What is the best hard science fiction you have encountered?

My personal favorites:

Greg Egan is an Australian mathematician and computer programmer who excels at hard science fiction. Not all of his works use real physics, but he has an unmatched passion for internal consistency and thinking through the ramifications of new technologies.

Permutation City - my favorite Egan novel, this deals with uploads, artificial life, and simulated realities, among other things. This was written in 1994, but it reads like it was penned yesterday. Filled with all kind of interesting ideas and technologies to mine for inspiration, including a look at how these technologies would impact society.

Axiomatic - A collection of short stories. Uploads, genetic engineering, mind editing, nanomachines, and a number of other ideas are explored. A few "holy shit" moments. Lots of stuff to steal.

Schild's Ladder - A physics experiment goes wrong. Has an interesting look at how humanity adapts and spreads throughout the galaxy based on our current understanding of physics - there is no FTL, which means that travelling to other stars involves transmitting the data making up your ego so that you can be reinstated at your destination. All kinds of interesting ideas that were lifted wholesale in Eclipse Phase. Hard science fiction.

Peter F. Hamilton writes hard-ish space opera. Some elements can be excused (FTL travel, for example) but some of the things he introduces are completely ridiculous (the souls of the dead, really?). Still, his fiction is filled with cool technology, factions, settings, and spaceships. Lots of inspiration for things to use in your own fiction.

His Night's Dawn Trilogy is the best of his work that I have read so far. Features an interesting dichotomy between hi-biotech people with living starships, grown O'neill colonies, and an interesting version of uploading, as well as a faction who have pursued mechanical solutions to their problems, using cyborgs and nanomachines. Voidhawks are pretty cool.

Peter Watts has a background in marine biology, and his attention to detail in the biological sciences as well as the mechanical aspects makes for fascinating reading - Watts and Egan are the gold standard for hard sci-fi. His misanthropy shines through in his novels, however. To quote one reviewer, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." His writing really sets the tone for Eclipse Phase. Most of his work is actually hosted on his website.

Starfish, Maelstrom, and ßehemoth compose the Rifters trilogy. Not to spoil too much, it features a group of very broken individuals who have been modified to survive several kilometers beneath the surface of the ocean in order to maintain a geothermal power plant. An extremely spooky setting is only made more interesting by an author who knows his shit. Bad things happen.

Blindsight deals with a near-future first contact scenario. Hard sci-fi with actually alien aliens. I'm not going to spoil anything. Thematically, this questions the nature of cognition and consciousness. I don't agree with his conclusions, but it really made me think about my own arguments. If Neon Genesis Evangelion depressed you, avoid.

Echopraxia is the sequel to Blindsight. Things get worse.

 

The problem I have experienced with hard sci-fi in the past is that they're often so focused on detailing the setting that they don't tell a compelling character-driven story. And for me, even though I love world-building, I first have to care about the characters in a world before I begin to care about the details of the world.

Can you recommend any hard sci-fi (nBSG kind of universe is ideal) that has a great protagonist? Specifically, a protagonist which uses the tropes of fantasy fiction - rags to riches, the hero's journey, that sort of thing.

The Minority Report movie would be a good example.

 

One of the themes seen often in hard science fiction is that the universe is a cold, uncaring place that doesn't give a shit about you. This is somewhat antithetical to tropes you want to see. There's nothing wrong with this kind of fiction not being to your taste, but you're asking for one genre to be more like another.

As far as great protagonists, Crysis: Legion comes to mind. Alcatraz's deadpan snark as everything goes to crap is great fun. This is another book from Peter Watts. It's certainly a contender for the best novelization of a game, but it also holds up well in comparison to his other work. There is a lot of thought into what makes a better soldier, lots of cool technology, and it has interesting aliens (that are, again, actually alien).

 

Eh, hard sci-fi just means realistic tech level. That's thematically neutral. You can tell hopeful stories within that, or pessimistic ones. Just as you can tell optimistic or pessimistic stories set in the real life present.

The Martian is another good example.

(Also, not a huge fan of aliens in my sci-fi. Ideally no aliens or even interstellar travel. Intrasolar sci-fi can be great.)

 

The sine qua non of hard science fiction is a rigorous attention to detail, of following your premises to their conclusions, of meticulously presenting a secular world. Fantasy traditionally asks, "what if the world worked the way our ancestors thought it did?" and invokes a older worldview. In hard science fiction there is no ultimate power, no good or evil, no beyond, "no longer any reason in what happens, no love in what will happen to you" - to quote Nietzsche. That is not thematically neutral. "Tech level" is a very small part of it.

A few more recommendations:

2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke's novel, unlike the film, is very descriptive and coherent, and does not drop into bizarre scenes without giving you any context. A monolith is found on the moon, and transmits a signal to Jupiter once excavated. Things begin to go wrong when Discovery One reaches the signal destination...

Rendezvous with Rama - another excellent piece of work from Clarke. A system designed to catalogue asteroids and determine if they pose a collision threat with Earth discovers and reports an anomaly - a perfect, metallic cylinder many kilometers in length and diameter. The astronauts capable of reaching it have a short time frame to explore the seemingly abandoned O'neill cylinder before it plunges into the sun.

 

The Hyperion Cantos is pretty much the only one I can think of that would fit your specifications. It's character driven, has distinct story arcs with a bit of a mystical feel to it that's reminiscent of fantasy, but retains the general tone of hard sci-fi.

 

I'm not sure if it truly fits the sub-genre of hard sci-fi, and I've mentioned it in other places, but Red Rising by Pierce Brown is a great book. Don't be put off by the comparisons to Hunger Games. There's a similar feel in places, but the storyline, the characters, the worldbuilding, and the writing makes it, its own story.

 

For me, one of the hallmarks of good science fiction is that I read in a state of tension: keep turning the pages or put the book down and work through calculations to verify stuff for myself.

A second is that I don't run into glaring problems with the science, which breaks immersion for me faster than anything.

A few recs:

• I'm almost through Saturn Run by John Sandford and Cthein (I'd picked it up in the airport to have something to read and I've met the author, as he lives in town here--Santa Fe has a disproportionate share of good authors). It has a compelling story and strong characters. The authors have a good sense of how to keep the tension levels up.
  
• Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is a classic, the quintessential "idea book." Its strength is the idea; its weakness is over-reliance on the idea to carry the story (which doesn't work for 200 pages).
  
• Red Mars (and sequels) by Kim Stanley Robinson is another classic. It gets the science more or less right and is an amusing premise (colonization of Mars by humanity's greatest geniuses), though it botches the way science is done and, for that matter, how hyper-intelligent people tend to interact with one another. It also suffers from trying to follow too many characters.
  
• Charles Stross (of Colder War fame) is a go-to talent for hard science fiction riddled with good ideas. Accelerando is excellent, particularly if you've wondered about the Singularity and what it means for humanity. Glass House by the same author is also recommended.
  
• Joe Haldeman's Forever War is an older book, but a classic. Not the most deft with some of its themes (the anti-war message, e.g.), but still plays well. The sequel was "meh."
  
• Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is very good (but there's the presence of aliens, so it fails Taure's test). Has two sequels that are decent.
  
• Stephen Baxter's stuff. Some of his older stories (Titan, e.g.) are overly dry, bog standard hard SF. His Manifold Time series, however, is quite good.
  
• Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves. It's dated, but still a good read.
  
• Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge is quite good writing and probably matches Taure's desiderata best.

 

You've already mentioned my favorite authors (Greg Egan and Peter Watts).

Another whose books are dense with realistic ideas is John Brunner. I've read Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider by him. All three are fairly dark looks at the near future (or the current present, given that they were written decades ago), although The Sheep Look Up is definitely the most depressing. Brunner's writing style is to have many nonlinear chapters switching the point of view among varied characters, whose lives show different aspects of society and end up being interconnected.

His concepts are often dark but plausible: The Shockwave Rider coined the term "worm" for a certain type of malware before it existed, and also includes prediction markets, digital identities (complete with identity theft), and corporate (ab)use of customer data. The Sheep Look Up is largely about pollution and environmentalism, with eerie parallels to global warming, toxic water in Flint, Michigan, backlash against gas-powered cars, the rise of whole, "natural" foods, and President Donald Trump. (Not even kidding.)

"The sine qua non of hard science fiction is a rigorous attention to detail, of following your premises to their conclusions, of meticulously presenting a secular world." Brunner is brilliant at this. Overpopulation is a major theme in Stand on Zanzibar; but instead of just showing overcrowding and saying it's bad, we see its effects in many ways—a common relationship is two roommates with one girlfriend who benefits from free living space; homeless is such an undeniable problem that NYC resorts to issuing limited panhandling licenses; eugenics is popular since nobody wants their maximum two children to be inferior or a burden; and so on.