"Inherit the Stars" has been one of my favorites since I read it in the early 1980s. No antagonist. No action. Just a fun story. Enjoyed the 2 next sequels too. I've re-read that trilogy several times and love it each time.
It was one of the first sci-fi series I really got into once I progressed past Dr Who novels. Loved it then, still love it 35 years on from my first read.
@@lanokia Similar. I read most of Hogan's books, but the Giants series is his best in my opinion. I've read it several times and it it's like comfort food to me now. :)
I'm a big scifi reader and I love that you still show me books that I either never heard of or heard of but never got to. Can't wait to read one of your books
You cited two of my favorite authors, James P Hogan and Greg Bear. Another by Greg Bear I'd recommend is "The Hammer of God." I won't spoil it, but toward the end this one section was so well-written that I literally felt ill, being able to picture it all. Makes me shudder to think of it, but I've re-read it many times it's that great! Also, "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, in which a race of intelligent beings evolves on the surface of a neutron star. Reviews from other well-known hard sci-fi authors like Asimov and Clarke were very glowing!
@@Sephiroth144 Yes, I was just going to say that The Hammer of God is definitely written by Clarke (though I suppose it's possible that Bear wrote a book with the same name).
Stephen Baxter’s Evolution is my all-time favorite novel. I’m glad you included it in this list because it really deserves more recognition. I haven’t read the others on this list, but I’ll try getting around to them sometime.
@@user-sl2ng2hr1k Well, kind of. Baxter himself acknowledged that Evolution was indeed influenced by Last and First Men. But they’re still fundamentally different. - Last and First Men focuses entirely on how humans might evolve in the future as understood by 1930s science. - Evolution focuses mostly on the history of human evolution (and life on Earth in general) after the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as a few fictional animal species that weren’t preserved in the fossil record. It’s not until the last 3 chapters that the book really delves into how humans, along with animals and plants, might evolve in the distant future. It’s still a fascinating read though.
I've had my copy of "Inherit the stars " for decades. A great book. I would also add Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". A hugo winner, back when the award meant something.
Anathem is an astonishing book that you will loose yourself in. The notion of mathematical perfection being tied to physical space travel is mind blowing. It is like nothing I can easily summarise, almost as if there are layered Platonic realms available for exploring.
You may want to mention David Brin's 'Earth', that back in 1989 was the most comprehensive forecast for the next 30 years. Mostly optimistic but very grounded in facts
James P. Hogan and Greg Bear are high on my list of favorite sci-fi writers. Code of the Lifemaker and The Two Faces of Tomorrow by JPH and Blood Music by GB are three other fairly hard sci-fi books I've enjoyed very much. The Two Faces of Tomorrow is about mankind's need and attempt to create strong A.I., basically (had that term been invented yet?). However, both Code of the Lifemaker and Blood Music are about intelligence manifesting in unexpected places. I can forgive Bear for likely mischaracterizing quantum physics at the end of his book, and not sticking the hard sci-fi landing, because the rest of Blood Music is kinda mind blowing!
I'm really glad that Inherit The Stars by James P. Hogan is on your list. I was lucky to find it when it was first published in 1977 and it turned me into a fan of Hogan for life. All of the subsequent sequels are very good too, especially the second book, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.
I think this a first for your recommendations; I haven't read a single one (!), although all five are sitting in my 'to read' queue. 😲 As for my own recommendations, I think that any of Hal Clement's 'weird planet' stories deserve to be remembered (I'm showing my age, again). The scientific accuracy is not so much in the technology, but in the conditions to be found on planets which differ wildly from Earth. 'Mission of Gravity', 'Starlight' and 'Cycle of Fire' come straight to mind but I think my personal favourites are 'Still River' and especially 'Close to Critical. All good stuff.
I loved loved loved Quarantine, after that I read every Egan thing I could find, short story books are phenomenal. I am also quite sure that much of the Black Mirror early episodes took inspiration from his short stories.
Hi, the writer I'm about to praise may not fit today's genre perfectly, but I can't help but ask - Why does everyone keep overlooking Bruce Sterling? The writer who is at the top of Gibson's thank-you list when you open his Neuromancer. A.Reynolds was another writer heavily influenced by Sterling's work. His complete collection of Shaper/Mechanist universe stories released as Schismatrix Plus is such a masterpiece and a staple of modern scifi and cyberpunk. He deserves more attention. Thanks for the video, cheers!
Great video thanks. I read Darwin’s Radio when it came out and liked it very much. I’m definitely interested in Inherit The Stars now (although it’s a little expensive that one, I’m seeing). Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement would fit on this list well too. I’d like to also recommend a quite overlooked movie called Moon, from 2009 with Sam Rockwell that is a great hard sci-fi flick 👍🏻
Yes! I added all five to my list. In august I leave for a roadtrip of eight weeks through the U.S. (while it still is a democracy) a I will download them to my kindle. Thanks Darrel! Kind regards, Jasper
Hal Clement wrote a lot of my favorite hats sci-fi. His shirt story collections, *Music of Many Spheres* (I think there are three volumes,) are essential. Probably my favorite short story and favorite hard sci-fi story are one and the same: Clement's *Planetfall.*
I thoroughly enjoyed Inherit the Stars when it came out and recently re read it and its sequels. Great stuff. I certainly agree that Fire Upon the Deep should be on this list.Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a seminal hard sf novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy would satisfy the requirements of hard SF too.
I love the Giant’s star series; at least the first three books, I can’t get through the first chapter of the fourth book. The Mote in gods’s eye and its sequel by Niven & Pournelle could perhaps fit in this video. And Greg Bear’s The forge of god and sequel Anvil of stars might also.
@@christophersmith8316 I dunno.. _" _*_soft sci fi_*_ deals more with sociology, history, politics, psychology, and economics [..] _*_hard sci fi_*_ is more concerned with having realistic science based on currently proven facts about the world."_ Question for me would be - why is "futuristic" sociological science not considered realistic when it comes to it? IMHO is above definition (and the one u also make) not holding up to scrutiny. PS: ..unless 'hard SF' has a different definition to the one I found?!
Thanks for this video, I will look for "Evolution". Hogan was a highlight in SF during the late 70s and 1980s. I have the Minervan series, plus more. He also wrote at least one hilarious short story, which I enjoyed immensely! "Neander - Tale" I read a lot of Greg Bear, I should reread. "Blood Music" it was strong SF, I preferred the short story version, a little.
I really liked Darwin’s Radio. If you want something similar, but with a bit more speculative touch, you might check out Entheòphage by Drema Deóraich - kind of Darwin’s Radio meets Andromeda Strain with a touch of climate fiction and medical mystery
I loved "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter. Fascinating read, one of my favorites of him. Your video is well made. Thank you for sharing. Do you read unknown authors, too?
Good video, especially since I haven't read any of the books reviewed. I have read some of the authors. I've read Greg Bear's Blood Music twice. It's a fun book.
If you want to read the hardest of hard SF, you need to read more Greg Egan. He has created plausible universes based on entirely different physics than ours, and makes them work incredibly well. And he's a bit eccentric, claiming there is no true picture of him on the internet. Personally, I think he's an AI masquerading as a human. :)
I tried looking up these books on audible and most don't have audiobooks available... Surprised that Stephen Baxter only has 3 audiobooks available there!
Everything Baxter writes fills me with hopelessness, dread and alienation. So of course, I've read every book he's ever written. Some, a couple of times. Most hard SF makes me feel like that. Benford, Bear, Clarke, Baxter, have a special talent for sucking the joy out of me. I treat it by reading masses of Neal Asher and Charles Stross. Techno-porn Space Opera and British Cthulhu spy comedy are just the thing.
Baxter and Bear are great but I'd like to put in a good word for Peter Watts and his amazing novels Blindsight and Echopraxia, the two most mind-bending super-hard sci-fi novels (with copious references!) I've ever read. All I can say is "wow!"
Very very few books get me to read them more than once. Top of my list is Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, about the emergence of a human hive. Not Star Trek's Borg, but much more basic and primal.
Thanks for this! I recently discovered Freehold by Michael Zimmerman. I found it extremely well written and very Heinlienesque. Not surprising since I discovered the book because of an Afterword he wrote in the Kindle version of Stranger in a Strange Land which I recently re-re-re-read after not having picked it up in a very long time.
GREG EGAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My favorite author of all times 🔥🔥🔥 His novel Schild's Ladder is, in my opinion, his absolute masterpiece. It's pure hard sci-fi, but with deeply touching characters, a beautiful fusion of mathematics, speculative quantum physics and genuine human connection.
... I was going to make a joke about "darn, should this scale not be called 'Moh' scale"... and then I found out that TV Tropes had done that and Wired had written on it.
My novel, Book of Answers, is like Baxter but without hard science. My book is a tongue in cheek look at human devolution through the perspective of a lost hippie immortal and the aliens the intelligent designer hires to find him and that takes ten million years. And so it goes
Kudos for mentioning Stephen Baxter; few people do because there's this lame belief that his characters are wooden, even though no one should read Baxter for his characters but for the concepts; characters are for soap operas or general fiction dramas; sci-fi and fantasy are about the exotic...
His text definitely follows a rigidly-defined structure and there is a lot of repetition of certain words and phrases, in virtually every video I’ve seen on this channel.