Any good sci fi space books?

[iDan122]

I'm looking for good space books to read. I like those which are more about space and are as scientifically accurate as possible, but they can easily be sci fi(something like a planet and a moon which have intersecting atmospheres or colonies on Dward planets and so on.

Share your recommendations here!

I'll read pretty much anything.

[sjwt]

I shall recommend 'The Integral Trees' by Larry Niven, comes with a bucket load of Orbital mechanics for fun!

Story Setting..

***

The story occurs around the fictional neutron star Levoy's Star (abbreviated "Voy"). A gas giant, Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits this star just outside its Roche limit and therefore loses its atmosphere, which is pulled into an independent orbit around Voy and forms a ring that is known as a gas torus. The gas torus is hugeâ€â€one million kilometers thickâ€â€but most of it is too thin to be habitable. The central part of the Gas Torus, where the air is thicker, is known as the Smoke Ring. The Smoke Ring supports a wide variety of life.

No "ground" exists in the Smoke Ring; it entirely consists of sky. Most animals therein therefore can fly--even the fish. Furthermore, the Smoke Ring is in orbit and therefore in free fall: there is no "up" or "down". Most animals have trilateral symmetry that allows them to see in all directions.

Most plants in the Smoke Ring are quite fragile because they need not support their own weight. A notable exception to this rule are the eponymous Integral Trees, which are up to 100 kilometers long. Tidal locking radially orients them: one end points toward Voy while the other points toward space. The ends of the tree feel a tidal force of up to 1/5 g. Each end consists of a leafy "tuft", where photosynthesis occurs. Compared to trees on Earth, the tufts are both canopy and roots.

Each tuft of a tree is up to 50 kilometers from the tree's center of mass and therefore either orbiting too slowly (the "in" tuft) or too quickly (the "out" tuft) compared to the atmosphere, which is in orbit at all points. The ends of the tree are subject to a constant hurricane-force wind that wind bends the ends into the shape of an integral symbol ∫ and pushes water and food onto tufts, or alternately onto trunks, where the gravity-like tidal forces pull the material out towards the tufts.

Twenty astronauts aboard an interstellar "ramship" colonized the Smoke Ring five-hundred years ere the story begins. Their descendants have adapted to the free-fall environment by growing taller and developing prehensile toes. Small numbers of devices from the original crew are coveted items in the Smoke Ring society.

[iDan122]

Thanks, sounds interesting!

[Tommygun]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is quite good, but they do become more and more political by the third book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

Also another Larry Niven book "A World Out of Time"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time

Edited December 22, 2013 by Tommygun

[Kerbal01]

The NASA trilogy by Steven Baxter is an excellent alternate history series that explores what would have happened if the US went to mars instead of building the space shuttle.

[pebble_garden]

Dr. Robert Forward's books "Dragon's Egg" and "Starquake" are *incredibly* hard-SF (meaning technically/scientificially accurate), and that sounds like what you're asking for. You can buy them through Amazon in a single volume for pretty cheap. They involve the cheela, an alien race that evolved on the surface of a neutron star (!!). It's very imaginative stuff. Forward's science is fascinating and deep, but he's not the best writer and his human characters tend to be a little flat. Forward's written other books as well, I suspect you will enjoy those too. (Edit: I forgot about his novel Rocheworld, about two earthlike planets who orbit each other so closely they almost touch, and share a bridge of atmosphere, and occasionally oceans.)

On the other hand, another writer who knows his science but also does good characters is John Varley. He was a rising star in the late 70s/early 80s until William Gibson came along and paved over science fiction with his cyberpunk fiction (I'm a HUGE Gibson fan, don't get me wrong. But he did derail the old-school space SF genre for a decade.) Anyway, I highly recommend Varley's anthology The Persistence of Vision and his related novel The Ophiuchi Hotline. Lots of spaceflight and world hopping there, but it all takes place in our solar system, nothing interstellar. Oh and his Gaea Trilogy is pretty awesome too.

Another hard SF novel that I enjoyed was Wil McCarthy's novel Bloom, about a dangerous probe mission sent by the displaced human civilization living beyond the asteroid belt to scout out the inner solar system after it has long been taken over by out-of-control nanotechnology. It's creepy and absorbing. His book The Collapsium is quirky and pretty epic, and it is a sequel to a book called The Wellstone which I haven't read yet. Both involve brain-bending technology like programmable matter and traveling to other stars by sending copies of yourself via some kind of quantum fax machine thingie.

Edited December 22, 2013 by pebble_garden

[sjwt]

I must throw in my 2cents behind "Dragon's Egg" and "Starquake", I spent months dreaming about the inhabitants of the Neutron star after reading them.. it was just that well written it was almost real.

[Scramble]

If you ever wondered what might be the fate of one of your stranded Kerbals ... you might want to check out "The Martian" by Andy Weir. Heavy on quick thinking on-your-feet MacGyver type engineering solutions. If you want to read a book where the engineer is the hero, this may be the book for you. Whether it offers "accuracy" depends on your point of view (do you want real world science, or plausible sci-fi world science immersion), however the book is certainly immersive and heavy on technical details.

[Dispatcher]

Any number of books by Heinlein, Clarke; also Bova.

[air805ronin]

Any number of books by Heinlein, Clarke; also Bova.

I've got to second this. I cut my teeth reading Heinlein. He has a good catalog and while it may not be highly accurate as of today, he was basing his stories off of popular science theories of his time.

The same goes for Asimov and Clarke.

[Xeldrak]

Well, anything by Clarke - I especially enjoyed "Rendezvous with Rama". Thats quite hard SciFi that focuses more on the technical details than characters.

Another book I liked was "The Forever War" by Joe Haldemann. Basically how to wage (and experience) war in a pretty hard SciFi setting.

Anything by Heinlein is not as hard but still quite awesome.

Now, this is all stuff from the sixties and seventies. A period I thorougly enjoy - but it has it's own flavour not anyone might like.

I recently read some modern stuff I can also recommend:

John Scalzi: Old Man's War - not very hard SciFi, but awesome, engaging and sometimes disturbing. I'd call it space opera.

Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl - well, it's hard to classify - Wiki calls it Science fiction, Biopunk. No spaceships but lots of genetic engineering in a kinda dystopian future. Just read it

[pebble_garden]

I just read this blog entry on Alastair Reynolds' hard/epic SF, and thought of this thread.

I haven't read anything by him yet, but this sounds like just what the OP is asking for.

[sal_vager]

This thread is pretty old samsulisl, it'd have been better to start a new one.