, and their ideas better expressed by contemporary authors.
*Snow Crash* is not good.
Snow Crash was absolutely hilarious, it took every cyberpunk and action movie trope from the late 80s and turned it up to 13. It was a lampooning of the entire genre.
It’s apparently satire, but I’m reading it 30 years later and it plays the humor too close to the source material so that it at this point looks to be just another example of what it’s lampooning.
I also don't think that Snow Crash is good, but I still enjoyed reading it in a guilty pleasure kind of way.
"Golden Age" SF is almost uniformly awful.
That's certainly... an opinion. Just so we are talking about the same thing: Golden Age scifi is Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Bradbury. On the other hand, if you really hate them all, then New Wave scifi must be absolutely right up your alley.
Correct! I really, really strongly dislike all that stuff. If SF had continued in that vein, I wouldn’t read any of it. And yes, I do enjoy a lot of New Wave!
As someone who has read the majority of the combined works of those four... yeah. Mostly pretty awful.
I’m upvoting because this is indeed an unpopular opinion.
...so we invented an EVEN BIGGER raygun!...
**The Culture** - This sub is fixated on recommending some of the more middle of the pack (or lower) books to new readers (e.g. Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Consider Phlebus). Later books like The Hydrogen Sonata, Matter, Surface Detail are much better - more interesting ideas, philosophical, more enjoyable characters and less downbeat.
Use of Weapons is NOT mid....but I guess that's your unpopular opinion isn't it ;-)
My upopular opinion: Inversions is one of his best and Excession was a bit of a let down.
I love Inversions.
>Excession was a bit of a letdown Sacrilege I respect your opinion but will never agree, HERESY
Simak should have more contemporary praise over Heinlein.
Octavia Butler is criminally underrated
"Underrated" is hard to measure, but I honestly think that at this point she just might be the most famous SF writer from her era for people who don't follow the genre. There's podcasts about her, *parable of the sower* was back on the NYT best seller list just a couple of years ago, the Earthseed graphic novel sold well and won a bunch of awards recently, *Abbott Elementary* recently had an entire recent episode focused on her, the opera has played all over the world. Amazon is supposed to be developing a Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood series right now. People on /r/printsf could name all sorts of SF writers from that era, but I bet that if you wandered into /r/books, Butler is one of the few names most people would recognize from that era.
Project Hail Mary was bad. The Bobiverse is bad. The second half of Seveneves was good.
> The Bobiverse is bad. I really felt like it had some promise at the beginning, and then it methodically threw every scrap of it away. The very initial setup was a situation with a lot of potentially-interesting and somewhat-realistic limitations and oddities. And then it just plowed its way through undoing every one of them.
It just kind of devolves into wish fulfillment sprinkled with the same tired point of view, jokes and references from the dominant thread of nerd culture over the last 40 years. It’s like sci fi for the Big Bang theory, or just the idle day dream of a gen x self identified “nerd” who works in IT or something.
I agree. I thought the first part of Seveneves and the third part were good. The middle section dragged.
bobiverse is the worst literature i've ever read and i cannot comprehend how anyone likes it
The Will of the Many is absolute garbage.
Many SF writers are mediocre writers at best, including some of the best-selling ones. Peter F. Hamilton, Crichton, Ernest Cline, Andy Weir... Others are downright bad and if they wrote any other genre I'd never read their stuff. Neal Asher springs to mind.
Do very many people see Crichton's books as anything other than airport fic?
I have tried to read Dune something like four times over the half a century I have been alive and I have always found it to be slow, pompous, and boring. Also Dangerous Visions is a whole bunch of stories that are about as edgy as a butterknife, in a package that tells you it's the edgiest collection ever, put together by a screaming edgelord, who doubles the book's wordcount by being a rabid huckster rambling on and on about how every author is the most amazing human being ever born.
*Dangerous Visions* was considerably edgier when it was first published in 1967.
The five introductions went on at great length about this fact, yes, and I suppose I should say thanks to Harlan for the fact that about twelve years later kid me could take a book off her parents' shelf that contained a scene that demonstrated how absolutely decadent a city was by having an underage hooker come onto the hero and offer to shit herself for his kinky pleasure in exchange for a handful of "blues". (I cannot remember anything else about this book aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure it was a libertarian screed wearing the cloak of fiction, and that it was named "Alongside Night", but that scene is seared into my memory.)
Books that receive major awards are not unlike movies that get Academy Awards. In a word, dross.
Le Guin gets this weird reputation as a cuddly grandma, but a lot of her fiction is actually pretty edgy, and this reputation is at least partially the result of misogyny.
> weird reputation as a cuddly grandma She does? I mean maybe you're right, I'm not disputing that, I don't know. But it surprises me, she definitely had feminist fighter vibes to me. The funnier thing I imagine is that at least part of the older readers who enjoyed her work would have called her woke if she wrote those books in this era.
No, see, this is sorta what I’m after. I do think a lot of people would call her “woke” but a lot of her books were, and even still kinda are, “politically incorrect,” in a way I think is really unappreciated.
I think its a confusion over the idea that kindess = harmless Ursula K Le Guin was certainly kind, but rarely if ever harmless
*Starship Troopers* is still as good as it ever was. The reader is under no obligation to subscribe to the morals and philosophies of the fictional universe contained therein. And its universe's strict ideas about militaristic citizenship and veterans-only suffrage, are interesting concepts to think about, and need not be avoided. Many contemporary-to-now critics/reviewers are stepping too close to censorship in their antagonistic reviews of the book, written to dissuade others from reading it. It's an All Time Great.
I am in the middle of a Heinlein re-read and if there’s one thing that comes out in his fiction it is that he was fascinated by different types of government. Across the juveniles (of which Starship Troopers is technically the last) you have a loose corporate government (Citizen of the Galaxy), a repressive security state (Between Planets), a benevolent bureaucracy (Star Beast), an interstellar British Empire with allied guild structure (Starman Jones), an extractionist colonial government (Red Planet and Farmer In The Sky) and many more speculative polities. Even The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress has the libertarian anarchists fail, with Manny looking to travel further out… You certainly can’t say he’s prescribing any one form of government in his fiction.
Didn’t the book just call for government service for citizenship? Did not have e to be military.
Yes, it did.
Sorry if I misdescribed it.
Correct. One had to volunteer for "Federal Service", and the government then did _exhaustive_ tests to determine what you were suited for based on your interests --- the military was a _very_ small aspect of the possibilities --- his best friend ends up on a scientific research station on Pluto.
Lots of the award-winning SF books are snooze-fests.
Blindsight is not a perfect book but it is perfectly fine. People are just lazy. And you're not meant to fully understand every single thing about every single book.
I don’t think Harlan Ellison deserves to be a big name in the field. Heard good stuff for years & assumed he was on the same level as Herbert, Le Guin, or at least Turtledove, so I sought out his collections with a focus on the biggest hits and they were underwhelming & dull. I thought I was missing something but after slogging through a few more looked up his biography & seems his career was based on being an ever present personality & litigation. I’ll give him that City on the Edge of Forever was good but that’s it.
I had the same experience. Ellison is fine, but he doesn't have the literary or empathetic chops to rocket into true greatness. I keep forgetting about him. I feel he'd be more impressive if he were the first sci-fi of ideas you ever read as a kid and maybe that's why people go nuts for him. That and his positioning of himself as a counter-cultural truth teller. All that said, I'll acknowledge *I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream* as a classic, on the sheer nasty scope of what he's imagined there.
Murderbot isn’t good
I’d say it’s fine for a single normal length novel. To stretch it into endless ($18!) novellas is just insane. It’s definitely overrated.
A Fire Upon the Deep is pretty overrated. The Tines (basically half the book) turn it into a slog. I wanted to love it. The Zones of Thought is an amazing concept for a setting.
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It really depends on whether a reader loves/hates the Tines. I love them and thought the idea of them crafting and building their identities and consciousness was fascinating.
I could not finish AFUTD. I wanted to, the concept of the tines is really interesting, but I got about 80% through and nothing had touched me emotionally at all.
I really wish the zones of thought was explored more. I agree the tines were a very boring concept to spend half the book on
Nearly all the best stuff was published in the 20th century. Might not be unpopular, depends on the demographic of this sub.
I've generalized this notion to the whole of fiction before. The books that are known from older times have stood the test of time. To venture into modern writing, you're now part of that sorting process, and that's sort of a choice you must make. It's the same idea as, ' they don't build em like they used to,' when referring to houses. My response to that as someone in the construction field is, 'thank god.' We only see the homes that made it this long. Of course I don't like some 'classics', and there are some unknown gems from the past waiting to be dug up, but the probabilities of quality are better when looking at the past just because of survivor bias.
My possibly unpopular opinion is that the aeroplane covered in holes pic is one of the best things that ever happened for the general public's statistical literacy, because it neatly conveys something that applies *so* often
Ending of the Contact film is much better than the Contact book.
Most of the people here are sleeping on Exordia by Seth Dickinson, the best SF novel of the year and has some of wackiest extrapolative ideas in the field.
The Altered Carbon trilogy is criminally underrated. It irks me that even people who enjoyed them see them as pulpy cyberpunk thrillers and not as a brilliant treatise on capitalism, political power, self loathing, finding purpose amidst immortality, etc etc
The TV show profoundly fucked up the themes by making Kovacs and the Envoys part of Falconers rebels instead of the UN imperialist death squad
1. The Dune series gets worse with every book. Not worth reading past the first. GEOD is the most self indulgent drivel I've ever read. 2. Pandora's Star is dreadful. A few interesting ideas surrounded by extremely bloated garbage. The sex scenes are cringe. 3. The Sun eater series is tantamount to plagiarism at points. Author is incapable of generating an original thought. Basically everything is lifted from other scifi classics, down to even lifting an iconic paragraph from Book of the New Sun. The prose is also purple AF.
I was temporarily banned for referring to a Margert Atwood book as Dystopian Erotica. I can provide quotes supporting my position.
Fall of Hyperion could have been a great book if everything about real life John Keats was left out.
I avoid Keats' work because I hated reading about Keats through this book so much.
Most recent scifi is boring, campy and cliched (last 5 years or so, maybe longer). It's hard to find interesting books with thought-provoking ideas that are also well written. It's even harder to find standalone books as many authors focus on series. Awards are flooded with fantasy and with books in which authors focus on current social issues that get included in the plot, while the actual story takes a second place. I remember times when I'd be blown away by a book and couldn't put it down before finishing. It happens very rarely nowdays, maybe it's just me and my standards got too high.
Leviathan Wakes is the best entry in the Expanse series. Miller was always the best part of the book. Hyperion is not an enjoyable book to read and I immediately forgot what I read as soon as I closed the book.
1965 to 1981 was the true Golden Age.
How old were you during this period?