I am hard at work on several new projects, and I’ve decided to put out a call for recommendations here on the blog and out in Twitterverse land. I am working on a new hard SF anthology and am compiling a list of hard SF writers that the book might include. Now, when I say hard SF writers I’m not talking about writers who could write hard SF or are capable of writing hard SF, but about writers with a track record of writing hard SF: writers like Greg Egan, Greg Bear, Nancy Kress, Linda Nagata and so on. So, if you can think of a terrific hard SF writer who should be in an original anthology of hard SF stories, jump on the comments thread here and recommend away. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Peter Watts
Can I preorder it yet?
Wil McCarthy. Chris Moriarty, Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker (hard math). Before she moved shop to fantasy, where the sales are, Sarah Zettel. Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m now haunted by the hordes of folks I know I’m forgetting.
What about Chris Moriarty? I haven’t seem much of her work lately, unfortunately, but I remember loving Spin State, which I considered to be pretty hard SF.
Ben Bova, Larry Niven, other such common names are good. Cory Doctorow? Are his novels hard SF? Charles Stross, Robert J. Sawyer…umm, I think that’s all I have. Hope that helps!
I’m Alex above :)
And have tweet you various peeps. Actually, can I add, Scott Westerfeld. Would be nice to read some more hard sf from him.
Ditto Wil McCarthy. Kay Kenyon. Jack Campbell (John G. Hemry). Joe Haldeman.
First of all, thank you all for the wonderful comments.
Cat: I already asked Peter to be in the book. He’s terrific!
Alex: I only just sold it. It’s more than a year away, but I’ll be sure you know when and where to get it when the time comes.
Susan: I’d not thought of Rudy, but that’s a great suggestion. Stan too. Hmm. Not sure if he’d go for it, but he’d be fascinating.
SMD: It does help! Not read Moriarty, but should.
Peter: Scott, huh? I know he’s done space opera, but hard SF. Hmmm.
Amy: Hi! Wil I’ve spoken too. Wouldn’t have thought of Joe as hard SF. The other suggestions are good, though. Thank you.
Oh, what about Mike Brotherton?
Hannu Rajaniemi’s a new writer, but very good, Jonathan.
I’d second KSR, for variety from the physics side of hard-SF. Vinge I forgot about. Is posthumous ok? Hal Clement.
How about Mike Brotherton, Mark Van Name, Greg Benford, Travis S. “Doc” Taylor (he does “Hard SF” for real!)?
Paul McAuley?
Alastair Reynolds?
Among newer writers, I think Ted Kosmatka is worth a look. I’d second the Hannu Rajaniemi recommendation. James L. Cambias. Daryl Gregory.
FYI…Some more Hard SF author suggestions are given here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/02/whos-your-favorite-hard-science-fiction-author/
As you can see, in some cases people have different definitions if Hard SF — but there is still a healthy selection of definite hard SF authors.
Some more suggestions here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/02/whos-your-favorite-hard-science-fiction-author/
Chris Moriarty
Beyond those already mentioned, how about Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, Allen Steele, or George Zebrowski?
Compulsory: Greg Egan, Ian McDonald, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Alistair Reynolds, Kage Baker, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad (if he still wants to).
Oh, and Geoffrey A. Landis! Always liked him.
I know you said “track record”, but I think a case can be made for Nancy Kress and Robert Silverberg. Love them lots.
In fact, the majority of your Space Opera authors would be candidates – as you know.
Walter Jon Williams! Ted Chiang (please!) Michael Swanwick! James Patrick Kelly!
Stephen Baxter, Allen Steele, David Marusek, Tony Daniel, Joe Haldeman (of course), Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, Paolo Bacigalupi, Robert Reed, Jay Lake, Neal Asher, Ken MacLeod.
I don’t know too many women who’d qualify … Pat Cadigan, Mary Rosenblum, Gwyneth Jones, Kelly Link … no, wait a minute …
Above all, don’t forget the obligatory “many others” …
More comments! Yay! Thank you all.
SMD: I just heard from Mike. I’ve not read his stuff, so I need to check his stuff out.
NeilW: I love Hannu’s stuff, and it looks like he should be writing for the book, which delights me.
Jon: I’d love, love, love to have Stan involved with the book. He doesn’t write much short stuff, though, so it’s a long shot. Same for Vinge, whose stuff I also love.
Fred: I need to try Travis Taylor. Don’t know his stuff.
Paul: Definitely!
Rich: Cambias, huh? Hadn’t considered him. Others all well within my sightys.
JohnD: Thanks!
Sandra.: She plainly has a lot of fans. Thanks for the rec!
Chris: Steve is in the book. Greg possibly too. The others are great recs.
Peter: All of those are terrific. More women recs are welcome too. I want to be aware as possible of gender balance for the book, though there don’t seem to be a LOT of women with a track record writing hard SF.
This whole anthology wins the “Best Idea of the Week Award”, I think!
Defintely both Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley. I don’t know if Neal Asher really qualifies as hard SF, but I’d recommend him if he did.
Yeah, if would be nifty if you could get a short story out of Chris Moriarty.
Speaking of the Chris thing, what is the Lawson character up to, these days?
G. David Nordley.
@Jonathan: re: KSR short fiction. That’s true, and it’s a shame, because I’ve loved the few shorts he has written, in particular one about amnesia called (I think) “Before I Wake”. Same for Vinge’s fiction revolving around the Rainbow’s End universe in particular (Fast Times was incredible). Oh and I forgot “the cookie monster”.
I’d love someone to please clarify why Alastair Reynolds could be considered Hard SF: you don’t mean any of the revelation space stories, do you? Ottomh “Signal to Noise” perhaps could be considered hard sf, but I’m not sure the proponents of Reynolds are referring to this story, or whether he has written others that are more clearly so.
Two women for you: Catherine Asaro (physics), Joan Slonczewski (biology)
Do you think Bruce Sterling might qualify? How about Fred Pohl if he still writes?
I also like Robert Silverberg.
Jon: “I’d love someone to please clarify why Alastair Reynolds could be considered Hard SF: you don’t mean any of the revelation space stories, do you? Ottomh “Signal to Noise†perhaps could be considered hard sf, but I’m not sure the proponents of Reynolds are referring to this story, or whether he has written others that are more clearly so. ”
FWIW, I don’t really consider myself a true-quill Hard SF writer either. I’ve consciously tried to avoid self-identifying myself in that manner because it immediately says “here is a line in the and and I’m working on this side of it”, whereupon someone will come along and insist that the line ought to be drawn somewhere else anyway.
I’ve occasionally, with tongue somewhat in cheek, advocated the existence of something called “ductile SF” which would include works like DUNE and NOVA and A FIRE UPON THE DEEP that make allowance for science to bend and warp away from the current paradigm. That, to me, is a more interesting form of SF than, say, MISSION OF GRAVITY or DRAGON’S EGG. It’s not for nothing that I repeatedly cite “A Game of Rat and Dragon” as my favorite SF story, over, say, some hard SF touchstone like THE COLD EQUATIONS.
That, of course, should be “line in the sand” in the post above. Too late, too bleary-eyed…
@Jon:
I’ve thought about hard Al’s SF is before as well. If you google him, you’ll find the term “Hard SF” associated with him a lot. I think he is definitely “harder” than most science fiction out there…no real FTL, no force fields, hyperdrives, teleporters, psionics and the like. He actually calls his stuff “ductile SF” in an interview. The Hardest ones were apparently the “Merlin” ones (Mirror matter is hypothetical, but a real scientific concept).
There are very few of his stories that follow all the laws of physics to the letter, but some of them, including some RS stories, are pretty hard for the most part. I know that the Inhibitor trilogy and some of the tech there was a bit dicey, but some of the ones set a bit earlier (like “Great Wall of Mars” or “A Spy in Europa”) were pretty realistic. It depends, I suppose, on how scientifically accurate you want the cutoff to be. Just my 2 cents on the whole thing.
Anyways, who else could be included… Peter Watts would be another good choice, I think.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I didn’t see Al’s post before I stuck my reply up there! (Probably cos it took me a little while to write that). My bad…
Though I would hardly call “The Cold Equations” particularly a “hard SF” exemplar.
Al: I’d not heard the term ductile SF before, but it certainly describes some of the work I’d hope to cover in the book I’m doing. DRAGON’S EGG hard SF is intrigiuing, but it’s also a bit much for an entire book of stories.
Rich, you’re quite right, it’s a poor example of a nuts-and-bolts hard SF short story.
When I think of pure quill hard SF it’s Robert Forward that comes to mind. Even Larry Niven has a healthy dose of space opera to what he does. I have expanded my horizons, though, to include hard SF applications of sciences other than physics, though. Writers who expand on neurological, biological sciences and so on work brilliantly.
I would buy every collection containing stories by those four: Alastair Reynolds, Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Ted Chiang.
Karl Schroeder? He’s got a long history of working out the street and society level effects of advanced tech.
Could I get a working definition of “hard SF”?
This might suffice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction). Definitions are perilous things, when it comes to genre.
The problem is avoid one so restrictive even Clement (who used FTL in his stories) isn’t excluded.
Michael Flynn wrote an interplanetary shipwreck novel that probably qualifies. I don’t know if he does short fiction.
I bet you’re doing new material and not old but Bob Buckley had a novel published in Analog back in 1980 that used floating habitats in the upper atmosphere of Venus rather like the ones proposed by Landis. I mentioned this to Tobias Buckell on his blog when he mentioned how he had used the Landis idea as an interesting but obscure precursor of the Landis proposal and Buckell helpfully pointed out that when the Buckley story was published, he was busy being a newborn.
Jack Vance of all people had a story about a solar sail boat that I don’t recall having obvious flubs.
Has Joan Vinge been mentioned?
If Niven’s Known Space stories count, then some of Lee Killough’s material would qualify. She doesn’t seem to have had any short fiction since the Reagan era but I wanted to mention some names that might be overlooked.
Some of Poul Anderson’s books would qualify.
Women that come to mind are as mentoned Chris Moriarty, Catherine Asaro, and Joan Slonczeewski. How about Linda Nagata? She started out a fairly hard sf writer and I’d love to see more short fiction from her. Elizabeth Bear could do a good hard SF story. How about Vonda McIntyre or Joan D. Vinge who I hear is starting write again. Pat Cadigan is always excellent, as well.
Can’t wait to buy this one!
D’oh! Alexis Gilliland! He hasn’t been published in a while but he is still writing. The last time I ran into him at a con he read a short story set in a densely settled Solar System, one without the usual improbably high thrust, high delta vee rockets seen in other people’s settings.
How about Fred Pohl if he still writes?
He just had a novel come out in August 2008. He was Arthur C. Clarke’s junior partner on The Last Theorem.
He has a blog:
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/
which Fred Pohl fans helpfully slashdotted when he launched it. He does mention that he has some neurological issues that make writing more difficult but he does mention writing as an ongoing activity, not something he used to do.
Interesting, what Al Reynolds says. And who among us can say they didn’t know? The point is that I have particularly enjoyed some of his stories (and somewhat against the run of play, “Minla’s Flowers” was my favourite in the first space opera book). Hard or not, space-time should be warped to let him in. If he wants in, of course. The same applies to the venerable Robert Silverberg. I think it’s just slightly too much of a stretch to look on him as a hard SF writer. But if an anthology like this features him, you won’t hear me complaining.
I should also mention that hard SF is sometimes TOO hard for some readers – me, for a start. Ian McDonald and Cory Doctorow regularly hurt my head. So do Greg Egan and Charles Stross – but both of them have also written perfectly accessible stories that I loved.
Bottom line: I don’t care. As long as the stories are good and the book as a whole serves up what it promised. In the New Space Opera, we weren’t expecting two stories about actors, were we? But it all turned out fine :)
Bob: Linda Nagata is mentioned in Jonathan’s original post, so we can assume she’s on his list. Her novel VAST is a particular favorite of mine; it messed with my head in really interesting ways.
One thing I feel compelled to point out (especially in light of Al Reynolds showing up :)) is that to dismiss something as Hard SF is not to suggest that it is in any way defective. I’m working my way through Charles Stross’ “Merchant Princes” saga at the moment after spending years reading hard sf more-or-less exclusively and really enjoying myself.
Similarly, the sands shift: if you read golden-age SF, it might have been clearly “hard” at the time but in light of the information era, speculation about singularities, etc., “fails the test” under modern standards.
How do you think “mundane SF” relates to hard SF? I sometimes wonder if the proponents of it purposefully defined a new branding to avoid the issues surrounding classifying hard sf.
Obviously, if Jonathan could somehow trick Fred Pohl to work on something for his book, that would be a coup. But I checked out his blog recently, and the guy seems to be having such a good time that he may not be available.
Another name that comes to mind is China Miéville, whose stuff is generally New Weird stories too full of goo for my liking. His upcoming novel The City and the City could be seen as hard SF (or possibly Mundane) in as much as while the situation we see is fantastic, there’s nothing necessarily impossible in the book.
Rebecca Ore is a possibility and so is Nicola Griffith, although she’s been seduced by the larger readership and the not living outside in a refrigerator box of mystery (She did a novel about waste control).
Steven Gould has written hardish SF (Greenwar with Laura J. Mixon, and Blind Waves).
Would Eleanor Arnason’s novels count?
I think Marta Randall dabbled in hard SF and I know Pamela Sargent wrote some.
Rosemary Kirstein’s novels are definitely hard SF (they are about the process of science) but as far as I know she’s only ever written one short story, back in 1989.
Howard Waldrop can write anything he likes except, apparently, novels in any great quantity. He’s mostly a very skilled short story man.
And Brian Stableford!
Damien Broderick is apparently writing stuff again, too.
Paul Chafe.
Hmm, what about Rusch? I think she’d be good for that anthology. Sheri S.Tepper wrote wonderful “Grass” years ago, I’d love to see her writing hard SF. Maybe Carolyn Ives Gilman? I have not found in this thread one very good hard SF writer: Dan Simmons. The Legend. Author of “Hyperion Cantos” cycle should be in this anthology. Other missing author is Ian McDonald.
Matthew Jarpe
Phillip C Jennings
Paulo Bacigalupi
Tony Daniel
Geoffrey Landis
Jack McDevitt
Tom Purdom