New hard SF recommendations?

[danaeris]

My dad the curmudgeon is always on the lookout for science fiction to read. He tends to prefer hard scifi because he has difficulty trying to suspend his disbelief, but well written scifi of any kind can work for him.

I know he loved the alien invasion WWII series by Harry Turtledove. He's currently rereading Green Mars. He liked William Gibson, most of Peter Hamilton, Richard Morgan (although he found it a little bloody), and he mostly likes Iain Banks (except he feels that there's too much Deus ex Machina in the recent books). He liked Cryptonomicon, but not the books that followed afterwards.

Edited to add:
If it's classic, he's probably read it. He's been reading SF longer than most of us have been alive -- he celebrates his 71st on the 30th and started reading scifi when he was about 12, back when HG Wells and Jules Verne were about all there was.

So, he's more looking for recent/new authors he may not know about.

Comments

[jadia.livejournal.com]

The classic hard sf is, of course, Hal Clement. I really liked Mission of Gravity.

I also recently enjoyed Haldeman's Forever War and also Forever Peace.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Alas, if it's classic, he's probably read it.

[yaksman.livejournal.com]

Has he read David Weber's Honor Harrington books?

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth Moon's still writting stuff. It's not DEEP SF, but decent space military thrillers with threads of politics running throughout. It doesn't take much suspension, just an acceptance of FTL travel and (rather expensive and interruptable) communications.

I totally agree about Banks, btw.

[mytheria.livejournal.com]

If he hasn't read them yet, Lois McMaster Bujold has a series called The Vorkosigan Saga. Has the feel of classic militarty space opera and good character development.

SF

[admiralthrawn.livejournal.com]

John Scalzi: Old Man's War/Ghost Brigades/Last Colony

I'll second the comment above that the Harrington series by Weber is good, though it is more space opera than hard sf.

If he branches off into fantasy at all, Naomi Novik's books are excellent.

Anything by Bujold.

[stiltwalker.livejournal.com]

I'm a fan of Vernor Vinge's "Fire upon the deep" and "Deepness in the sky".

I'd also heartily recommend Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap series, which starts with "The Real Story". Very nitty gritty hard space sci-fi. Very in-depth characters as well as intimate details of life as a space miner/salvager/outlaw. As in "oh, I felt a rough vibration when I touched the bulkhead... do you realize your artificial gravity spin bearings are about to seize up?" and a homebrew MacGuyver-like trick for coaxing another few hours out of a ships catalytic CO2 scrubber. It's a very well-thought-out universe; technically, economically, socially, militarily, and politically.

[foms.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macgyver

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guyver

[stiltwalker.livejournal.com]

:P

Heh, I watched about half an hour of "The Guyver" on cable late one night. Mark Hamill looked creepily strung out. I couldn't tell if he was acting.

And Jimmy Walker was in it! He never yelled "Dy-No-MIIIITE!!" tho. Not during the time I was watching anyway.

[lariel.livejournal.com]

the Gap series has a lot of creepy rape/sex/mindgames stuff in it, as well, however; this might be a bit much for some.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

i liked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Bridge_(book)

it's delicious alternate-history-time-travel-particle-physics-science-fiction :)

[dragontdc.livejournal.com]

I've been reading David Weber and John Ringo (and some of their collaborations). Good military sci-fi.

[yaksman.livejournal.com]

I enjoy a lot of John Ringo, but I would hesitate to recommend some of it to Daneris' father.

[lariel.livejournal.com]

I just recently read some books by Julie Czerneda, which were good, and Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter, which was also good. He may well be familiar with these authors, however.

[blueelf13.livejournal.com]

Greg Egan, and Charles Stross are recommended by Jbash. Some of Stross's stuff is online and you can read it for free. http://www.accelerando.org/ is his.

I would have suggested Stephen Baxter also, and Vernor Vinge as well, and like Greg Egan.

I know warren likes Julie Czerneda but haven't read any myself.

[earthdragon.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth Bear: Hammered, Scardown & Worldwired
Post cyber punk about someone who lived fast but did not die young.

You might like Dust and some of her other stuff too, but I'm not sure about your dad.

[vsbooklady.livejournal.com]

You could try James White's Sector General stories, & *definitely* Neal Asher's stuff, esp. "The Skinner."
let us know what he thinks of your recs!

My latest two...

[happypete.livejournal.com]

Picoverse, though I found a few bits somewhat contrived a bit too far from the underlying science, and Spin, which is so far [about 2/3rds in] still rocking my pretty little socks off.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Variable Star by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson, in case he missed that one, came out recently.

[asfi.livejournal.com]

I hugely enjoyed reading Karl Schroeder's first two novels in the Virga series, being Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce. The third book, Pirate Sun is coming out in a couple of weeks. Squeeee!!

Joe Haldeman's recent novel Camouflage proves that he still writes very well.

Wil McCarthy has written a series of novels involving "programmable matter".....it starts with The Collapsium.

Allen Steele's Coyote novels, which are near-future stories of humankind's first interstellar colony, are a real treat too.

And how could I leave out Robert Charles Wilson's Spin?