The best hard science fiction books

Romance and love are of course great inducements to time travel, and have animated many a time travel novel and series. I like The Mindtraveler the best. It combines the struggle for true love with an astute knowledge of physics, a keen eye for the academic landscape, and a witty sense of humor.

Jazz Bashara, Andy Weir’s bad-ass female MC in Artemis, is one of my favorite female sci-fi protagonists of all time. Jazz is a “moon-girl” who makes her living on the Moon’s first city by using her job as a porter to smuggle contraband onto rocket deliveries via a childhood pal on Earth. An apostate Muslim, Jazz is wicked smart, funny as hell, and has a morale code that defies logic yet, somehow, makes complete sense. Weir brings his signature sense of humor to this character without dumbing her down or sexing her up. He takes us on a great adventure as she blows things up, especially her relationships, and then tries to repair the damage without getting deported from the Moon or, worse yet, disappointing her father. 

It is not possible to talk about “galactic empires” in SF and not naming/checking Asimov’s masterpieces. Asimov describes in breathtaking detail a highly complex yet credible and vivid universe and follows its evolution and the struggles in a historical buildup, encompassing several novels. Expect to feel like watching History Channel of the Future: you will see an empire rise, swell outward, stabilize, destabilize, fall, experience a Dark Age that lasts 30,000 years, and then rise again. Asimov based many of the details of his empire on the Romans, their history, and their Empire. Impossible not to feel how real his Galaxy thus becomes: here and there you will have the sensation that something familiar is unfolding in front of your eyes… if you have studied classics and history, that is. Asimov’s Galactic Empire is thus recognizable and with a familiar shape, and at the same time, it is the epitome… show more.

Several other lists mention this classic, but I had to as well, being one of my all-time favorites.

This is Asimov at his best, even better (IMHO) than the great Foundation series. What would it be like to control the timeline? What changes would you make in history for the betterment of humanity? If you had the power, would you risk it all to protect someone you love? 

When I met Joe Haldeman, I was struck by how such an unassuming, witty person could write such a gritty, visceral novel about war. Haldeman served in Vietnam, and (by his own admission) his combat experience shines through in Forever War. Yes, this novel captures combat in unflinching detail, but I’m a former professor of war, so what I really care about is the intriguing interplay of time, space, and war. As captured so well in the short story version of the novel, “Time Piece,” this novel is less about fighting and dying and more about what war over relativistic distances does to society. I love this novel because it says just as much about those who stay home as it does about those who go into combat.

When I was a kid I was very excited about wolves. Not in the sense that I knew a lot about wolves—I didn’t study them and learn about them—so much as I felt certain, in my heart of hearts, that if I met a wolf, we would understand each other in a way no two creatures ever have. Feed Them Silence is a book that returned me to that sense of certainty, but with a more fundamentally realistic understanding of the nature of animals as existing outside of human understanding. I couldn’t put it down, and the hours slipped right past me.

If you want to look for a precursor to the modern trend of retelling fairy stories as sci-fi novels, you could do worse than look at The Snow Queen, which unashamedly draws its inspiration from the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the same name. But to talk of Vinge’s novel in those terms is to do it a grave disservice. This is a brilliant example of someone using sci-fi’s fascination with technology and aliens as a mere backdrop to something else. Beyond space travel and intriguing devices, The Snow Queen is a love story, an examination of cultures (Vinge has a background in anthropology), and a poignant plea about the dangers of over-exploitation. Come to The Snow Queen for the writing alone. Even if you loathe sci-fi, I can almost guarantee you will love this.

After spending a few weeks on the Navajo lands in Northern Arizona in 1988, I wanted to write my book from the holistic and naturalistic perspective of a young Navajo who had worked for NASA and lived off the reservation for several years (loosely based on a friend of mine). As it turned out, Ben Bova got there ahead of me in 1992, sending a Navajo geologist on the first crewed mission to Mars. While he’s there, he makes a discovery that also ties into Navajo culture. I have always appreciated the worldview of the Navajo people, and characters with this perspective offer a different lens for interpreting Martian landscapes and the possibilities of a new frontier that can be settled without being destroyed by human activity.

Esen is a shapechanger, a young one. While exploring a world considered ‘safe’ by her matriarch, she is captured by the natives. Her only hope of rescue is to betray her species' strict rules and reveal her true nature to her fellow prisoner, a human.

I adore Esen as a character. She is very relatable. I also love the breadth and scope of species and habitats and worlds in this series. Julie Czerneda is one of my favorite authors. Her storytelling skills shine. Esen is definitely not human, but Czerneda creates such a warm character you can’t help but love her. Beholder’s Eye is part coming-of-age but mostly a darn good science fiction adventure.

Folks daunted at the prospect of jumping in to a longer series will be delighted to know that this is just a standalone novel. In fact, it was the only novel Walter M. Miller, Jr. wrote in his lifetime. There is a posthumously published sequel to this novel, but it was completed by another writer and is generally considered the lesser work, and at any rate, Canticle stands on its own. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, set after a nuclear war in the 1960s wiped out civilization. It takes place over the course of centuries, and follows a small Roman Catholic monastery in the American southwest as they struggle to preserve documents from before the bombs destroyed everything—scientific knowledge, mostly, knowledge the poor monks can’t even begin to understand.

This is one of the most beautifully written novels in the genre’s history, and one that—though I’ve only read it two… show more.

The fifth book on my list was a difficult choice; so many to exclude. I chose this because it is about the colonization of an alien world, in this case one tidally locked to a red dwarf. The description of the planet is good, although it begs the question of why the atmosphere did not freeze out on the dark side. I was struck by the highlighting of some of the sociological problems of colonizing such a strange world. It touches on the scientific aspects, the sociological aspects of being that far from home, and the economic issues. There is also a good story; I found it both entertaining and imaginative.

Egan is an Australian science fiction writer.

To my mind, he’s written better about AI than any other science fiction writer, because he takes it seriously. He recognizes it represents enormous change.

Permutation City is about a time in history when uploading becomes possible and very rich people can upload themselves into machines that operate quickly and in real time.

Poorer people have to upload themselves into machines that process very slowly and so they live very slow versions of life. 

Humans need imagination to help us see a way beyond or through problems.

This is exactly what Kim Stanley Robinson’s book provides for climate change. As someone who works in and writes about climate change every day, I found this book deeply optimistic and uplifting.

Stanley Robinson is a genius at creating a realistic political and social landscape, and his storytelling thread pulls you through what meaningfully halting climate change might look like. The first third of the book is very bleak—but hang in there.

The book is impactful because it is rooted in a beginning that feels so realistic—things will get worse before they get better. Stanley Robinson helped me see how small community projects can connect with global movements, how every person’s actions count, and how human ingenuity can be applied to this most ominous problem. 

I read this novel decades before I ever heard the term “prepper.” I particularly enjoyed the survival elements of the story. I can’t help noticing that the plot holds up, even today. The idea that someone could predict that war was coming from simply paying attention to the news and things going on around them fostered my own interest in keeping up with current events. Ultimately, the story is all about making the best of a bad situation. Even today, I still enjoy the inherent optimism of that sentiment.

You and I may already have one foot in this near-future world with its chilling look inside the warehouse of a retail giant: Amaz… uh, Cloud. The company is named Cloud. Can powerful bosses possibly be benign overlords? Is a miserable existence good enough in a wretched world? Hmm, maybe not.

I loved the characters – a reluctant hero and a cold-blooded spy who join forces as an unlikely couple searching for the truth behind a colossal global company. I never guessed the ending, and that's always a plus.

Rama is a spaceship, not a space station, but it's huge and ancient, and at first appears to be abandoned. Then the human explorers realize it's just sleeping. This is a prime example of science fiction's "sense of wonder" at the strangeness of the Universe. When I read it, at about age 14, it utterly blew me away with its combination of rock-hard science and utter weirdness. It also has the best final line ever.

In the 21st century, you occasionally hear about libertarian fantasies of floating island civilizations free from the pesky laws of nation-states.

They always bring me back to China Miéville’s pirate city of Armada, which is the opposite of a libertarian fantasy; it’s a city populated by the kidnapped, ruled by contentious factions, and steered through the seas with a weird purpose.

The Scar’s main character is a linguist, unsure if she’s been brought to Armada to put her own skills to use or as collateral damage in the kidnapping of another character, and unsure how to relate to a city that she’s growing more comfortable in even as she can’t forget it holds her prisoner.

Also everyone has to donate blood to feed the vampires. Socialism!

Good sweet lawd of mercy, if you want ass-kicking, read Marty Wilsey. Ass-kicking with guns? Yes. Ass-kicking with fists? Yes. Ass-kicking with blades? Yes. Ass-kicking with good writing? You better believe it. This is Wilsey’s debut book, and it opens up his breakneck-paced sci-fi repertoire. High recommended. 

Climate change aside, what scares me the most about technology today is the capacity for bioengineering to run amok.

What happens when scientists monkey around with deadly viruses—and one escapes from the lab? What if some rogue researcher creates an entirely new lifeform that proves toxic to humans? Or some experimental microbe—an effort to save the world’s butterflies, for instance—proves to kill off bees instead?

This novel, which won major awards, depicts a frightening future world wrought by bioengineering. And you wouldn’t want to live there anymore than I do. 

When I received Ninefox Gambit for Christmas, I have to say that I was blown away. What I loved the most about it wasn’t just that Yoon Ha Lee dropped me in the middle of a war and hit the ground running (from lazer blasts!) The tactician Shuos Jedao leads Cheris into an inner battle that turns out to be even more consequential than the war itself. And when finally the question arises of “who is right” in the conflict, something that the good soldier Cheris has never asked herself before, the answer depends on who’s answering. Cheris, like all of us, must decide for herself whether the secrets of Jedao’s past are true, or whether she’s having her strings pulled.