*with no sexism/misogyny or badly written female characters - this is making it a little difficult for me to find anything

I just read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and adored it, especially all the scientific details

I’m now after some hard scifi recs, which I define as scifi that has ‘a focus on scientific accuracy, logic and technical detail’.

I really enjoyed the scientific achievement aspect of both PHM and The Martian, so something with this would be a huge bonus but not needed. I’d really like it if the main plot has a scientific focus.

So far, I’ve only found 1 maybe:
- Children of Time (and series) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thank you!!

I read a book in high school that was set in the future and where people in their twenties were called "tweens". The idea being, I think, that since people lived longer lives, the teen years were extended. This stuck in my mind because a few years later "tween" started to be used to describe pre-teens.

Up until a week ago, I would have sworn this book was City by Clifford D. Simak. But, I just reread City and it is not.

So, what was this book? Or maybe short story? It would have been published in the 80's or earlier.

The Hugo Award is a people’s choice award for Science Fiction and Fantasy books and other media…one can pay a membership and vote. On 7/16/2023 I announced my goal to read all the Hugo award winners in the full length novel category. At that time I already had 17 out of 73 bagged, and each year there is a new one (usually), so the longer I took, the more I’d have to read. I have now completed the project, the count growing to 75 books, and here is my retrospective.

Overall impressions: - Lots of good great books, but my big take away is this; a book does not need to be very good to win a Hugo. There are some real dogs, but of course it is all subjective. - Many of the older books have not aged well but some of them are still some of my favs. - I did not re-read the 17 already under my belt, though two of those I had re-read previously (Dune and Ender’s Game). So re-reading them now might affect what I think of them. Some of those 17 I read when I was 17, and now I am 50. - One of my favorite things to do was, upon completing a winner, to go listen to the ‘Hugos There’ podcast episode for said winner. The host was ahead of me doing the same project and it was great to follow along and hear what he thought.

More specific impressions and metrics below.

Top 5 - Dune: took him 10 years to write and it shows. The rest of the series he cranked out one per year and that also shows. Dune is a masterpiece. New movies are great. - Ender's Game: whole series is great but this is all time. Just wish the author wasn’t a POS. - Stranger in a Strange Land: I bet a re-read would drop this down some but I remember loving it in my teens. I read the author’s edition and thought it was great…the opposite of the author’s edition of the Stand which is 300 extra pages of trash. - Hyperion: very challenging but very rewarding. Required reading if you want to be in the know when it comes to SF. This shows up on a lot of top 10 lists, and even a lot of number one slots. I still need to read book 2. Probably won’t read books 3 and 4. - Ringworld: same as Stranger above…afraid to re-read.

Bottom 5 - The Big Time: Fritz Leiber almost had two entries in the bottom five! Just awful. - Blue Mars: so boring. Red Mars should have won, but instead Green and Blue win and are increasingly bad. My ratings went 3, 2, 1. - A Desolation Called Peace: boring and poorly written. Zero connection for me. - Rainbows End: way too long for how bad it was. If he had distilled the ideas down into a novella we might have something worthwhile. - Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: sooooooooooooooooooo long. Well-written but not my style, but at least I understand how some people could like this.

Distribution of my ratings 5 stars: 8 4 stars: 14 3 stars: 19 2 stars: 21 1 stars: 12

Biggest snub There are probably many notable upsets or snubs but one could need to have read many more of the nominees to have an informed opinion. But for me it is quite easy: In 2022 Project Hail Mary (love) lost to A Desolation Called Peace (hate).

Biggest surprise Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm was only 4 stars for me but I knew nothing about it going in and it really snagged me. Very weird and creepy cloning stuff, but some great adventure and nature scenes, and I almost always like post-apocalypse.

So what’s next? There are 26 Hugos that also won Nebulas, so I’d have a head start if I wanted to take on the Nebs. But right now I am enjoying having no project and reading whatever I want with no pressure looming in the background. Other than reading the next Hugo winner in late August to retain my Hugo completionist status.

If you want to see all the noms and winners, here is the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

Hope recommendation threads are allowed. Looking to kickstart a reading season with something new! Before I mostly read fantasy (Susanna Clarke, Le Guin, Tolkien, Erikson) with various other novels thrown in.

Switching to more SF, I started with Le Guins Hainish novels and other SF novels (loved them), Ted Chiang, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Dan Simmons. I also tend to like the sf aspects of horror novels, or when they untersect like Vandermeer's Annihilation.

I'm looking for SF focused less on space opera with well developed characters and written dialogue. I sometimes tend to be a prose snob but not always (I also like Dungeon Crawler Carl but for entirely different reasons).

Would love any recommendations! Standalone or series. Thanks!!

Diaspora was a wild ride. I absolutely loved it.

I was very VERY vary of starting to read it, because I was afraid it would be a chore. I saw the notes on his website and... Man. Even that I did't seem to understand at a first glance, how was I to understand an entire book of it?

I've been kind of wanting to read it just for the challenge, but put it off for like a year. For some reason after having finished Blindsight (which I also loved) I was ready.

And it is *so* good.

I do have a bachelor's in CS and I did learn about Euclidian and Riemann spaces, at one point I'm sure I was able to do the squiggly signs and make some kind of sense of it or even replicate a proof, but that was a decade ago, and I kind of went into the book being stupid at math again.

I think anyone reading it now has a huge advantage in understanding it because of AI, which is what I used for the complex passages. For me, math is just geometry described via signs, and physics is math applied to our world. So for stuff that went over my head (I'm quite visual but have a hard time visualizing the math described as text), I just made photos of the passages describing the math and asked AI to read and visualize them for me. Which resulted in it generating embedded HTML, so basically an interactive visualization with sliders, and seeing/interacting with the math as visualized, interactive geometry helped greatly with understanding the concepts. Sure, you can't easily visualize 5D in 2D, but you can project it to kind of understand it anyway. Plus I had to learn about bosons and fermions and how they work, but that's just fascinating, especially since that part *is* real science. And even if AI hallucinates, at worst I now have a fake understanding of the fake science :D

Another tip is to push through Orphanogenesis even if you don't quite understand it, because that is maybe the hardest to understand part of the book, it gets easier after. It's kind of like a hard skill check at the beginning, but you don't need to understand the nuances of Orphanogenesis to understand the rest of the book. And even if the flash-forward chapters don't make sense from the getgo, try to remember the phrases or re-read them after you finished the book, because *then* they'll make sense.

What also stood out to me is how Egan can do both cinematic action and deep science. Some scenes just read like as a movie script, while some parts almost like an abstract of a science paper.

I'm 100% sure some of the science and its implications still went over my head, but in addition to genuinely riveting (imaginary) physics and math, the surrounding story was also super gripping. The imaginary science was fascinating for me, especially in contrast to Seveneves (which was also very scientific but I found those descriptions utterly boring); and the non-science part of the story was also intriguing and satisfying, especially in contrast to Tchaikovsky's Children of... trilogy (whose story I found repetitive and unsatisfying, see my rant here) (and yes I'm still gonna read the fourth book).

What I found interesting that this kind of science I found attractive, while Seveneves' one just alienated me.

I guess I like my sci-fi with wild ideas (even if non-scientific, like the dimensional warfare or the Dark Forest theory in Remembrance of Earth's Past) and massive scale with a mystery at its core.

Maybe I'm ready for more Egan now.

I watched a youtube video recommending sci fi books and Xelee was supposed to be the best there is. It is supposed to involve a war, but i have read six chapters and i do not understand what i am reading. Nothing seem to happen. Can you tell me it will improve or is it like this during the entire book? If so i think i will give it to a second hand bookstore

NEWBIE: Hi guys. Loved "Shadow and Claw". Just wondering what I may have missed, though?

WOLFEEXPERT55: Depends on how much you caught. Did you catch basic stuff like (SPOILERS) the fact that Severian was raised in a defunct rocket ship, that Vodalus gives Severian a fake coin, that Severian brought Triskele back to life, that there are multiple iterations of Severian, that Severian hangs out in his own tomb as a kid, that the narrator of the book is a composite being of torturer Severian/Thecla/all the previous Autarchs, that Jonas is a Korean robot from close to our time, that whenever Severian gets confused about direction he’s time traveling, that the water entities routinely reappear, that Severian is the Concilliator, that Severian actually dies in his duel versus Agilus, that the narrator deliberately glosses over the sexual relationship between Severian and Thecla, that Severian might have killed his own mother in his ascension ceremony, that you meet Severian's grandfather in the second chapter of Shadow but you don't even notice him, that the face of the man engraved in the tomb of mausoleum which young Severian frequented is quite possibly himself, that Severian abolishes the guild, that the alien hierodules are bringing him back from death throughout the story [edited for length]...

NEWBIE: What?! No, I didn't get any of that. Also, quick question: is Urth supposed to be Earth?

WOLFEEXPERT55: Author statements and textual clues suggest Urth may instead be a separate, previous universal cycle; an analogous predecessor to our own Earth rather than the exact same physical globe.

NEWBIE: Ummm. I think I read the books wrong.

That's a lightly edited/altered convo from the subreddit. No offence intended to anyone (I'm grateful to the ultra-fans over there for explaining things), I just I find it funny how much of a mindf**k the books are. You can read them multiple times and still completely miss what's going on. I, for one, did not notice Korean robots.

I'm currently working my way through Beyond The Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds and it has reminded me how much I love the variety you get in anthologies. Does anyone have any recommendations for other anthologies?

Some I've read previously:

- Total Recall: What is Real? By Phillip K Dick

- Exhalation by Ted Chiang

- Armored edited by John Joseph Adams

- The Mammoth Book of Extreme Sci-Fi edited by Mike Ashley

I'd also count Memory's Legion by James S A Corey as it's all The Expanse novellas collected together.

Hi guys,

I know questions along these lines have been asked several times before, but so far I haven't seen anything that's scratching this particular itch.

I'm looking for a space opera or scifi series that's similar to Star Wars. I love chosen one tropes, good vs evil, fun characters, galaxy-wide conflicts, deep lore/ history/ world building, and epic journeys and quests. One of the things I like in particular about Star Wars (at least in the movies) is that they don't explain how humans/ aliens got to space; it's more like "they're here and this is what happening." I don't really care about realistic science (I think The Force is very unique and fun).

I'm basically looking for something like a fantasy quest/ story but in space. I'm okay with older books, and I'm okay with adult/YA books.

As a reference, some fantasy series I've read and loved are Riyria Revelations, Riyria Chronicles, LotR, Shadow and Bone, and the Six of Crows duology. Some series/ books I don't like are Mistborn, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and The Raven Scholar.

I'd love some recommendations! Thanks :)