In my new interview with author Paul A. Dixon about his hard sci-fi novel "Carpathians," he reveals himself to be a creative person. Though after telling me what his daughter named their cats, I'm thinking she's the creative genius in the family.
https://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-carpathians-author-paul-a-dixon/
📖🚀⚪️
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
#PaulADixon #PaulADixonInterview #PaulADixonCarpathians #PaulADixonCarpathiansInterview #ScienceFiction #SciFi #HardScienceFiction #HardSciFi #SciFiBooks #HardSciFiBooks

Noch acht Modifikationen, dann ist #EisXXIX da! Mehr dazu in meinem Autorenshop unter Kurzgeschichten (https://www.mikegorden.de/web/product/eis-xxix/).

Lies dazu diesen Artikel im #SpektrumDerWissenschaft :

https://www.spektrum.de/news/eis-xxi-neue-art-von-eis-hat-die-komplizierteste-bekannte-struktur/2295413

#HardScienceFiction #ProudSelfPublisher #HMLVerlag #HardSciFi #WritersOfMastodon #Bookstodon #Medien #Blogger

Auch hierfür lohnt sich das Abo!

Professor Stein würde lächeln und zustimmen. Immerhin hat er im #MoíraZyklus eine ähnliche Theorie aufgestellt, die sich immer mehr bestätigt 😏

https://www.spektrum.de/inhaltsverzeichnis/dunkle-energie-spektrum-der-wissenschaft-12-2025/2240108

#QueerScienceFiction #HardScienceFiction #SciFi #ProudSelfPublisher #Standardmodell #GefrorenerUrknall #Neutronenreiter #WritersOfMastodon #Bookstodon #Medien

Fleet of the Forgotten (Exiles War #1) by Dan Thornton
Release Date November 6, 2025
#ScienceFiction #SpaceOpera #MilitaryScienceFiction #HardScienceFiction

https://www.risingshadow.net/book/83589-fleet-of-the-forgotten

Aurora

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/11/03/aurora/

#actionAdventure #book #ColoniesSpatialesRomansNouvellesEtc #ExplorationScienceFiction #fiction #HabileteSDeSurvieRomansNouvellesEtc #HardScienceFiction #InterplanetaryVoyages #InterplanetaryVoyagesFiction #kimStanleyRobinson #review #SciFiFantasy #ScienceFiction #ScienceFictionHardScienceFiction #ScienceFictionSpaceExploration #ScienceFictionSpaceOpera #spaceAndTime #SpaceAndTimeFiction #SpaceColonies #SpaceColoniesFiction #SpaceExploration #SpaceOperas #survival #SurvivalFiction #TPolyphilus #VoyagesInterplaneTairesRomansNouvellesEtc

Echoes of Time (Epic of Atlantis #1) by Douglas E. Richards, Brandon Ellis
Release Date November 1, 2025
#ScienceFiction #TimeTravel #HardScienceFiction

https://www.risingshadow.net/book/82294-echoes-of-time

Beyond the Reach of Earth

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/09/29/beyond-the-reach-of-earth/

#AlienInvasionScienceFiction #book #colonizationScienceFiction #ExtraterrestresRomansNouvellesEtc #ExtraterrestrialBeingsFiction #fiction #HardScienceFiction #HumanAlienEncountersFiction #KenMacLeod #LightSpeedFiction #Lightspeed #LumieReVitesseRomansNouvellesEtc #Novels #RencontresAvecLesExtraterrestresRomansNouvellesEtc #review #romans #ScienceFiction #ScienceFictionHardScienceFiction #ScienceFictionSpaceOpera #SpaceOperas #SpaceShipsFiction #TPolyphilus #VaisseauxSpatiauxRomansNouvellesEtc

Space Raider Nibelung (The Nibelung series #1) by Taylor M. S. Thomson
Release Date September 20, 2025
#ScienceFiction #HardScienceFiction

https://www.risingshadow.net/book/82912-space-raider-nibelung

Beyond the Hallowed Sky

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/09/15/beyond-the-hallowed-sky/

#book #DeCouvertesScientifiquesRomansNouvellesEtc #DiscoveriesInScience #DiscoveriesInScienceFiction #ExplorationScienceFiction #fiction #HardScienceFiction #KenMacLeod #LightSpeed #LightSpeedFiction #LightspeedTrilogy #LumieReVitesseRomansNouvellesEtc #review #ScienceFiction #ScienceFictionSpaceOpera #secrecy #SecrecyFiction #SecretRomanNouvellesEtc #spaceOpera #SpaceOperas #SpaceShips #SpaceShipsFiction #TPolyphilus #VaisseauxSpatiauxRomansNouvellesEtc #VenusPlanet_ #VenusPlanetFiction #VeNusPlaneTeRomansNouvellesEtc #WomenScientists #WomenScientistsFiction

I would say that I find #HardScienceFiction of the past (say, 1950s-70s) more engaging than hard science fiction of more recent years.

I confess I haven't read much hard scifi but I'm much more inclined to look at the older stuff.

I think the lack of technology at the time makes more compelling.

#Scifi

Finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Shards Of Earth: The Final Architecture: Book One."
https://amzn.to/40aul3G
📖🚀
Well, this was one heavy, rich, inventive, and ultimately engaging and epic #HardSciFi #SpaceOpera story. Book 2 soon...
#books #reading #ScienceFiction #SciFi #HardScienceFiction

Started reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Shards Of Earth: The Final Architecture: Book One."
https://amzn.to/40aul3G
📖🚀
Only 54 pages in, but I can already tell this is going to be an intricate, epic, and engaging #HardSciFi #SpaceOpera story...and a good start to this trilogy.
#books #reading #ScienceFiction #SciFi #HardScienceFiction

I'm reading Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, and on the one hand it is kind of boring because he is from that generation of SF writers who isn't very good at writing characters but still feels he has to, but on the other hand it is bringing home to me that I don't understand relativity (in particular time dilation effects) as well as I thought I did.

#TauZero #ScienceFiction #Relativity #HardSF #HardScienceFiction #HardSciFi

Sister Alice

Multiple people have recommended Robert Reed’s books over the years. I started to read his Greatship stories many years ago, but got distracted and never made it back. Recently I came across a recommendation for his book, Sister Alice, as an example of hard science fiction space opera, and decided to check it out. Published in 2003, it’s a fix-up novel, composed of five stories which were originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in the 1990s.

The setting is several million years in the future. Humans have colonized the galaxy, and there has been peace for ten million years. Before the peace, widespread availability of god-like technologies led to existential wars that threatened to destroy the entire species. To preserve humanity, it was decided that only a few individuals would have these powers.

These individuals were selected from the population for their innate disposition not to abuse their power. In order to ensure their genetics remain pure, they only reproduce by cloning, although the clones can be of both sexes. This has led to one thousand “family” dynasties who rule the galaxy. They are the rulers, warriors, and terraformers, among many other powerful roles.

This isn’t to say that regular humanity isn’t heavily improved. Death by old age or disease appears to have been eliminated, with people living for millions of years. Regular people can heal from devastating injuries and only experience limited pain due to built in analgesics. However, aside from this, they are restricted to something resembling the standard human form, although there are modified body plans on many different planets.

Ord is the youngest clone in the Chamberlain family, which is known for its terraforming prowess, making worlds and other environments habitable, such as floating continents on the rings of Saturn. Ord is only a few decades old, too young to take any posthuman forms. He learns from an elder brother that their sister, Alice, is coming to Earth. Alice is the family’s “Twelve”, meaning she is only the twelfth clone produced in the family, which has over twenty-four thousand by the start of the story. So she is a very senior member of the family, and the reasons for her visit are mysterious.

When Alice arrives, her actions are enigmatic and, for some reason, alarming to the family. She seems to take a liking to Ord, having private conversations with him, and helping in the wargames he’s currently participating in with his peers from other families.

Eventually it’s revealed that Alice and many of her peers attempted to create a baby universe at the core of the galaxy. They wanted to leave open an “umbilical cord” to access it. However this caused the energies from the baby universe to flow back into this one, creating a massive explosion which over hundreds of thousands of years lays waste to huge numbers of worlds toward the center of the galaxy, killing billions and displacing trillions.

For her crime, Alice is imprisoned. And the Chamberlains, along with all the other families who participated, are disgraced and, eventually, disbanded. Ord finds himself caught up in a plan he doesn’t understand, suddenly endowed with Alice’s talents, her posthuman powers. What follows is a tale told through tens of thousands of years, with chases and battles across interstellar space and on scales both unimaginably vast and at times unimaginably small.

Reed often describes the various encounters in terms of human interactions, but it’s clear that these are frequently just virtual interfaces for events happening between vast posthuman entities, often in the form of interstellar spacecraft, or maybe even fleets of ships. There’s a feeling that things are happening we could only dimly comprehend, and that maybe the human aspects of the characters only comprehend through the user interfaces they work though.

I mentioned above that this was cited as hard science fiction. There’s generally no FTL (faster than light) travel in the book. The galactic scale of the story is possible because everyone is immortal and events can take millenia to play out. But Reed helps himself to a lot of magical concepts, like inertialess drives. And he posits vast worlds and technologies built with dark matter, which may have been conceivable based on what was known about dark matter in the 1990s. But he’s often vague enough to allow the reader to conceptualize different ways the events might still be possible within known physics.

This is a book with a wealth of ideas. Most of Reed’s career has been as a prolific short story writer, where ideas tend to dominate, so it makes sense that would be his strength, and that it would show in this fix-up of multiple novellas. It’s not unusual in idea stories for character development to be lacking, and that’s true here. But I also found the storytelling problematic.

The story seems to take a long time to get going, to the point I nearly stopped reading in the first part when Ord has little to no agency. There’s a lot more movement from the second part on. But we often don’t understand what’s happening, a popular suspense strategy in short stories I’m personally not fond of. On a novel scale it leads to long stretches of not knowing why we should care about what’s happening. One Amazon or Goodreads reviewer said they found the book tedious, and I suspect this is why.

To be fair, this is one of Reed’s earlier novels, and the faults aren’t that unusual for a fix-up. The ideas were enough to make me enjoy and recommend it, just with a caveat so people know what they’re getting into. In many ways, it reminds me of Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns, with enough similarities to make me wonder whether Reynolds’ tale was inspired by Reed’s book. It was good enough that I definitely plan to get back to Reed’s other books in the Greatship series.

Have you read it? If so, what did you think? Any recommendations on similar books?

#bookReview #bookReviews #HardSciFi #HardScienceFiction #sciFi #ScienceFiction #SciFi #SpaceOpera

This hard SF tale of sheer alien weirdness is one of the author's best. #bookreviews #reviews #bookstodon #sciencefiction #hardsciencefiction

https://www.redheadedfemme.com/2025/08/review-shroud.html

Demon World (Undying Mercenaries #24) by B. V. Larson
Release Date August 17, 2025
#ScienceFiction #SpaceOpera #HardScienceFiction

https://www.risingshadow.net/book/77845-demon-world

Schild’s Ladder

It’s been a while since I’ve read a Greg Egan book. I often love the ideas he explores, particularly in Diaspora. But I sometimes find his stories difficult to get through. That was definitely true of a previous book I read, Incandescence, which takes place in the setting of an interesting interstellar civilization. But the story seems to slide into a thinly veiled tutorial on general relativity.

I had heard that Schild’s Ladder was one of his more accessible works, but held off reading it until now. I’m glad I did. A decade ago a substantial portion would have been unintelligible. Today I know enough about quantum mechanics to follow many of the discussions and tactics used in the book. But I’m not sure the average reader would find this book that accessible. It doesn’t get into the math (although there are a few diagrams), but it helps to have a conceptual understanding of how superposition, decoherence, entanglement, and similar concepts work.

The setting is twenty thousand years in the future in a posthuman interstellar civilization. People can backup their minds and transfer to new bodies, and are generally immortal. This is hard sci-fi so no faster than light travel. In most cases traveling interstellar distances, typically by transmission, means separation from friends and loved ones for decades or centuries.

In some cases when someone travels, their entire home planet population will go into “slowdown” until they return in order to avoid having them become too out of sync. Slowdown is a protocol that it’s possible to cheat on and exist in real time while everyone else is moving and thinking at a miniscule fraction of the normal pace.

There are also a group of humans known as anachronauts, who left Earth thousands of years earlier, before mind copying had become viable. They travel in sleeper ships, occasionally stopping at a world to check in on how humanity is developing. As the name implies, they’re largely throwbacks, and have difficulty accepting many of the changes that have taken place.

One of those changes is that sexual dimorphism no longer exists among humans. The “he” and “she” pronouns only continue as linguistic conventions relative to types of names. Sex requires people’s bodies to react against each other’s pheromones and gradually become compatible, maximizing the chances that it’s monogamous and consensual. Egan doesn’t describe his characters in physical terms, which likely downplays just how strange we would find them. (This conception of sexuality also reminds me of Ursula Le Guin’s Gethens in The Left Hand of Darkness.)

People’s minds operate on qusps, quantum “singleton” processors, which ensure that any decision is worked out in an isolated quantum superposition and then promoted prior to interaction with the environment, so that a person only ever makes one decision. In other words, they don’t branch (many-worlds style) into multiple versions based on their decisions. (Although it’s accepted that they can and do branch due to other quantum outcomes.) So the premise assumes wave function realism, which becomes important at various points in the story.

Quantum mechanics and general relativity have been reconciled into a framework known as the Sarumpaet rules, presented as a descendent of loop quantum gravity theory. The rules are thousands of years old and heavily tested and validated. At the beginning of the story, it’s hard for the characters to take seriously the idea they could be wrong. But it becomes clear they are when an experiment goes horribly wrong, leading to the accidental creation of a “novo-vacuum” that begins expanding out at half the speed of light, consuming everything it comes in contact with.

As the centuries pass, the novo-vacuum consumes hundreds of star systems necessitating large scale evacuations and migrations. A space station, named the Rindler, is built just outside the boundary of the novo-vacuum with its speed matched to the expansion rate, and deploying scientific instruments to probe the “far side,” a nickname for the novo-vacuum, as opposed to the “near side” for regular space.

Initially built by scientists wanting to study and understand the far side, the Rindler‘s population has swelled as additional people have arrived to participate in the studies. But a couple of camps have formed: the Preservationists, who want to stop the novo-vacuum and destroy it to preserve as many of the existing planets as possible, and the Yielders, who want to stop the far side’s growth but then study it. Relations between the two sides have become bitter.

Tchicaya, the protagonist, is a Yielder who has just arrived on the Rindler. His childhood friend, Mariama, arrives shortly after him. He has not seen her in centuries. She is a Preservationist. Which is ironic because as children, she was the more adventurous one while Tchicaya the one most inclined to preserve the existing status-quo.

This book has a moderate amount of conflict in it, even some violent conflict, something often missing in Egan’s stories. Although as in his other posthuman books, the society envisioned is pretty utopian. The violence comes from the anachronauts, who are from outside the utopia. And the story eventually converges on a typical story frame for Egan, two people together on an odyssey of discovery.

I don’t think I’m spoiling much by noting the final portions of the story explore the changed physics inside the far side. This is a long standing fascination for Egan. He loves exploring alien physics, something that, based on the descriptions of many of his more recent books, has only increased over the years.

I enjoyed this book, but I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it as much without being familiar with the science. Egan’s work is pretty much the hardest of hard sci-fi, which means quantum physics is central to the plot. Often in sci-fi the story can be enjoyed by people who aren’t necessarily into the scientific speculation. I’d say that’s less true here. There is some character drama, but relatively limited. If the idea of characters working on an intractable problem in a quantum superposition so that some version of them finds the right answer sounds like your jam, then it’s probably worth checking out.

Have you read it? If so, any ideas from it that particularly resonated with you?

#bookReview #bookReviews #HardSciFi #HardScienceFiction #sciFi #ScienceFiction #SciFi

Finished reading Jane Mondrup's "Zoi."
https://amzn.to/4kZFbCd
📖🪐🦠
This was rather unique, and inventive, but also humane as in dealing with humanity. Good stuff.
#books #reading #ScienceFiction #SciFi #HardScienceFiction #HardSciFi

Started reading Jane Mondrup's "Zoi."
https://amzn.to/4kZFbCd
📖🪐🦠
Knew what it was about, but wasn't sure what to expect. So far, so good.
#books #reading #ScienceFiction #SciFi #HardScienceFiction #HardSciFi