Ask HN: Best hard scifi AI novels?
I don't think 'i robots' are hard scifi. Today i sixth times read The greatest 'True names'(1981) by Vernor Vinge, it is an incredible AI cyberpunk hard scifi novel，aslo a great literature.
Update: Thanks for all the great recommends，it is greatest time to find ideas in these books today. Please aslo add the book publish year，i think it will be helpful to see the writer's wonderful superior consciousness.
105 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadIt's been a while since I read it, but I don't recall a big focus on science, and some things are pretty explicitly hand waved ("we are lucky they have that issue with right angles")
Personally, if an author's done enough research to support most every detail with at least one or two scientifically plausible explanations (and has the personal scientific background to vet those ideas), I'll give their work the benefit of the doubt. Between ultimately still just being a work of fiction and the march of scientific discovery, you have to give some small leeway.
Regarding the right angle thing, it's been long enough since I've read Blindsight that I can't recall how much was actually explained in the novel vs in the FizerPharm presentation or other material on Watts' website. If you're willing to include extra-textual content, Watts' vampires are given as hard a science fiction treatment as any classic monster is likely to get...
Watt's is a biologist who gives them plausibility and even ecological place that justifies their traits and behaviour. Hard scifi vampires!
It took me a long time though to get myself to buy the book because the book description on Amazon is the worst and sounds like a awful B-movie.
Nonetheless, I think the result is extraordinary, because the problems posed, the paradoxes highlighted, and some brilliant insights, are new and valid outside the fictional world created in the novel.
However, I regard him as a bad writer, as his dialogue is very bad, his characters hollow and his plot progression is rather jumpy.
Read him for his stimulating ideas, but not the way he tells the story.
[0]: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Definition on Wikipedia: Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific accuracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction
Tempted to mention The Diamond Age, but not sure that qualifies as "Hard", though closer than some other Stephenson maybe...
For myself I take it to mean no new fundamental physics. Any new technology is a reasonable extrapolation from existing, known science. Probably the single biggest narrative restriction that implies is no FTL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction#Scientifi...
Hard scifi implies that technology has changed the entire world. A good example is "I, robot". Themes are explored by characters interacting with the world.
Soft scifi implies that technology has changed only the lives of the characters. A good example is "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" Themes are explored in characters interactions.
However, I adored Daniel Suarez's 'Daemon'
That said, A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite all time SciFi books and I'd highly recommend it.
Probably one of the most thought provoking pieces of scifi I've read.
I'll also recommend Accelerondo, and Seveneves.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi_Kovacs
It might be more philosophy of AI than science fiction. It takes form of series of lectures that superintelligent (singularity level AI) gives to humanity before it goes away.
It has many ideas that I have never seen expressed anywhere outside the book.
Most of his sci-fi is from the late 1970s through the early 2000s.
I especially like his Voyage From Yesteryear from 1982: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=sum... "The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond? ... The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"
The whole point and the buzz was people saw it as a novel about present day tech.
A story about a near future where a man is living on another planet. You don't think that counts as science fiction?
On the one hand, I disagree ('20,000 leagues under the sea' was sci-fi when it was written). On the other hang, holy crap we're so close to humans being on Mars that such a story might not count as science fiction! That's amazing!