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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).

Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.

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The Three Body Problem is not even close to hard science fiction.

Three Body Problem in the book set the alien world in Alpha Centari, which is not a three body system.

Even a cursory analysis at the time of writing would have ruled out Alpha Centari.

It was shockingly bad research.

Never mind that; how about sentient (AI) protons?

The Sophons are actually more believable. Much has been discovered since the first book was written, and that was actually a very good guess.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-co...

I don't see how. Yes, protons are made out of quarks. No, this doesn't mean that you can "roll out" proton "like a sheet", and then "etch a circuit" (!!!) on it, quantum or otherwise.

Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet).

While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.

Proxima orbits at a great distance from the inner pair of stars, around their center of mass. Proxima is also a small red dwarf star. This layout had to have been well-known by the time the book was written.

This is perhaps similar to the pursuit of "unobtainium" in Avatar.

Both just seem lazy.

Recommendations?

For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.

I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.

If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.

* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.

Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.

Other book recommendations:

- valuable humans in transit by qntm

- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)

- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher

- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)

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