I'm looking for decent recent scifi books. But all lists and recommendations I come upon include something that automatically discredits it. Like World War Z, The Road, or Hunger Games.

So decided to ask here.

I would prefer something on the harder on the science side. That is not with bunch of techno babble to explain away magic. And lighter on inept social criticism a la Hunger Games. Also a stand alone book/complete series would be much preferable to an in progress work.

In short something along the lines of the Mars trilogy.

 

I've always liked S.M. Stirling's work, especially when he's on the more scifi side of things--he's gotten bogged down a bit in the Emberverse. I don't know the Mars trilogy, but he has a good scifi series in the Lords of Creation. It's a modern look at the Burrows pulp scifi, so instead of John Carter having adventures on a living Mars or Venus, you have the Americans and Soviets going there in a space race on crack. It's still got the pulp-like swashbuckling adventure, but in a more realistic way and with hard science rather than handwaving semi-magic.

It's a two-book duology, going to dinosaur-and-Neanderthal infested Venus in The Sky People and to a Mars with strange culture, technology and beliefs in In the Courts of the Crimson Kings.

That's one of the better recent scifi works I can think of, I'll try to remember more later.

 

If anything else, you can't go wrong with Enderverse. I liked his series but it's actually more on the sociology/psychology side than the sci-fi. Still great though.

 

I'm a big fan of the Lost Fleet series. The author is a former US Navy officer so he does a great job attempting to make strategy and tactics work in outer space battles.

 

MilSF is probably where I have the most fun. I don't know if that's what you're looking for -- most of the good MilSF is less about the SF and more about the Mil, e.g. David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series (seriously, don't let the name put you off -- a lot of the stories there are inspired by Drake's real life experiences in Vietnam).

The best HardSF I have read recently would actually be a webcomic: A Miracle of Science
http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/

Seriously worth the read IMO. And read the author's notes at the bottom of the page starting on page 8.

And don't forget, Mars loves you.

 

Check out the book I recc'ed in another thread: Red Rising. I may have forgot to explain in that thread that it begins on Mars and, as you get into the series, it's basically a space-opera, but with enough solid military understanding to be believable.

 

I'll definitely echo the suggestion of Red Rising by Pierce Brown aswell as the recently released sequel Golden Son. Both are dark, violet, and extremely difficult to stop reading. I also enjoyed Ian M. Banks Player of Games from the Culture series and Scalzi's Old Man's War.

 

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, first book of an open Triology. This is as hardcore as it gets but also makes you consider the social consequences.

Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Richard Morgan defined the last SF decade for me. In no particular order.

 

I'll second the Lost Fleet series. It's not the best sci-fi out there, but it's got consistently great quality and the space battles are incredible. Characters could have done with some fleshing out (Black Jack is the only real three dimensional character in the series), but they work for what the author want.

I've read through all the Lost Fleet series and a few of the Beyond the Frontier ones so they're entertaining enough to keep going, at least.

 

The other positive about this series is that the author makes a valiant attempt to stay true to the relativistic kinematics of space battle among fast ships. It's one of the few stories I can think of that does.

Few things are a quicker turnoff to a scientist than stories not getting the science right.

 

Mhm, that's one of the highlights for me. All battles stick rigidly to what is possible under the Theory of General Relativity and they're no less interesting because of it.

 

Hm.. I don´t think I would call Lost Fleet or Altered Carbon great or even good SciFi. The first may have an interesting idea (though one I find personally very unbelievable) and manages to keep its battle´s realistic but with every book in the series his MC gets more Gary Stue and the plot + characters a bit more idiotic.
And Altered Carbon has a really great and interesting first book but its successors can´t really keep up the quality. (The same is true of Ender-verse. If you only read the first book it deserves such a place but it fails as a series)).
Those books are not bad- far from it- but they are really not on the same level as the true classics.

Through to be fair I don´t have read much modern SciFi that I would call good. I personally would try things like Armor (Heinlein inspired military SciFi), Snow Crash (futuristic America), Old man´s war (MilSciFi that avoids most of the bad tropes in that genre) or Spin and if you like a more "trashy" SciFi there are things like Blades of Winter (through that one is ore AU than SciFi).

 

The series didn't start in the last ten years, but David Weber's Honor Harrington series is a favourite of mine. Starts with On Basilisk Station and the series has something like 20 novels now, with about 12 being main-story line.

 

Honor Harrington has really gone downhill lately IMO. I've heard that Weber has a wrist injury and started using a voice program (probably Dragon) to type his stories. The problem is that nothing gets edited down. I remember reading one of the later books and it starts with the villains having a meeting and Weber starts giving us lengthy internal monologues that carry on for paragraph after paragraph as the villains explain their plans to the reader in meticulous detail. When you compare that to the first book, which just builds and builds and builds until the climactic chase scene at the end... so disheartening.

 

I am very fond of Walter Jon Williams, Dread Empire's Fall series was a very enjoyable space opera. Big fleet battles, some mystery, not a badly executed romance. I would highly recommend it.

 

I'll second Altered Carbon, it has a good mix of detective noir and cyberpunk themes, as well as just being well written, and Old Man's War was good, and just makes the last decade from 2005. To be honest, most of the really good Scifi that I know (Ubik, A Fire Upon the Deep, Player of Games, etc.) was written over 20 years ago, but I'd recommend them nonetheless.

 

Monologues/infodumps have pretty much always been something of a problem with Weber. I know there have been some issues re editing due to one reason or the other though.

 

Out of curiosity, what do you have against The Road or Hunger Games, both of which I thought were pretty decent. I wasn't the biggest fan of WWZ (but then I hate on the zombies in general).

In the past 10 years, I've enjoyed Neal Stephenson's REAMDE and Anatham (the former a bit more than the latter, which revealed a rather idiotic premise about three-fourths of the way through the book). Stross's Glasshouse and Palimpsest are quite readable. His Eschaton series (Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise) is just outside of a decade old and is quite good (I thought). Iain M. Banks's Look to Windward if you're into his Culture series of novels. Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is good, if somewhat nontraditional Science Fiction fare. Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe wasn't bad. Cline's Ready Player One is also very good.

 

The Hunger Games was so heavy-handed in its message that I had to put it down midway through the third one. It would have been easier had the worldbuilding been better to frame it all, but it was so bad I just couldn't even continue. That was on top of the fact that it was rushed to publishing and both choppy and ill paced, in my opinion. I remember thinking that it had to be, and that thought being confirmed afterwards in something I read.

BTW, OP, even if you didn't like The Hunger Games, a preceding Japanese YA novel it's often compared to is worth checking out. It's called Battle Royale, and it has a similar setup to the game they play there. Been years since I read it, though, not sure if it holds up after you're a certain age. I did like that it tried to make its point within the framing device, unlike The Hunger Games.

 

Thanks for the clarification.

I've read Battle Royale (and even have a half-finished HP/BR fusion that I'll get around to posting one of these days) and agree that it's probably the better novel.