Sci-fi, hold the fantasy

June 17, 2023 10:19 PM

I need book recommendations! One of my favorite genres is science fiction, but only hard sci-fi and speculative fiction, NO FANTASY. Trying to find a regular source of book recs is tricky because they all seem to include fantasy. Any recommendations?

I have enjoyed: Andy Weir, the first 3/4 of Seveneves, Version Control, The Punch Escrow, Six Wakes, Never Let Me Go. (I also love Murderbot of course, but "space battles" aren't my favorite.) Bonus points for near-future tech, unreliable narrators, literary fiction, and generation starships. Even more bonus points if you can find me a source of ongoing science fiction book recommendations that excludes fantasy. Thanks!

posted by Threeve to Media & Arts (37 answers total)

You would probably enjoy Andrei Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which involves space travel and relativity and insectoid civilizations. It's the first of a trilogy.
posted by suelac at 10:47 PM on June 17, 2023 [14 favorites]

The three body problem
Hyperion
posted by christiehawk at 11:22 PM on June 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
posted by cadge at 11:51 PM on June 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

The Expanse series.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 1:11 AM on June 18, 2023 [18 favorites]

I really enjoyed Elizabeth Bear's
Ancestral Night (White Space series) reas. hard scifi with a lot of humanity, and well-developed sentient machines.

Daniel Wilson's (Cherokee Nation) Robopocalypse (I think there's three books), is very enjoyable (horrifying at many point too), and weaves native American culture thru. books. Some very intriguging ideas on a sentience becoming aware of the climate change threat. Set now.

I'd like a recc. source too so will watch this thread.
posted by unearthed at 1:33 AM on June 18, 2023

I really enjoyed the Bobiverse series.
posted by gible at 2:14 AM on June 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Expanse, Madadam
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:48 AM on June 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Iain M Banks' Culture novels

maybe Ursula LeGuin's Hainish cycle

Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts is a generation ship story without fantasy
posted by kokaku at 2:55 AM on June 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

oh, and Sea of Rust
posted by kokaku at 2:56 AM on June 18, 2023

On the more literary end of the science fiction spectrum:
Rivers Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts for your generation ship request; on preview, seconding kokaku!)
Nick Harkaway (Gnomon in particular for the near-future tech, though I love The Gone Away World too)
Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Empire/A Desolation of Peace)
Emily St John Mandel (try Sea of Tranquility to start)
Klara and the Sun by Ishiguro
Samuel Delany (anything but Dahlgren, which is great but not what you're looking for)
Octavia Butler (the Xenogenesis series in particular)
The Strugatsky Brothers (start with Roadside Picnic)

Strongly seconding from above:
The Sparrow
Children of Time series
The Expanse series
Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake and its sequels)

Fun sci-fi without fantasy:
John Scalzi (I'm sure you know about him, but still worth mentioning)
Sarah Gailey's The Echo Wife (I love her other books too but don't think they meet your criteria)
Emma Newman's Planetfall series
Micaiah Johnson's The Space Between Worlds
Drew Magary
Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon series

For sources:
My best source of book recommendations is here! Otherwise, I tend to look at NPR, NYPL, NYT and similar orgs'/papers' reviews/best of lists and also keep an eye on the other prize lists (both literary like the Booker and sci-fi like the Hugos and Nebulas) to see what's come out recently that seems interesting.
posted by snaw at 2:57 AM on June 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series is very good. Chasm City is set in that universe but can be read as a stand alone book and part of the plot is set aboard a generation ship.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:37 AM on June 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Following because I feel exactly the same way about my sci-fi. From suggestions I’ve seen above I loved Arkady Martine’s books and The Expanse series (which I think is some of the best hard sci-fi ever). Would also add Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, which I absolutely tore through and loved (specifically the Ancillary books, haven’t read the others in the universe but mean to).
posted by malthas at 4:58 AM on June 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

Solaris
Contact
most Crichton, for popcorny trash (I criticize because I love)

have you seen my question here

I did read the Expanse and start on Neal Stephenson after asking that question and both recommendations were accurate and I've liked the a lot. Kim Stanley Robinson wasn't for me. I read Old Man's War and the sci fi part was nice but I wasn't into the war part. I've never been able to get into Greg Bear. My question was also about non-book media, and I had seen most of what had been recommended in that thread; I watched the Netflix show Travelers and adored it.
posted by phunniemee at 5:04 AM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

THE THREE BODY PROBLEM
PROJECT HAIL MARY
posted by kbanas at 5:32 AM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've read several books by Peter Watts and enjoyed them all. He's a former marine biologist and his books often focus on biological and psychological themes. Blindsight and Echopraxia are related novels set in space during a first-contact event. Starfish (part of the Rifters trilogy) is set in a deep underwater station run by augmented humans.

You can find the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight for free on his website: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
posted by apparatchik at 6:00 AM on June 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

You might like Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, one of which the movie Arrival was based off of. He seems really good at coming up with a concept (a treatment to increase intelligence, or we meet aliens who have a strange language, or you can animate golems with words) and then doing a deep dive into how that would work and the implications on the world.
posted by cali59 at 7:22 AM on June 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

Stanislaw Lem’s work, particularly Solaris and The Futurological Congress are great works of hard SF with unreliable narrator and literary aspects.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:23 AM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Tade Thompson's Rosewater is fantastic. From a Guardian review (which I won't link because of mild plot spoilers): "This expertly judged cyberpunk-biopunk-Afropunk thriller is set in Nigeria in the aftermath of an alien invasion."
posted by hovey at 10:34 AM on June 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

Pretty much anything by Kim Stanley Robinson. His Mars trilogy is an excellent place to start.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:13 AM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think in terms of authors more than titles:
Metafilter's own Charlie Stross. Not all of his stuff is hard SF, but the stuff that is, is diamond-hard.
Bruce Sterling.
Vernor Vinge. See especially Rainbows End.
William Gibson, naturally.
Annalee Newitz' Autonomous
Ian McDonald's Luna series
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower. A little too real, and utterly devastating.
posted by adamrice at 12:03 PM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and John Varley come first to mind for me. The last's The Ophiuchi Hotline is an epitome of hard science fiction still.
posted by y2karl at 3:34 PM on June 18, 2023

One book that I think fits the bill and would love more people to read because it knocked my socks off is The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.

If you do read it, MeMail me because I've been dying to have a conversation about this book for three years!
posted by Kitteh at 3:40 PM on June 18, 2023

More suggestions:

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (cw: pandemic stuff)
The Terraformers by Annalee Newlitz
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (cw: also pandemic stuff)
The Warehouse by Rob Hart

CTRL+F "Vorkosigan" - No results
All of the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold

I wish I had a good source of recommendations.
posted by jeoc at 4:21 PM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just because his name is only on here once, Ted Chiang, Ted Chiang, and Ted Chiang :) There's an audiobook of his Exhalation collection of short stories that has he himself explaining the influences that jump-started a particular story, and those often (if not always?) include influences among scientists. Like literally "the way the math works if time travel is at all possible..." or "you can kind of think of food as digesting order and excreting randomness..." kind of thoughts.

That being said, you already know the words I would suggest "Hard sci-fi" and "speculative fiction."
posted by adekllny at 4:29 PM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

So many fantastic books already mentioned! I'd like to propose The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal.
posted by It Was Capitalism All Along at 4:46 PM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series (includes generational starship).
posted by Kriesa at 5:04 PM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

No one has mentioned David Brin yet... the Uplift Saga. He won a couple of Hugos and a couple of Nebulas in the 1980s for various books in the Uplift Saga. There are six books in all, starting with Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War. He has plenty of other books. Like several of the other authors cited here, he started his career as a scientist with a PhD in Astronomy.
posted by BlueTongueLizard at 5:16 PM on June 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I found "To Sleep in a Sea of Stars" by Christopher Paolini to be very good speculative science fiction. Mind you, it's over 800 pages plus an Addendum. It reminded me somewhat of Dune, in so far as there is a dense fabric of galactic history, wars, races, alliances and intrigue. It's like that old line about any sufficiently advanced civilization's everyday life being basically magic to us. However it is not fantasy. Another comparison I would make would be to The Fifth Element in so far as humans stumbling into something way over their pay grade. Full disclosure: Paolini became famous writing the Inheritance series of fantasy novels, but (in my opinion) this book shows that he's not a one trick author. Of course, read the reviews.
posted by forthright at 5:23 PM on June 18, 2023

John Varley, the Gaia trilogy. I have heard that his Eight Worlds stories, which seem to be the largest part of his work, are also very good.

I don't have enough good words to say about Arkady Martine's work.
posted by lhauser at 5:41 PM on June 18, 2023

Your interests sound very similar to mine, but I have a soft spot for time-travel, time-loop, groundhog-day, and if you remove those you get a lot of post-apocalyptic spec-fic. A few favorites that you* didn't mention:

Wool, Hugh Howey
The Peripheral, William Gibson
Greenwood, Michael Christie
Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr
The Last Policeman, Ben Winters
The City Where We Once Lived, Eric Barnes
The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
The City and the City, China Miéville
Saturn Run, John Sandford
The Leftovers, Tom Perrota

and, not scifi, but my favorite book this year:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

* - and that were not mentioned above... enthusiastically seconding: The Sparrow, Children of Time, and The The Space Between Worlds.
posted by pjenks at 7:08 PM on June 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

On the subject of Charlie Stross if you’re looking to avoid the horror/fantasy bits I’d would then start with Halting State and Rule 34.

Also Paulo Bacigalupi has written some good stuff, I particularly enjoyed The Water Knife.
posted by mce at 9:54 AM on June 19, 2023

Response by poster: Thank you all! I will report back on my selections so keep them coming. I've read and enjoyed a lot of these: Gnomon, Ted Chiang, Ben Winters, Becky Chambers, Margaret Atwood.

I do love time travel (and How to Lose the Time War). Michael Crichton was my jam as a kid and probably what got me into the genre. Since we haven't come up with recommendation sources I will say the Big Idea series on John Scalzi's blog is my best source for this; I just ignore the fantasy recs.

@adekllny, whenever I look for lists of "speculative fiction" I inevitably get reams of fantasy. Near-future gets me closer but that's not really a category a lot of book sites use.
posted by Threeve at 9:56 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just google for "science fiction books " and I get lists of the science fiction novels coming out this year.
posted by jeoc at 6:30 PM on June 19, 2023

Watt's Blindsight, and pretty much everything he writes; hard sci-fi, touch of horror.

Going fluffy, the Bobiverse, Becky Chambers' stuff, or anything by Scalzi, probably starting with Old Man's War.
posted by talldean at 1:49 PM on June 23, 2023

fwiw I would *not* recommend john varley's 'gaia' series -- the first half of the first book is hard SF but it then becomes ever-increasingly absurd. i mean, there are centaurs pretty early on.

if someone here wants to defend the the third book -- in which an omnipotent god becomes obsessed with mid-20th-century hollywood movies, well . . . i'd love to hear it
posted by mookieproof at 11:53 PM on June 24, 2023

Semiosis, by Sue Burke was quite fun, especially the audiobook version.
posted by TheCoug at 7:55 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've just borrowed Stolen Earth [Penguin link] - JT Nicholas, and it's very good so far. Zero fantasy, low/no gratuitous violence common to much so-called hard sci (e.g. Expanse), main protagonists have a feel like the crew of Corey's Rocinante.

Stolen is a lighter read (but a real page turner) focussing more on relationships in stressful space/s, hidden agendas, and very good prose re AI's as sentiences and the hazards thereof. Only half way through so can't speak of the ending.
posted by unearthed at 11:17 PM on June 27, 2023