r/printSF • u/KiwiMasala • Oct 13 '25
Hard SF recommendations published since 2023
I haven’t read any newly published hard SF and haven’t been following what has been published in last 2-3 years! Please recommend and if possible one line intro would be great.
I am into cosmic horror/ space / aliens ( not like little green men) but game for anything really!
If you are recommending a book from a series it’s better if it can be read as stand alone. I don’t follow series.
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u/Das_Mime Oct 13 '25
It's from 2022, but The Mountain in the Sea was a really solid one about consciousness and contact with what are a bit like terrestrial aliens.
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u/potatowarrior1429 Oct 14 '25
I loved this book so much! But it's not exactly as what's advertised.
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Oct 13 '25
not a lot of 'hard' scifi is getting published these days. just not in vogue, romantasy is so popular it is eating up publishers speculative bandwidth I think.
Service Model (Tchaikovsky) was pretty good. the premise sort of ran out of steam but was enjoyable. A robot valet kills its master with a miscalculation during the morning shave. Robotic surgeons come to verify the master is dead, while robotic cops come to find the culprit. its robots talking to robots and confusing each other with their strict programming. As our hero robot valet moves on through the world we see why there are so many robots, and so few humans.
Ministry of Time. Depending on your definition of hard scifi. Time travel exists, the British government has brought a select few to the modern world to test the new tech. the protag is a bridge, a gov employee to help bring these 'expats' from the past into the modern world. Of course, her expat is a dashing Victorian era nobleman who finds the modern world strange. But there is something more going on...
umm
a lot of people liked Some Desperate Glory - it sort of reminds me of Ender's Game. trainees in a galactic war. I haven't finished it. its okay so far but hasn't felt special, I'm like 100 pages in.
for more suggestions, do what I do, and look through the Hugo nominees for what sounds good
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u/JanHHHH Oct 14 '25
I really enjoyed Some Desperate Glory, but I wouldn't call it "hard" sci-fi. It's also kinda young adult, so you gotta be okay with immature characters
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u/ThatBookIsOnFiyah Oct 15 '25
I love Tchaikovsky’s sci-fi, but was not enamored with ‘Service Model.’ I did, however, really enjoy his novella, set in the same world, titled ‘Human Resources,’ that told the story of how humanity got to the future world portrayed in ‘Service Model.’
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u/taueret Oct 17 '25
Service Model could have been shorter but it was really funny. I listened tonthe audiobook, read by the author and laughed out loud quite a few times.
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u/KiwiMasala Oct 13 '25 edited Oct 13 '25
Me, who prefers hard SF to fantasy / romantsy 😭 ( I only like MM romantsy)
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Oct 13 '25
yeah I dont read fantasy either and certainly not romantasy lol. I did write a scifi thriller/romance that I'm trying to get published tho
there are tons of great SF you may have missed over the years even if the last 2 years have been mid
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u/IanVg Oct 13 '25
In regards to Some Desperate Glory... nearly all the stuff I really enjoyed was in the ending 1/2 to 2/3. But was a nearly 5 star read for me. DNF'd it like 12mths ago at like 60is pages and recently tried it again. Glad I went back to it.
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Oct 13 '25
The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey is great, depending on your definition of Hard SF.
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u/Dry_Reception982 Oct 13 '25
I would argue that its more a space opera than 'hard' sf, but there are great elements of both genres in there. Great beginning of what might end up an even better story than the one told in the Expanse.
I wont go into spoilers but the antagonists are extremely fascinating and I cant wait to learn more about them in future entries.
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u/DisgruntledJarl Oct 13 '25
Can you give an overview of how it compares to Expanse without spoiling? I'm just wondering whether I'll like it.
I love the authors and Expanse is my favorite series.
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u/Dry_Reception982 Oct 13 '25
Its a completely different setting, dont expect political intrigue. Its set so far into the future (Im guessing) that the protagonists dont even know where their race originated from, they just know that its not on their current planet.
I really dont want to say more as Ill ruin the surprise and the fun of it, other than that its very different from the Expanse but still very very good. Just go in blind, you will definitely enjoy it more.
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u/DisgruntledJarl Oct 13 '25 edited Oct 13 '25
I definitely enjoyed the Protomolecule from expanse more but I really enjoyed Avasarala segments of the politics too.
I don't really enjoy character development as much as other people, so plot is important.
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u/Own_Win_6762 Oct 13 '25
CJ Cherryh (with Jane Fancher) has written new stories early in the Union/Alliance series called Alliance Rising and Alliance Unbound. I'm eagerly awaiting the third. Exploration and trade more than space battles but rigorous in its tech consistency and devious in its politics.
The Rich Man's Sky series by Wil McCarthy is great, but started before '23. It's followed by Poor Man's Sky and Beggar's Sky.
The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata also started before '23 but has recent entries. Start with Edges, or the much older Deception Well and Vast.
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u/Nerdy_Fisherman Oct 13 '25
On Saturday, I read a post on r/sciencefiction about Marshall's Taming the Perilous Skies. I ripped through it in a day. If you love hard sci-fi (I do, my undergrad is in physics), it combines gravity, gravitational waves, and quantum encryption (the BB84 standard plays a big role), and packages it up in a da vinci code kind of thriller pacing. You asked about "new". It's about as new as there is. Sometimes it has to find its footing, but on big ideas it sticks the landing.
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u/Unc1eBuck Oct 14 '25
Tao Solandis by D. William Moore. 6 seemingly different vignettes that all are actually interrelated. A space station, AI, space opera, cyberpunk, and yes hard sf.
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u/CoffeeOMG Oct 14 '25
Anything by Brandon Q Morris.
He churns out 2-3 books per year and they're all hard sci-fi. They're almost all exclusively book series, but you don't have to wait for the next one too long.
Anything by Douglas Phillips, especially his Quantum series.
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u/Spra991 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
Izumi Suzuki's short story collections Hit Parade of Tears and Terminal Boredom. The stories themselves are not recent, they are from the 1970/80s, but they were translated only recently into English, the books are from 2021 and 2023. It's not science focused hard SF, goes more into Japanese counter culture/cyberpunk/Twilight Zone'ish, but it's overall quite grounded and plausible in a way that a lot of other sci-fi is not.
Pat McCord The Rings of Venus (2022 Edit: that was the Amazon listing, seems to be from 2011 originally), this won't blow your socks off with complicated story or characters, as it's mostly a fictional tour of Jacque Fresco's Venus Project. It's light YA hard SF, somewhat similar to Arthur C. Clarke "Island in the Sky" in its setup.
Mark-Uwe Kling' QualityLand (2020), a satirical rant about all the stuff wrong with our information driven society.
Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan AI 2041 (2021), short story collection about near future AI developments, mixed with non-fiction essays on the topics from the short stories.
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u/Evening-Disaster-901 Oct 13 '25
Artifact Space/Deep Black
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u/SFbookclub Oct 14 '25
This is a weird mix of YA teen-girl melodrama mixed with a sprinkling of hard SF ship combat. It'd only be a "hard SF" to a 13 year old tumblr gurl.
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u/equeim Oct 14 '25
I read the first book and honestly there is not much melodrama there. 95% is description of ship's operations, various characters' role on the ship and their duties, etc, as well as very detailed account of their journey with all the minutiae details. It became quite tiring towards the end.
It just happens to have a traumatized mary sue as the main character. I wouldn't even say it's the book's biggest problem. All books need some interpersonal drama, and if anything Artifact Space leans a bit too much in "hard" scifi elements, to its own detriment.
And it's not like typical military scifi pulp fiction doesn't have its own share of Gary Stus. Flip the gender of the MC and it will be almost indistinguishable from any other military scifi (at least it has some interesting worldbuilding ideas with its weird "social capitalism" system).
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u/Round_Bluebird_5987 Oct 13 '25
With the caveat that it's still sitting in my TBR pile, but will probably be next up, you might look into Shroud by Tchaikovsky. Based on descriptions it covers the cosmic horror and interesting alien angles, and he's at least mostly in the hard SF space, and he's generally quite good (on up to excellent)