What is your hard scifi?

>>51330482
Planetes, Blindsight/Echopraxia/Rifters Trilogy, most non-shit cyberpunk.

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For me, nearly All genres fall within this genre spectrum. Hard Sci-Fi would be more in the green spectrum, with things like Interstellar, and Fahrenheit 451. Science-Fantasy, like 40k or Star Wars, would be more scarlet. Supernatural stuff would be more turquoise.

>>51330482
Chess.
>but anon chess isn't scifi
Maybe not to you.

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>>51330750
Thank you for making this!

>>51330750
What would the center be? Realistic Science-Fantasy? Sounds like a Bradbury short story.

>>51330482
>>51330750
How hard is "hard"? I've never read a science fiction that didn't have fantasy technology somewhere to make the actual setting work.

>>51330482
Kim Stanley Robinson

>>51331598
Ever see Interstellar? That's pretty damn hard right there.

For even harder, you'd basically have to go to the level of Astronaut fiction. Something along the lines of "Fuel/Travel time is not an issue in space," and then suppose what might occur from that. Asteroid mining is a favorite of mine.

>>51330482
Energeos. Mecha that work, tanks are boss monsters.

>>51331698
>Interstellar
>Hard sci-fi

Riiiiiiiiight.

It's exactly what I was talking about. Wormholes, timetravel, etc to make the plot work.

>>51331598
>Hard sci fi

Gravity (2013 film)

Planetes... if you ignore the FTL drives which are never actually used (still being developed/built)

Apollo 13 I guess.

>>51331598
If your science fiction just presents a fictional take on the world as we know it to be, then it is just called "fiction."

Science fiction requires a fiction about science. A fiction is an "invention or fabrication as opposed to fact."

Science fiction, even "hard" sci-fi, requires that it make non-factual assumptions about science, by definition.

>>51331780
Most of the science is sound, and very nearly plausible. That's about as hard as you're going to get.

Or maybe you're that faggot that posted the "running Sci-Fi genre games" shitpost earlier in the week.

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>>51330750
What would pure white be?

>>51331894
William Gibson.

>>51331873
>Or maybe you're that faggot
A faggot, yes, but not that faggot

>>51331894
Shadowrun?

It's got scifi, it's got fantasy, it's got modern.

>>51331894
Take something like Gravity, or Intetstellar, or something. Invent a precursor race that seeded the universe with genetically similar races to humans. These are your fantasy races. Elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits, humans, goblins, zora, whatever. Maybe some low-fantasy magic similar to the Force if you're feeling frisky.

It's essentially what my setting is.

>>51331830
>sci fi
>Apollo 13
wat

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The Expanse. Start with the book Leviathan Wakes. It's quasi- hard Sci-Fi. But really fucking interesting. Great characters, plot and story. I love it..

For real hard sci-fi Try out Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora Star series. (Part of the CommonWealth series)

Also check out Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds. I don't really enjoy Alistairs works but his stuff is very hard Sci-Fi...especially Revelation Space.

>>51332925
>moon landings

Larry Niven is fun. Some people don't find it hard enough though.

Children of a Dead Earth.

The only sci-fi accurate computer game that requires you to know how to:

1. Build a nuclear weapon with different fissionable components.
2. Build the elaborate array of coils, reinforcement, and materials for a nuclear sabot.
3. Build the ship that it will be carried on out of like 250 different materials with heat radiators, proper reactor shielding, and calculating a mass ratio to have reasonable delta-v to get to a military objective.
4. Plot orbital trajectories to engage enemy forces and align intercepts for missiles.
5. Get horribly killed as you are struck by high speed projectiles going like 7km/s relative.

Eclipse Phase is hard sci-fi

>>51331988
It has little realism
The only reason i don't say NO realism is because it's set on Earth technically

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>>51331698
>Interstellar
STOP

>>51331527
A Wrinkle In Time?

>>51331909
I feel this is a really good answer.
Not, like, Sprawl trilogy Gibson, but later Gibson, where he starts doing super spooky near-future/five minutes in the future stories about spies and loneliness. Pattern Recognition, and maybe Idoru, though Idoru is more traditional sci-fi.

>tfw want to run a hard sci-fi psychological horror game
>based on the Doldrums and old sailor folktales
>space is cold and dark and deadly
>but nobody is sufficiently interested to play

>>51334598

How doesn't it have realism?

It's set not just on earth, but an extension of the earth timeline we know today, with all the same cities and such. It has many of the same companies (or at least, has backstories for how they evolved into new companies) and such, and much of the equipment is quite realistic - Everything from AK look alike rifles to realistic drugs (Cram I believe is based on amphetamines, for example).

>>51331894
Star wars!

>>51331527
The Martian. The event that stranded him is impossible. And NASA getting that much funding is wish fulfillment.

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There is a lovely chapter out of the Aliens Colonial Marines guidebook that details the fine points of orbital denial

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>>51330482
It's about space janitors. That screw is travelling at tens of thousands of km/h, and could destroy an entire spaceship if it hit one. So someone's gotta go out into space and clean up all the dead satellites.

It's also one of the very few anime/movies/tv shows that actually understands zero-g and orbital mechanics. Unlike all the bullshit in Gravity.

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>>51334763

What the heck, here's the whole thing

Space combat starts on page 116, but the whole thing is a great well-thought out read if you like the Aliens franchise

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>>51334788
https://www.scribd.com/doc/21995420/Aliens-1-Colonial-marines-technical-manual

>>51334766
Very underrated show.

I don't have one. I don't have enough faith in our epistemological faculties to think we could create something genuinely realistic. I think even "hard" sci-fi is just fantasy where the base has been shifted to something the author and his fanbase don't find offensive enough to pick at. Demonstration of this can be seen in the fact that speculative fiction, even that which was rooted in scientific principles and careful forethought has largely not resulted in any meaningful predictions, besides those that can only be considered accurate predictions if you squint really hard at them.

>>51334127
Known Space is a great universe. I got introduced to the Ringworld and the Puppeteers and Kzin pretty young, and never regretted it.

That man writes some fuck awful porn though. I'm not reading your books for the women, Niven.

>>51331830
>FTL drives in Planètes
If you talk about tandem mirror engines, it isn't in any case FTL. These engines are based on He3 fusion, and are developed to shorten the travel to Jupiter to a seven years expedition. That's really far from FTL

>>51334127
>>51335089
I always wanted to run a game in Known Space, but I never got around to it. Also I'm not sure what system to use.

>>51331863
For fuck's sake, retard, the 'fiction' can mean 100% correct physics and a STORY about THINGS THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. Motherfucking imbecile.

>>51330482
Absolutely uninterested after the last one-shot I had with a math PHD student.
I never been so bored in my life, the only saving grace is I found out how long my phone battery can last using the web.

>>51331873
dude, he's manipulating gravity with the power of love

that's not hard sci fi

>>51331830
>someone else read Planetes
I swear I own the 2 bigger books covering all of it and I feel like I made it up sometimes. So rarely see it even mentioned.

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>>51331527
Wings of Honneamise.
Actually I'd call it more pure fantasy but nobody's going to agree with me because no magic lol

>>51330541
You are an excellent anon.

I'd like to add The Expanse (the TV incarnation, haven't got to the books yet) to that list, I just love when shows make an effort for newtonian physics.

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>>51330482

>>51334547
I know how to do point 5 already

Reminder that "hard sci-fi" does not mean "no theoretically technology" OR "no made-up technology."

There are many different subdivisions of hard sci-fi. It can include things like imagining a completely impossible technology like FTL travel and rigorously exploring the effects it might have on society.

It is much more nuanced than just "muh realism."

Lame. Hard Sci-Fi is fucking lame.

I'm currently writing a Hard SciFi setting that leads into a full-on futuristic fantas setting on Mars. We are talking full-on feudalism, wizards and knights fighting "dragons", yet everything has a reasonable explanation and is part from a clear and traceable chain of events.
Shit's a lot of fun to come up with.

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>>51330482
Orion's Arm.

>>51336377
>helicopter a mecha in so it can machine gun the bad guys from a distance
>this is an advancement over putting the machine gun on the helicopter

>>51337069
Indeed. Fuel ain't cheap. We need cheap alternatives to fight some Ak-47 wielding mobs somewhere in pseudo-Tibet Central Asiastan.

>>51330482
the Martian was breddy gud

>>51337069
The mech walked into a cave. I mean, a thermobaric bomb would do a more thorough job, but I guess they didn't want to for some reason.

>>51337317
I mean, we bought the thing, might as well use it for something, right? Though that puts it way towards the green on the genre scale.

>>51337390
>>51337317
It was secret weapon test for a mech doing sophisticated operations. Plus mission was to recover the flag and to get it in one piece as much as possible.

>>51337421
Oh right, I forgot about the flag. Which is fucked up seeing how the anime is called FLAG.

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>>51334127

The Mote in God's Eye is pretty damn hard. The softest thing the humans have is a warp drive and deflector shields, but the warp drive is so situational that one guy describes having to jump to a point AWAY from his destination, then spend a week accelerating at 3 Gees to get to a point where he can jump towards his destination, all of which takes shorter than just going in a straight line.
On the other hand, the aliens have a caste which exists entirely to make soft sci-fi inventions.

Footfall is also a super-hard sci-fi book.

>>51334617
To be fair, even the other characters knew she was full of shit. She insists on visiting her boyfriend's planet first because they "have a connection", at which point they promptly ignore her and check out the others. And when she finally gets to him, surprise surprise, he's been dead for like a week.

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>>51337580
>Footfall
Michael is best low-tech space battleship, someone debate me.

>>51336607
You're lame, nerd.

>>51336576
Aurora 4x is the best hard sci fi game imo, based on these lines: FTL is possible, thanks to these new elements we discovered. No we have no idea how they work, they're even called trans-Newtonian because they defy all classical laws of physics, but the point is we need more of them, so go build an empire.

>>51336720
I like you.

How's the air pressure, higher by terraforming, or at least in the valleys? IIRC you can get reasonable human-powered flight going.

>>51330482
Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series, full of juicy quantum mechanics without explaining anything.

The Quantum Thief
The Fractal Prince
The Causal Angel

>>51334547
This game is awesome.

The closest rpg I can think is vanguard free rpg

>>51331598
"Hard Scifi" is what happens when boring people want to jerk off over science under the guise of fiction.

>>51337933
>boring people
We can't all be fun exciting people like you anon who spend their time shitting on other people's tastes in fiction on an anonymous image board for fun.

>jerk off over science
You say that like it's a bad thing.

>under the guise of fiction.
>the guise
Are you claiming that these events actually took place? The mars trilogy was a real story? Now that's a twist.

>>51330482
It's the year 2018. It's like 2017 but there's a new model of iphone in the stores.

>>51330750
I disagree with this.
I don't see sci-fi as distinct from realism as it is from fantasy.
To me sci-fi is all about speculation, using whatever is in the science headlines (what articles you use, the research themselves or pop-sci clickbait, deciding the hardness factor) and fantasy is about creating new worlds from whatever sounds engaging, instead of what sounds probable.

>>51337933
Hard scifi is what people that want to justify soft scifi being called scifi call actual scifi. Black mirror is scifi, doctor who is not.

Issac Arthur

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

>>51338123
How did the war in Syria end? Is there still a refugee crisis in Europe? Did deluded media consumers kill Trump yet? If so, how does that influence the state of national security, race relations and increasing political tension? If not, are foreign products now more expensive in the US? Did that help against unemployment? Did any demographic become richer or poorer as a result? How did China respond to the new foreign policy of one of their biggest trading partners?

>>51338054
>The mars trilogy was a story
That's a stretch.

>>51338253
things got worse and stupider

there's still no new ipad worth upgrading to

grrm and sanderson died before finishing anything, unfortunately rothfuss still lives

>>51338253
Both sides declared victory, nobody's shooting at each other. Yes. No. N/A. Slightly. A bit. Too early to tell. Built another carrier but kept selling us crap.

I may be a bit hard on scifi. As a kid I watched the moon landing, I watched the shuttle. I was watched the ISS (heap of shit that it is) get constructed. I loved space and always wanted to work there. Although I never got the chance to go there myself I do help design satellites.I know my level of hardness it more than most.

>>51331698
Interstellar exist to show off visual effects and show what relativity. Other than the ship design and it taking quite a while to get anywhere it's very soft. It exist purely to do one part of it extremely hard. The rest is soft otherwise they would have been destroyed by x-rays long before they landed. Relativity is shown fantastically hard though.

>>51331830
Gravity looks fantastic. It's a visual experience and very soft. Sure they don't have ftl or go more than 800km away from Holy Terra but everything shown is a fiction. Even Kessler syndrome suffers the hollywood effect.

>>51333035
The expanse set in our solar system is very good series and to anybody with netflix please watch it but in terms of how it deals with vacuum it's very jaring. Also the premise of water shortage in space, in the belt is laughable.

>>51338317
>Gravity looks fantastic. It's a visual experience and very soft.
The scene where she takes off her spacesuit and floats in a fetal position is incredible, gave me a real children of the stars vibe. I don't care that they're all on different orbits, it's a beautiful film.

>Also the premise of water shortage in space, in the belt is laughable.
I think they explained this by having it all mined out of Ceres or something? Probably didn't know how watery it was then. Biggest immersion-breaker for me was how everyone rushed to turn on their magnet-boots so they could act like they were in gravity.

>Interstellar exist to show off visual effects and show what relativity.
I couldn't stand how easy it was for them to drop a space shuttle on a normal-grav world in a black hole's gravity well and then just pop back up to orbit and go back to the mothership. It was worse because I didn't expect them to pull something like that.

>>51338224
>Hard scifi is what people that want to justify soft scifi being called scifi call actual scifi. Black mirror is scifi, doctor who is not.
Doctor Who these days really isn't science anything, regardless of stiffness. I do think we could use another term for stuff that's a bit shy of hard though. "Hard science fiction" to me is a relatively exacting term, and very little fiction is rigorous enough to live up to it.

>>51335918
Fuck you because now I have to go rewatch it and I have work to do aaaaa also I love you and your taste (homo optional)

>>51331830
>>51335350
>>51335621
>Planetes
my niggas

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>>51338458
There's always something new to find. Can you believe the director was 26?

>>51330750
Wouldn't it make more sense to have a square, where the x-axis is time period/tech level and the y-axis is the degree of realism?

>>51330750
Sci-fi, fantasy, and realism should be on the primary colours, not the secondary colours.
0/10

>>51338478
>>51338458
Too bad anything like honneamise will never, ever happen again. It was a financial failure.

>>51337693

this design really reminds me of a scene i saw once on youtube from i think an animated series that was 'hard scifi' themes, with ships with nuke sand long range cannons.

Anyone know what im talking about? at least one of the ships looked similar to this i think

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>>51338481
Something like this?

>>51338500
Good. It'd be worse anyway. Also people have no fucking taste.

>>51338228
I love his megastructure series.

>>51334712
>shadowrun
>realism

get the fuck out of here you magic using knife eared faggot

>>51331894
Argentina.

>>51335547
Well, actually the 'humans from the future' are manipulating gravity with it's sixth dimensional bullshit tech and letting him direct everything with his fingers. It is magic bullshit but not bullshit fueled by love

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Boardgames count, right?

>>51337162
>using mecha and helicopters and all kinds of expensive shit to fight a low intensity conflict

just send in mercenaries in jeeps
why the fuck does anime have to overthink the shit out of problems

>>51331669
I just finished 2312

I remember enjoy the Mars triology, but 2312 is fucking awful

nothing fucking happens and everyone seems like a boring unlikeable arse

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>>51338582
I just wish we had more secondary worlds with modern tech. I know your new setting that's based on ancient China or ancient India or medieval Mesoamerica is really cool and original but I want to see industrialization, and I want to see it without the material having to make a comment on WWII.

>>51338625
It wanted to be deep and award-winning, so it was slow and ponderous with occasional hyperviolence. It also wanted to sell toys, so it had a mecha.

>>51338625
Otherwise the MIC could not be able to try it's new toy.
Have you actually saw the anime?

>>51338478
>>51335918
My niggas.
>>51338665
>It also wanted to sell toys, so it had a mecha.
>Implying.
It was a "realism"-wank by the director who is quite known for making such stuff in past.

>>51334766
This.
Manga is mandatory reading too.

>>51338665
The Phantom Menace syndrome.

>>51339033
But there was no pottery whatsoever and not much happening on the screen.

>>51335506
If it's describing things that didn't happen, it's getting its social science wrong. Everything that does not actually happen is scientifically inaccurate in some way.

>>51338478
Why the hell does a propeller-powered plane need oxygen masks?

>>51330541
Blindsight is utterly amazing. Echopraxia is dog-shit.

>>51334766
This actually looks cool gonna watch it thanks

>>51336377
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8hwDQJRU7E
Watch their previous series, VOTOMS and Dougram. VOTOMS is the hardest SF mechs you will find.

>>51337801
I'm still looking into exact numbers and hammering out the exact details of the terraforming. Since the Mars has earthlike gravity now by virtue of a giant, artificial mass in the center (probably a stable black hole or something along those lines) and a proper, artificial magnetic field (probably by way of giant spires and/or rings) to solve the issues with the atmosphere and air pressure, it's going to approaching earthlike numbers I guess.
I spent the last few weeks mostly writing up the history of the last thousand years to get a better picture of where the Earth, humanity and the whole solar system stands.

>>51339312
I feel like I have to warn you: while the whole hard sci-fi aspect of it is really cool, the actual characters and writing in that show is absolute shite. It's a really well realized world populated by insufferable anime cartoon-cut outs holding some of the most asinine and insufferable dialogues I've ever seen, even in an anime. It's just badly written all over.

>>51339135
People can start to experience altitude sickness at about 2000 metres if they fail to acclimatise. Propeller driven aircraft can change altitude faster than your body can adjust and can get over 10000 metres high.

Nasa's helios is propeller driven and that got up to 29km.

>>51330541
Rifters trilogy escalated so fast, holy shit.
Actual spoilers.
Oh cool, its about these deepwater workers. Nope, incoming life ending microorganism.

>>51331780
Sorry, would you lump it in the same tier of sci-fi as Trekshit?

>>51339510
To add on, you also need to think about temperature as well. The snow line for mountains can start as little as 600m -1000m. If you are flying not only are you probably higher than that but you are also sitting still, getting blasted in the face (wind chill), constantly changing altitude and therefore pressure, temperature and moisture level but you are also breathing it.

WW1 planes didn't go to high and they had massive issues with frostbite.

>>51337933
So like, /hwg/ but jerking off to an actually interesting subject?

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>>51330541
>>51339290
>>51339545
Can confirm that Blindsight was fucking fantastic, took a couple of reads to get to the first layer of "woah wait what" and another one to actually understand the mindfuck (hey, I was slow back then).

How does Rifters compare? In terms of tone, pace, quality? Echopraxia had a pretty good opening and some decent expansion on Blindsight's setting overall, but by the time it became pic related it was approaching wet fart territory

>>51338632
that's pretty much exactly what I've set out to do with my setting

glad to know people are hungry for it like I am.

>>51333035
Dat grill has v good taste

>>51330750
That only cares about genres defined by their setting, and ignores genres defined by their style, like comedy, romance and mystery.
Sure, even those, usually, have setting they belong, but in that chart a modern time mystery would be in same spot as modern time romance.

Also, where's historical settings? I assume it goes to that "Realism" part, but "Modern" being the first word there, kind makes it confusing.
I'd maybe replace the whole "modern/realism" part with "our world", or some other such expression.

>>51339322
And both are top tier. Really good stuff

>>51338628
I'm just starting the mars trilogy. I like it so far.

>>51340995
Style and tone would be perpendicular to this. Any setting genre can be run as a comedy or horror.

It should probably just be Realism.

>>51334766
Isn't there an anime called Moonlight Mile that is supposed to be Hard SF as well?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXjIKQn0IFU

>>51338893
i don't watch mecha faggotry

>>51338608
Hey I have this

>>51339135
It looks like the super-efficient prop planes that were coming out at the end of WWII. The Kingdom's using them pretty effectively to dogfight with jets in the ending battle, which might imply superior tactics or maneuverability (the enemy fighters have really stubby wings) or might be one place where this grungy apartment of 20somethings in Osaka failed to do their research. It's not like they don't have jets, the MC was watching their navy launch them when he was a kid, so it's odd that they're defending their territory with propeller craft at the end.

>>51339375
>he didn't cry when Tanabe pulls Hachi out of the water and she's in a wheelchair
It was painfully sincere and had too many comic relief characters but that doesn't equate to bad writing.

>>51340391
It's a wonderful path but it's difficult. In my own efforts to develop such a thing I've been awed and humbled over and over at how complex industrial society really is, and I've despaired at my own inability to bring out the beauty inherent in it.

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>>51342874
Tell me a little bit about your project?

Mine's basically the worker's union forges their own society, while maintaining partnership with the established government (yet both remain separate entities). The Busters' Society of Aufwolt is eh cool guy, eh handles all of the hard work that isn't military in nature and doesn't afraid of any oppression.

>>51331698
I have never seen the movie but I heard that it starts with the force of gravity leaving a message for the protagonist.

It doesn't seem much hard

>>51330482
My sci-fi is so hard that it's utterly boring.

>>51338584
His got a new video out on weather control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yzmuwDTwAU

>>51330482

pretty much anything by Larry Niven.

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>>51339846
Rifter starts much slower. But dear god does it pay off.

>>51330541
Mah vampira

>>51339290
Watts wanted so much to include all his rants about this or that and hide every clue behind so much guesswork and re-reading work he forgot to actually make an entertaining book out of it. On the plus side he's the first one to aknowledge that.

>you will never have a super dangerous lady vampire playing mind games with you for weeks before french-kissing you and showing her tongue down your throat to taste the cancer out of you.
Why even live?

You guys need to read the Beyond the Rift antology of his short stories.

Anybody plays Children of a dead Earth ? it demonstrates quite nicely the superiority of minmaxed ships around lasers over missiles in a near future no-bullshit setting, which makes me a happy laserfag.

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>>51343987
Also that motherfucker is currently teasing like a whore on his blog about something related so Blindsight, maybe a new edition, maybe a videogame, who the fuck knows?

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>>51344029

>>51334729
>star wars
>realism

Pick one.

>>51334729
Star wars is clearly fantasy
It doesn't even respect it's own setting, just makes up shit as the story demands
It's also objectively worse than it was before

Some of the best works to come out of the SW IP was the two KOTOR games. The movies were for selling toys.

>>51337599
And all that shit in the black hole?

>>51344029
>>51344047
What game is that from?

>>51334732
>And NASA getting that much funding is wish fulfillment.
the truth hurts

>>51344226
We don't talk about the shit in the black hole.

>>51344250

>Also that motherfucker is currently teasing like a whore on his blog about something related so Blindsight, maybe a new edition, maybe a videogame, who the fuck knows?

Watts posted them while speaking about absolutely unrelated things just to piss us off. Now everyone in the comments of his blog is pretending to ignore the elephant in the room.

>>51331698
>Ever see Interstellar? That's pretty damn hard right there.
You mean the movie where the force of love saves the day? That movie?

>>51344329

It is amusing to notice that everything hard about the movie is consultancy work that Nolan outsourced.

Also, everyone bitches and moans about the power of love and shit, am I the only one bothered by the fact they launched into space from earth with a multiple stage traditional-ish launch while they have those crazy powerfull SSTO designs the used later on on planet they ay have heavier gravity than earth?

Best Sf movie recently is First Contact imho.

>>51344029
>Also that motherfucker is currently teasing like a whore on his blog about something related so Blindsight, maybe a new edition, maybe a videogame, who the fuck knows?

I want him to write that novel about interstellar ship that builds wormholes throughout millions of years, until eventually humanity left behind no longer resembles the crew and refuses contact.

>>51331598

The Martian would be considered hard would it not?

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Always related.

The good anon who posted that graces us with his presence from time to time. Wonder if he has anything new to tell.

>>51344390
> the used later on on planet they ay have heavier gravity than earth
I need to proofread my rants...

>>51344390
what i love the most about Interstellar is that the entire reason they need to get off earth is to get away from the blight. And then at the end we see the ship being a huge open space with plants and everything, so they already had the technology to enclose huge spaces and successfully filter out the blight so they could conduct agriculture inside.

I mean if you can build enough greenhouses to save humanity in a trip through space but you are only missing the propulsion technology you could probably just build those greenhouses back on earth anyways.

>>51335547
>>51344329
There's no power of love in interstellar.
There's a lot of overemotional people in it and its problem lies in the lack of heart because of that. But it doesn't infringe on the plausability.

What inerstellar does is it pays lip service to a lot of modern scientific discoveries and plays them absolutely straight without exeggarating their effect. It gets a lot of praise because of that and it deserves it. Unfortunately it needs a wormhole to appear and 5th dimensional timetravel to happen to start of the plot, which it lazily justifies with "future aliens". So it disqualifies itself as hard scifi that way for most people.

>>51344442
There are three novels about that in the Beyond the Rift antology, and he's writing a new one currently according to the excerpts on his blog

>>51330482

Greg Egan. Stephen Baxter. Vernor Vinge. Gregory Benford. Old school writers include Clarke, Anderson, Niven.

>>51344460
It was sixth dimensional blight.

>>51344482
>There's no power of love in interstellar.
The whole plot of interstellar is that 4th dimensional beings wants to save humanity. They do this by opening a wormhole connecting saturn and a distant system with a black hole in it and by constructing a 3d space inside the black hole that maps to the space behind a farmers bookshelf in different points in time.

This will cause a scientist on earth to discover the wormhole, think of new hypotheses about physics, and prompt an expedition through the wormhole led by the farmer who owns the bookcase, the farmer will then fall into the black hole so he can USE THE POWER OF LOVE to find his own daughter at the right time and send her some data from inside the wormhole and also tell himself in the past the coordinates of the base so he can go there and get the mission.

I mean it makes complete sense that almost godlike beings would chose this as the best plan to save humanity.

>>51337846
>without explaining anything.
I just want to say that I loved this as a way of establishing that we were in the future and things were very different. You just had all these... nouns, and you slowly inferred what they did or meant to the people in the book from context and allusion, like reading something in a dialect you don't know.

I also hope that almost no-one copies him, as that would get annoying really quickly.

>>51344536
I met Gregory Benford during WorldCon in London and he was super nice to talk to.
I recommend his Galactic Centre series.

>>51331894
halo

>>51330482
This is one of those things where it helps to distinguish between setting and genre.

A hard sci-fi setting is one that's "realistic" as far as we can tell (or close to), at least from an engineering/physics/ probably biology perspective.

Hard sci-fi as a genre mainly exists in books, it's stories where the science is, if not "realistic", at least solid-feeling and, to some extent, the "science" is treated as interesting in itself.

I'm explaining this badly, but do people get what I mean?

>>51344621
I don't know why you're trying to insert the power of love into this.
The plot device is silly enough without trying to act like it's emotion magic.

>>51344623
That's a staple of trashy fantasy.
The most commonly parodied trope of cheap fantasy novels is their use of made up words.

>>51344623
I hope whoever copies him leaves out the gamer pandering.

>>51345084
because that's literally what they say in the movie, that his love is what is going to find her at the right time in that space -> time matrix.

>>51344455
I'm torn between wanting to have players that smart and the obligation to then be that better and smarter of a GM as well.

>>51345385
It's also what was said in the book.

>>51333451

Shouldn't you be in /pol/?

>>51344029
>>51344047
[AUTISTIC SCREECHING]

>>51344442
Read some Baxter - I think his short story Mayflower 2 (from Resplendent?) has something similar, although it all takes place within a generation ship. In general his stuff's good too - science a little less deep, but scale a little grander.

One of the main problems with defining what is Hard Sci-Fi is most of the people arguing don't know the science and don't care about the area the author is arguing from or the information available to the author.

A lot of hard sci-fi uses some form of FTL. Most of it is pretty clever ways of getting around the reason behind the limit or relativity instead of retardedly claiming Einstein was wrong. This is normally decried by people that trollishly claim introducing FTL is the cardinal THOU SHALT NOT and they declare any such transgression to be soft sci-fi.

When asked for an example of hard sci-fi from these people... they point to something with psychics, magical AI with apriori human motives, and nanomachines that don't have to follow the laws of chemistry or atomic physics because nano means magic too. Apparently to some people as long as there is no FTL you can just go absolutely nuts and still get called hard sci-fi.

>>51347732

>A lot of hard sci-fi uses some form of FTL.

There is no problem making assumptions in hard SF, as wild as you may wish, as long as you take the reflexion to the end of it.

Like, if you have cheap easy convenient teleportation technology available, why even bother making spaceships in the first place? If it's only short ranged, okay, then why bother having landing ships? If you have smart AI cheap and plentiful, why even crew your spaceships? etc.

>>51348349
>Like, if you have cheap easy convenient teleportation technology available, why even bother making spaceships in the first place?
Because it kills you and puts a clone with your memories somewhere else. I'm not getting into one of those deathtraps.

>>51344455
God damn I need more of this! Any other fiendishly clever/utterly horrifying stories out there?

>>51330482
>forward and tragic time travel via long-distance and high-speed space travel

>>51348858
Future War or Gunbuster?

>>51345458
I would love to see a recording of that game.

>>51348392
Not if you have teleportation. Actual teleportation. And not star trek style (which doesn't even work this way)

>>51347732
I find FTL acceptable in hard sci-fi if they allow for relativistic loop holes or un-tested science/exotic materials.

Like its possible if you can generate negative mass-energy.
>Does something like that actually exists?
>Can it be produced on a large enough scale to use?

If it's theoretically possible, then the leap of faith to practically possible is much more digestible IMO. As it still has fiction in its name tiny leaps seem even required.

That said, solving one problem doesn't change everything so remain consistent and use the limitations as tools for story telling rather than barriers.

>>51343189
Ridiculously huge solid planet with enough room for technological societies to be swallowed up, dangerous enough they can't swallow it. Held together by magic. A group of explorers is trying to find the ocean but it's a million miles away, so basically it's weekly adventures with a new industrial society somewhere.

I've always been fascinated by the vulnerability of premodern civilization, how any day the horse archers or Cimbrians might sweep into your fertile, urbanized valley and burn it to the ground, and I wanted to try and capture that for a world with freeways and cell phones.

I also love Kino's Journey and want to do something like that.

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>>51344442
I remember that anime.

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>>51349556
Chamber did nothing wrong.

>>51349646
he was such a bro

>>51332028
I think the algebraist did something like this, took early humans and spread them amongst the stars and used them to guide humanity for better or worse. Makes way more sense than most ancient aliens shit. Humanoid aliens trace foots back to earth,

>>51337781
Spreadsheets: The Strategy Game.

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>>51336846
My nigga

>>51338478
>>51335918

Thank you for introducing me to this movie. Just watched it. Absolutely brilliant.

>>51344446
It would if not for a number of points, the first of which being that the situation would never have happened in the first place because winds on Mars are weak as fuck, even for what counts as a storm there.

>>51341480
It's OK at best.

>>51349501
>I also love Kino's Journey and want to do something like that.
Good fucking luck, mate. Kino is top tier world building kino

>>51331894
Borges.

>>51338628
Mars Trilogy is wonderful. So is the Science in the Capital trilogy (which you can now pick up as the Green Earth omnibus). I concede that 2312 is a bit dry.

>>51344805
Gr8 b8 m8

>>51350221
Oops didn't see that was a reply to another post.

>>51334127

Larry Niven fucking rocks.

But more importantly, even if you don't accept his work as hard enough (for you), you have to admit his contribution to hard sci fi. As in, basically reviving it from the dead. Harlan Ellison's New Wave hippie artistes had basically gutted sci fi, and Larry Niven lead the backlash that restored the primacy of science in science fiction.

(Yes, yes, yes, New Wave and "speculative fiction" greatly improved the actual prose and avant garde writing chops of sci fi but at the expense of it not being science fiction anymore. And plus a ton of shitty political baggage.)

So much of what's best in hard sci fi owes its existence to Niven even if you don't appreciate his writing in particular. Though I've met very few hard sci fi fans who don't like Niven's writing.

>>51336846
Except in order to be more inclusive Orion's Arm hasn't been hard sci-fi in a long time. They still have magic AI and magic nano. Also evolutionary levels and tech levels. A good chunk of authors still argue with each other one what counts as real science. They once advised a guy to use a micro-singularity to create a world ship, never mind that all the information they gave him wouldn't have freaking worked because the "Hawking Referenced" data they gave him for was for an event that would last nanoseconds and create far less than what he needed. But it had the word singularity and it referenced Hawking so it just HAD to be legit, right?

>>51335398
GURPS

>>51339290
Echopraxia is OK, and definitely has its moments.

"Oh... oh shit, the space station is full of alien hypertech grown molecule-by-smart-molecule! It's a trap! *grabs flamethrower because tiny shit does not like heat one bit*"

Dude had the right reaction there, and it was satisfying.

>>51344460
That's a thing that doesn't come up in SF often - whatever the problem is, it's almost certainly easier, safer and cheaper to deal with it on Earth. There may be reasons to go colonise space, but "we need to get off Earth or we'll all die, but we won't in space" mostly only applies to human threats. Like nukes. And even then.

Even the most extreme global warming scenario will leave Earth more habitable than space. There's still be free gravity, and air, although you may have to process it for use in your sealed habitat, and you'll have to solve the same problems and more so to do it in space.

>>51349291
>And not star trek style (which doesn't even work this way)
Transporters work in several radically different ways with mutually incompatible failure states and technological ramifications, depending on the day of the week.

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>>51336846
More of these spaceships, please?

>>51344536
>Clarke
Muh nigguh
Rendezvous with Rama was both entertaining an the most boring book ever conceived.
Also, Asimov

>>51330482
Dragons Egg

>>51331894
Lem's cyberiad.
Hard sci-fi written in a style of a medieval story.

>>51334763
Damn it, I had a pdf with all the marine equipment, technical specs and comments from marines that used it. Think it was from one of the Aliens movies.

Like, each smartgun had, according to the marines, its own personality. Some would miss all the god damn time whilst other would be so accurate that it put round after round through the first hole, doing little damage to your target.

>>51352054
I wouldn't call Orion's arm hard sci-fi, but I like the concept and could see it being an interesting setting to play in, transapient stuff would mostly be behind the scenes

>>51354343
>cyberiad
>hard sci-fi
Yeah, hunting prabobility dragons with head-launchers is hardest sci-fi known to man.

>>51342226
Then don't act like a faggot.

>>51354975
>story about how quantum physics work
>written as a legend about dragons
That's exactly what I was talking about.

>>51330482
Ben Bova's Grand Tour series. Pretty good, too.
Until the hero from his other series with magical powers arrives in, but that's in the last book.

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>>51339322
My /m/an.

>>51330750
>>51331527
If you consider Rod Serling's definition (and I do)
>It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.
...then you can't mix sci-fi and fantasy. The moment something impossible becomes probable, it is a fantasy story.

Similarly, one could delineate Sci-Fi from realism.

>>51336310
>(the TV incarnation, haven't got to the books yet)
the books throw hard sci-fi out the window but they're still good

>>51355996

Rod Serling was clearly just trying to be a smartass.

Sci-fi is anything where tech is more advanced than it currently is, and fantasy is just magic. Which means anything where advanced tech and magic combines is sci-fan.

>>51338282
Hey man that's harsh, it had some good points even if it did degenerate into hopelessly idealistic hippy bullshit by the end.

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>>51352054
Orion's Arm is like 2001 A space odysee or sid meier's alpha centauri. The core is hard science but the shell is soft science. As long as you keep yourself at modosophont orlow transapient tech it is hard science. The archailects are fairly softer science. Orion's arm never dwells into total soft science, it stretches physical laws into maximal application.
But you can see the clarktech more like the starchild from 2001 or the ascent to transcendence fromalpha centauri. It is a good site and an interestig universe.

>>51338228
just spent an hour watching his stuff. my new favourite channel.

>>51357907
Issac Arthur is like a more realistic orions arm.

>>51358659
How have i never heard of this guy before?

>>51350118
>Kino is top tier world building kino
Terrific example of doing more with less. Humanity's divided into small walled countries the majority of which have less than 100,000 people. Why? Who cares?

LNs are great by the way, it's a little tough getting used to the blind idiot ESL translations with tense changing in the middle of every sentence but
>adventures with Master and gun store guy
>adventures with Shizu and his daughteru
>that country where they're all clones
>that running battle with the old operators
>that freaking Twitter story
>the h-bomb store in the middle of a plain
>the walking country
>the floating country
>the bone bridge
>twins
Man, it's a great ride. Pity they only adapted the earlier stories that were half Twilight Zone ripoffs.

>>51353274
What's frustrating is there are already much more compelling reasons to want to leave Earth without coming up with a plot device to force you to.

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Anyone heard of Big Ideas Grand Vision? its a setting that was made for alternity I believe it was but it was pretty cool medium-hard sci-fi. (it has FTL travel and Gravitic technology). Basically humanity spread to nearby star-systems and they each take different technological paths without any communication with one another, a bit planet of hats at times though, most of them are pretty interesting though, except "New America" which felt a bit too much "its america! in space!"

>>51331669
loved the mars trilogy

>>51359149
Like?

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>>51331527
I'm guessing stuff like The Stand, Shadowrunner, and Assassin's Creed. I think Fate/Grand Order falls under it as well with time travel being a thing.

Just started seveneyes, love it.

>>51359415
spaaaace

>>51359126
A whole bunch of small nations is way more interesting than giant megastates, and I try to apply that to my sf games too, so colonies tend to be small and grow slowly from a thousand folk to maybe a couple of million tops... or flip into some kind of hyper growth and go straight-up trantor. Why such low population growth? Handwave. It makes for a more interesting setting.

People on the huge worlds don't tend to leave and the worlds themselves kind of contract, ignoring distant worlds, then close worlds, then turning far enough inwards that their own system's other bodies and habitats don't interest them. They get a bit weird.

>>51353274
>whatever the problem is, it's almost certainly easier, safer and cheaper to deal with it on Earth
Whether it's to a new valley, a new continent, or a new planet, humanity has only ever needed one of three reasons to migrate:
1) Spread eggs to a new basket. Laziness being what it is, humans often do this only at the point the current basket is literally on fire. At any rate, it reduces the chance both baskets get burnt down simultaneously and you lose everything.
2) To get away from the assholes in the current village. When politics gets you down, the human response is to leave and make a new society (with blackjack and hookers) somewhere else. People make problems: no people, no problems!
3) In search of something valuable that can't be found at home. Whether spices, rare metals, or other intelligences, sometimes an idiot will find something irrationally appealing and move an entire civilisation to get it. For us on this board, it's probably alien vag.

>>51359455
I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

I fell way out of love with it midway through, and the ending... but you might be different!

>>51359415
Frontier spirit. Fleeing persecution (for good this time). International dickmeasuring. Paranoia. Planning for future population growth.

>>51359540
Thing is, the Earth is pretty fucking big and if you can colonise space, there are plenty of uninhabited bits of Earth that are still more convenient, like the middle of the fucking Sahara.

also there are no hot space babes with tentacles I'm sorry, galaxy quest is not really a documentary :(

>>51359523
>A whole bunch of small nations is way more interesting than giant megastates
Especially if they're interacting, getting conquered, forming alliances, behaving like nations do. Having humanity divided into Earth nation, Mars nation, and Belt autonomous region Expanse-style is stupid. It feels all right because we're used to such reductionism in SF, but proper chaotic systems like in Duke of Uranium are such a breath of fresh air in comparison.

>>51359565
You addressed literally none of his points. Well, sort of 2, if the technology didn't exist to put a half-pound of plutonium and associated hardware in the sky over your town in 15 minutes. You're forgetting the #1 draw of space to humans: the speed of light barrier. It can be possible to really truly go somewhere where no one will try to mess with you.

>>51359565
This is only useful for dissidents who want their own place but are too poor for space. There are no useful resources in the Sahara and the egg basket could not be so on fire that they would move there first but not space.

>>51359565
>there are plenty of uninhabited bits of Earth that are still more convenient, like the middle of the fucking Sahara.
Of the reasons I listed they all have things against them (otherwise we'd be in space already).

1) is unfortunately never taken seriously (humans who are good at aggregating power are bad at envisaging asteroids as a relevant threat).
3) all atoms are on Earth somewhere, and info can be transmitted readily enough between civilisations. Hot xeno-dickings really is the only reason to meet an alien face-to-face.

But 2) is still relevant. Humans go to other places, mostly to get away from each other. The Sahara maybe be uninhabited at the moment, but what happens when you go there and find Dickless-Dave has already set up his moisture farm where you were planning yours? You burn it down and steal the land! And then hope no-one else comes along and does the same to you...

>>51347649
>Read some Baxter - I think his short story Mayflower 2 (from Resplendent?) has something similar, although it all takes place within a generation ship. In general his stuff's good too - science a little less deep, but scale a little grander.

Manifold Trilogy is pretty good.

>>51347732
>A lot of hard sci-fi uses some form of FTL.
If it has FTL it isn't hard sci-fi. Baxter, Reynolds don't use FTL.

The only extreme exception is the use of wormholes/black holes.

>>51357712
Other universes like that ? I remember in 90s and early 2000s there were couple of them on the web. Arc builders for example.

>>51359149
Not if we becoem a stay at home civilisation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDqjK5vR6hE

>>51359348
>Big Ideas Grand Vision?
By Anders Sandber-a legend

http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/BigIdeas/

>>51359565
> Thing is, the Earth is pretty fucking big and if you can colonise space, there are plenty of uninhabited bits of Earth that are still more convenient, like the middle of the fucking Sahara.

Space is more convenient if you want to escape human society as a cult or political group.

First space colonists will be religious refugees.

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>>51360001
>If it has FTL it isn't hard sci-f

FTL is FTL, if you fuck with physics and timelike curves the form doesn't matter, as long as you go to the end of it. Like >>51348349 said, the point of wormhole being "acceptable" to you doesn't come from the intrinsic fact that they're wormholes, but that it doesn't open the "why don't we directly FTL from planet to planet" ? of cheap easy star trek like FTL.

Even Reynolds described a hard-Sci-fi-ish "embedded" FTL device. It blew up to Skade's face, but it was physically possible, albeit awfully unstable.

>>51360316
I never understood why it is assumed that we need to colonize other solar systems in vast numbers.

Even our system allows population of trillions to exist for billions of years.
I can imagine some splinter colonies and exploring other biospheres but colonizing entire galaxy seems unnecessary

http://www.astro-ecology.com/Astroecology_Human_Space_Populations.htm

How much living matter (biomass) can the Solar System support? The most readily accessed resources are carbonaceous asteroids and maybe comets. We therefore measured the amounts of organic carbon and of mineral nutrients in asteroid/meteorite materials, in soluble bioavailable forms and as total contents. We also know how much of elements are needed to form biomass, and how much of such resource materials are present in the Solar System. asteroids and in comets. From these data we can estimate the amounts of biomass and populations that can be sustained by space resources.
Based on the limiting elements N and P, water-extractable materials in one kilogram of carbonaceous asteroid soils can support 0.6 grams of biomass. On this basis, bioavailabe extractable materials in the 1e22 kg carbonaceous asteroids can support 6e18 (six million trillion) kilograms of biomass, six thousand times more than the biomass presently on the Earth, that supports six billion humans. The extractable asteroid materials could then support on the order of 40e12 (40 trillion) humans. Using the total elemental contents of the carbonaceous asteroids could support a biomass and population a hundred times larger yet, 4,000 trillion humans, comparable to the population of a million Earths. Materials in the comets could support biomass and populations even ten thousand times larger, comparable to ten billion Earths, in our Solar System alone. Billions of similar solar systems throughout the galaxy can support amounts of life and human populations billions of times still larger.

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>>51360399
Best spaceship coming through, out of the way peasants!

>>51359348
You can find other settings like this here

http://www.aleph.se/Nada/game.html


I know Anders works on Eclipse Phase too, but it is on other site I think.

>>51360438

Inhibitor style creatures out there are a valid reason imho. In less unrealistic domains we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova

Supernovae that can sterilize hundreds of cubic light years.

>But anon, what are the odds of such a thing happening close to Sol?

Well... https://jumk.de/astronomie/special-stars/hr-8210.shtml

However I do agree with you about the absolutely staggering population a fully colonized solar system could support. Trillions... Have you read Mining the Sky? The final chapters give an absolutely grandiose vision of our possible future if we're able to leave the gravity well.

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>>51330482
Albedo Anime adaptation when

This setting is in my top 3.

>>51360316
>>51360438
>>51360630
Easy more than trillions. That guy did the maths for earths can came out at trillions of trillions.

>>51342785
They said that only the Navy had jets. I'm assuming the army/air force are prohibited from using them for some political reason.

>>51360438
>I can imagine some splinter colonies and exploring other biospheres but colonizing entire galaxy seems unnecessary


When your population numbers in the trillions your migratory pressure out of excess growth doesn't magically disappear. You will likely see a pancake shaped migration wave leaving the solar system when it is fully colonized and if the migratory pressure is higher than the colonization speed you will see mighation waves bouncing back toward the explansion core. Trillions and trillions of migrants, wars encompassing entire solar sustems and taking thousands of years. Shit will really hit the galactic fan.

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>>51360441
My man!
-
If you'd ask me, I'd say that Alastair Reynolds makes quite a bit good hard-sf. I'm actually suprised no one mentioned him.

>>51331894
Worm. Magic space whales that grant people superpowers in order to end entropy set in an alternate universe earth where kaiju have been ravaging the world economy.

>>51360754
I doubt it would ever come to that. As level of life and standard of living increases people tend to have fewer and fewer children.

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>>51334766
I follow this thread since yesterday and it just dawned on me. Nobody here knows of Rocket Girls or what?!

>>51361040
But when your population is that high you don't need a high percentage of willing migrants to actually do it, One in a trillion ape whose brain demands that he takes risk and go to the next valley see if the lands is more bountiful. One in a million trillion, maybe one per generation, who is some future Elon Musk and has the industrial means to actually send people over there. The migration wave might be slow, maybe 10.000 to 100.000 years to the next solar system, but it will be there, and in galactic terms it will be fast as brushfire.

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>>51361042
This is now a Rocket Girls thread

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>>51361238

>>51360913
>Alastair Reynolds makes quite a bit good hard-sf
Yes he does, though by the end of many books the level of alien or experimental technology tends to climb out of the very-hard sci-fi state.
The books are good though.

>>51360441
My amarantin!

I love settings where trader ships act as almost angle-like entities for lower tech colonies they visit once in every few thousand years.

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>>51361297

>>51361412
In the case of the Revelation Space setting, lighthuggers aren't that infrequent, and they can often be a curse as much as a blessing. Sure they can bring new technology and resources that the colony can't produce by themselves, but then you get people fighting over who has access to those things.

>>51361471
Yeah, but in a few hundred years (2500) they'll be, since the Conjoined doesn't make any more besides for themselves.

>>51361238

> BRAAAAAAAAP!!!

>>51356034
Your joking right? The books are way...way more 'hard sci fi" than the silly TV show? Just watch the battle with the Donneger in episode 4. The space physics and how ships actually move and combat each other in space has been dumbed down for TV. Things happen fast and action packed.
The battles in the novels are FAR more realistic. Even the movement in vented space, and atmosphere was changed for show budgeting. You're idiot.

>>51362445
The opening the mask to scratch his face in vacuum really got me. People really have no clue how violent decompression is.

They watch one silly little vsaurce video and suddenly they think it's a little tickle.

>>51349501
I really like the sound of this idea. Are there any concentrated space programs?

how dense is the proliferation of intelligent spieces? Because on this planet it seems as if you can just keep moving on and away from people who want to kill you/live next to you. I could see lots of premodern nomadic peoples thriving around the edges and in the gaps between the industrialized societies.

In addition, where does conflict come from? Historicly a massive amount of conflict came about because of limited living space. In the case of your planet that's not so much a factor, though I have no doubt people would fight over specific locations regardless.

>>51349556

gargantua was pretty fucking sweet got to admit. I loved the look of the floating cities and I loved the thought of cultures moving around. How hard it is to keep a fleet together, keep the trust of captains, ward off mutinies and pirates so on and so forth.

>>51360913
Holyshit this makes me happy, I had no idea any one made a visual representation of the Lighthuggers. I always say them as more dense, and looking like titanic Ice mountains... but that's still pretty fucking cool.
>>51360441
Yeah, Like this. Good shit. Good ass shit.

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>>51363206
You should like this one, look at the name in the corner..

>>51330482
>What is your hard scifi?
Star Trek & Firefly, and really anything that hearkens back to the two.

if you don't like it, then kiss my ass

>>51363241
so this is the author's own take on the ships? Or at least one of his takes? Baller. Very close to what I thought of.

I loved the idea of using old hulls for space stations in the book 'Chasm City' Which, By the way, Is one of my favorite Sci-fi cities out there. So much room for so many different adventures!

>>51363293
Firefly felt authentic but I wouldn't call it hard.

>>51361141
>The migration wave might be slow, maybe 10.000 to 100.000 years to the next solar system, but it will be there

Why? There is no law of physics that makes it so. It might as well be that civilizations almost completely cease reproduction at certain tech levels and are content with virtual reality and couple of settled system, while their probes and explorers explore space.

>>51331527
Neal Stephenson maybe, particularly Reamde. Going purely off of things other anons have pointed out.

>>51344536
Vinge isn't that hard scifi as far as I can tell, but I love his Zones of Thought series. Although I wish it was more in the style of A Deepness in the Sky than the two (or is it three now?) higher level Zones novels.

>>51360441
>tfw Reynolds was at his best when in the Sky Haussman sections of Chasm City when it was confined to sublight travel

I do have a special place in my heart for the Nostalgia for Infinity and the Captain though

>>51343698
Planet Dike here we come.

>>51363614
Because even if there were a centralized form of governement/regulation able to managingeverything over the entirety of the solar system and making so that there is absolutely no competition whatsoever for anything, between each of a million settlements, major with billions of inhabitants, and minors with maybe a few hundreds, from Mercury to the Oort cloud, light-months away were the sun barely shines, no dispite for resources, not even over competing ideas and opinion, stagnation would require an absolute control over the entirety of al humans spread accross the entire solar system, which seems to be impossible to me. Not 99.999999999%, we're talking trilions of humans, that is not good enough, we need absolute 100%.

Spread would only require an infinitesimal minority disagreeing with that control and wanting to settle in another solar system to succeed. Each and every settlement in the Oort cloud drawing a big fat red line at the limit of the influence of Sol and Proxima Centary saying, "yup, we arbitrarily won't make a single more step in that direction"

How plausible does that seem?

>>51364532
Why would there be trillions of people in the first place ?

And why do you think any control is needed to make population relatively small?

If you have infinite virtual worlds and whole Solar System to exploit, you don't really want to reproduce probably.

>>51364244
I prefer Redemption Ark myself, but yeah, Chasm City has its charm.

>>51364557
Why not? Explain me which pressure would prevent people from multiplying once we get acess to the resources of the whole solar system?

>probably.
You destroyed your whole argument there. Probably is not good enough when we're talking in terms of galactic scales.

You just need a extremely small minority of outliers.

>>51364557
>If you have infinite virtual books and whole Old World to exploit, you don't really want to reproduce probably.

And see how the population of Americas skyrocketted.

>>51363318
The Prefect is set there, and it's supposedly getting a sequel this year.

>>51364748
I loved it and how it put the whole thing into place, with the Clockmaker and the Demoiselle. I'm saddened it was never translated in my language while they lost their time with Blue Remembered Earth. Not that I mind original texts but a lot of my fellow frenchmen are unaccustomed with reading in english, and there is no comparison between the two cycles.

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>>51360913
>>51360399

>>51364633
>Why not? Explain me which pressure would prevent people from multiplying once we get acess to the resources of the whole solar system?

Lack of pressure would. Reproduction rates are falling in all over the world as quality of life increases.

>You destroyed your whole argument there. Probably is not good enough when we're talking in terms of galactic scales.

Since the Galaxy is visibly not overpopulated than I guess this is one of the most likely scenarios.

>You just need a extremely small minority of outliers.

There is no physic law that makes them inevitable to exit.

>>51364663
>And see how the population of Americas skyrocketted.

In completely different stage of technological development.

Antarctica hasn't experienced population growth, and in place like Oceania people actually retreat from colonization of islands.

>>51365075
>Reproduction rates are falling in all over the world as quality of life increases.

To my understanding, technological development and quality of life isn't directly linked to reproduction rate. It's urbanisation and modern urban lifestyle, which is not exactly the same thing, and for no small part based on cultural reasons about the importance of salaried employment in our lives, that are just as likely to evolve than any other until then. You could get high quality of life in environement that doesn't preclude reproduction. So i'd be much less sure than you that technology implies low reproduction.

>Since the Galaxy is visibly not overpopulated than I guess this is one of the most likely scenarios.
No more than any other.

>There is no physic law that makes them inevitable to exit.
We're talking long term. Without a physics law actively preventing them from happening, it is bound to happen sooner or later. You'd just need one colony; settlement, country, emerging pissed off from a crisis and going all Mayflower "fuck it, we're getting into that spaceship and we'll see how it turns out" to spread.

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>>51365075
Also, man, I love that debate, thank you for taking the time to discuss with me about it, and thanks /tg/ for existing.

>>51359126
The tower country story is legit one of my favourites. The concept is so simple, yet its extremely satisfying and well done.

>>51338228
holy crapsnapples what is that guy smoking.

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>>51361238
I wish.

>>51331894
Shadowrun.

>>51363293
>>51363506

>Firefly

Had a Phillip K Dick vibe going on. Earth's fucked, government forces people out to colonize shitty worlds then proceed to shit all over them. Then there's this one woman who's such an irredeemable piece of shit you're supposed to hate her when she gets her way (these were in ALL his books, all based on one woman). This was the background to like half his novels. Throw in reality altering drugs, or time travel, or both, and it's a PKD book. Oh wait. It had that. Goverment doing mind altering experiments on unwilling subjects secretly, developing PAX drugs, one escapes and starts fucking everything up. That's another book right there.

I went on a PKD binge right before rewatching Firefly

>>51360716
>Albedo Anime
Fucking never, that's when. The fanbase for this dissolved. I don't think they'd have a clue who to market it to even if they did make it.

>>51363082
I imagine there are space-borne civs but hitting orbit is really, really hard, and space is dangerous too. The protags would be from one of them, their ancestors having escaped slavery several hundred years prior, which is how they know the ocean exists.

I did have an idea for a while of including haughty, alien, Poul Anderson-style elves, so after a continent's worth of humans so strange they're like Star Trek rubber-forehead aliens we meet these more normal people that are shockingly alien, and I imagined they had an orbital castle launched by Orion drive using the capital of their most hated enemy as a launchpad. Might not be able to include them, it's getting hard to juggle elements, but I imagine about half the lights in the sky are space habitats. Not being able to use the stars for navigation retards civilizational progress and preserves adventurousness.

There would be plenty of intelligent species, probably mostly human-derived, and lots of pockets where premoderns and even moderns live away from the ken of the grand civs.

Theoretically there's unlimited living space - in practice, there are wide belts of impassable terrain where, say, dragons, or ghosts, or mind-control towers of lost civilizations, live, or plain old nuclear wastelands.

There's a kind of telepathy possible only between women, often used to expedite translation and make better first contact, but in an incredibly miniscule percentage of births the telepathy's too strong and she unconsciously forms a hivemind, instantly linking and overwriting nearby women in a chain reaction, the resultant being able to use empathy magic to more or less control men in the area. The accepted international response is nuclear dusting.

>>51331102
A manichean struggle pitting white knights against dark queens. Son, that's fantasy not scifi.

>>51330482
Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton.

>>51365717
I love how the stories range from complicated narratives with sticky morals to fables, and how much the philosophy's woven into them.
>that country with the giant sundial in the LNs that was actually a suborbital gun
>They're going to conquer the world, but fire a warning shot at maximum range first
>Hermes realizes what's going on and makes a rare interruption to tell Kino to get out of Dodge
>BOOOOM
That one was pretty satisfying too, and almost as simple.

>>51366628
Alternately

> Mankind struggles to find relevance in a world where they have been completely outclassed by computers

Sounds like Sci Fi to me.

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>>51338590

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>>51331894
An original Mage: The Ascension campaign featuring the Technocracy or Sons of Ether.

>>51331894
A Certain Magical Index.

>>51366644
The diversity in the type of story is definitely a huge strength, but it always manages to keep roughly the same atmosphere or mood. Nevermind the anime, which is fantastic in and of itself, the LN somehow manages to create that same down to earth and melancholic mood through all the transliterating.
All this while still staying fairly neutral to the actual cultures and peoples that Kino and Hermes encounter.

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>>51331698
They were able to get out of a gravity strong enough to dialate time such that the black guy aged 50 years on the ship to their 2 hours on the surface, using fuel they brought along ontheir shuttle
How was this shuttle propelled so that it can get back into orbit?

REEEEEEEEEEEEE

>>51334732

It's painful because it's true.

>>51355996

What about something like the Difference Engine which though technically impossible when it was written has become possible (if not practical) today?

>>51360001
Reynolds has anti-thermodynamic maths that when you calculate it it uses up heat and your processor gets colder and if it gets stuck in an infinite loop you'd better get out of your ship (you use the processors as armour to reduce your ship to cosmic background temperature and be stealthy in space) before it reaches absolute zero.

hard sf is cool

reynolds is pretty hard

insistence that anything with anything not purely scientifically possible is soft fluffsf is just stupid; you can be hard at some stuff and have background softer elements that don't affect the story

>>51342785
>>51360737


Based on how barely funded and wonky the space project was, I think it was barely 50s level of tech. Like the concept for manned V2s - mathematically possible, and jets were around, but prop planes were still the cheaper and more robust technology. It would change quickly, of course, but an alternate universe where the two main powers are in a constant war might have a massive resource drain in place.

>>51360441
I mean even that has inertialess drives that retcon you out of existence if you crack them open

OK, get the REEE out of the way first: young adult novel

ok

done?

Lockstep, Karl Schroeder.

Some people developed good hibernation tech (fancy bed pod things, and implants to make it work right), and went off and colonised terribly poor, distant worlds that no-one else would bother with. They then set up their culture so that they wake up for a month, then hibernate for years while robots maintain their stuff in low-power mode, handle resource-collection, and so on. What does this give them? All their worlds (assuming the same schedules) can be linked, because unlike people off on the fast worlds who might leave home to visit another planet and come back to find everyone they remember is dead or different, they can visit the relatives in the next system over for a while, then come home and not have to pay relativity's price.

Also while their worlds are poor, they can live in luxury because they're only living a tiny fraction of the time.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-worldbuilding-in-lockstep-is-so-good-it-will-make-y-1584702572

of course there's a plot with the family in control of it all forcibly DRMing the hibernation and punishing worlds by changing their schedule, but eh. at the end of the story that gets undone and everyone's free~ and the setting gets way more open and interesting.

Anyway, it's a cool idea that gets you a hard sf setting without too much relativity.

He's got a short story in the setting (but distant from the plot of the book): http://www.tor.com/2014/02/26/jubilee-karl-schroeder/ It's a pretty good read.

>>51371706
that short story's set on a world with other inhabitants, but IIRC that's pretty damn rare for obvious reasons.

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2300ad is probably my favourite hard scifi, followed by Transhuman Space.

2300ad is still considered hard scifi, right?

Sorry for the misquote earlier

>>51344226

That is just both of the main characters losing their fucking minds.

Father just sees things he can't comprehand.
Daughter digs deep into her own madness to uncover the formula.

>>51371706
That circumvents quite nicely one of the problems of no FTL for storytelling. With the exception of science nerds like it seems of fair number of us in this thread, it is hard to hook an audience over a plot that spans millenias with people dead by the time you come back victorious from the war against the galactic bug eyed monsters. Except if said time gap is the point of the story.

Issac Arthur isn't hard. Black hole farming to power massive computers civilisations at the end of time.... yeah right.

>>51375132
>Meanwhile in 50AD
>"Solar farming to power massive computer civilizations in 2000 years. Yeah right."