The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld, and its sequel The Killing of Worlds is pretty good hard SF.
James A. Corey's The Expanse series is excellent hard SF. They're making a SyFy show about it, but the book series is still excellent!
Begins with Leviathan Wakes.
I really wouldn't call THE EXPANSE hard SF. They still handwave a lot of stuff. It's good space opera or pulp SF, but I wouldn't call it hard SF. Hard SF I think has to rule out FTL.
There is no FTL in the Expanse, isn't there? They barely accelerate at x10 g. Usually in weird fractional g.
But other than that.... :-P
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The "hard" element of The Expanse comes mostly from a realistic and comprehensive description of how life and travel outside of Earth will be affected by changing conditions of gravity. It's the part that elevates the books into more than simplistic action stories: how will it feel to live in a station on a small planetoid in the asteroid belt that uses spin (and thus centrifugal force) as a replacement for a gold old fashioned gravitational field? How will spaceships be built and how will humans accommodate to a structure that can range in acceleration from 0g to tens of g (during combat, for example)?
The big stuff is right but the small details are very well thought out and give credibility to the story - for example, in the spinning station, the outermost apartments would be the cheapest and least desirable because of a more noticeable coriolis effect.
It's fun, and it's nice that MOST made up science in the first books is all just the result of improving modern technologies significantly (better engines, better guns, etc.). And even in later volumes science and engineering problems often play an important role (there's a very memorable sequence in book 4 that has the crew of a spaceship coming up with increasingly complicated ways to stop it's orbit around a planet from decaying too much without being able to use actual engines, and in large parts the plot of book 3 deals with the catastrophic implications of some laws of physics suddenly changing around the characters), even though Clarke's Law kicks into higher gear in these parts of the series.