"Inherit the Stars" has been one of my favorites since I read it in the early 1980s. No antagonist. No action. Just a fun story. Enjoyed the 2 next sequels too. I've re-read that trilogy several times and love it each time.
It was one of the first sci-fi series I really got into once I progressed past Dr Who novels. Loved it then, still love it 35 years on from my first read.
@@lanokia Similar. I read most of Hogan's books, but the Giants series is his best in my opinion. I've read it several times and it it's like comfort food to me now. :)
You cited two of my favorite authors, James P Hogan and Greg Bear. Another by Greg Bear I'd recommend is "The Hammer of God." I won't spoil it, but toward the end this one section was so well-written that I literally felt ill, being able to picture it all. Makes me shudder to think of it, but I've re-read it many times it's that great! Also, "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, in which a race of intelligent beings evolves on the surface of a neutron star. Reviews from other well-known hard sci-fi authors like Asimov and Clarke were very glowing!
@@Sephiroth144 Yes, I was just going to say that The Hammer of God is definitely written by Clarke (though I suppose it's possible that Bear wrote a book with the same name).
I've had my copy of "Inherit the stars " for decades. A great book. I would also add Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". A hugo winner, back when the award meant something.
I'm a big scifi reader and I love that you still show me books that I either never heard of or heard of but never got to. Can't wait to read one of your books
Stephen Baxter’s Evolution is my all-time favorite novel. I’m glad you included it in this list because it really deserves more recognition. I haven’t read the others on this list, but I’ll try getting around to them sometime.
@@user-sl2ng2hr1k Well, kind of. Baxter himself acknowledged that Evolution was indeed influenced by Last and First Men. But they’re still fundamentally different. - Last and First Men focuses entirely on how humans might evolve in the future as understood by 1930s science. - Evolution focuses mostly on the history of human evolution (and life on Earth in general) after the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as a few fictional animal species that weren’t preserved in the fossil record. It’s not until the last 3 chapters that the book really delves into how humans, along with animals and plants, might evolve in the distant future. It’s still a fascinating read though.
Anathem is an astonishing book that you will loose yourself in. The notion of mathematical perfection being tied to physical space travel is mind blowing. It is like nothing I can easily summarise, almost as if there are layered Platonic realms available for exploring.
You may want to mention David Brin's 'Earth', that back in 1989 was the most comprehensive forecast for the next 30 years. Mostly optimistic but very grounded in facts
James P. Hogan and Greg Bear are high on my list of favorite sci-fi writers. Code of the Lifemaker and The Two Faces of Tomorrow by JPH and Blood Music by GB are three other fairly hard sci-fi books I've enjoyed very much. The Two Faces of Tomorrow is about mankind's need and attempt to create strong A.I., basically (had that term been invented yet?). However, both Code of the Lifemaker and Blood Music are about intelligence manifesting in unexpected places. I can forgive Bear for likely mischaracterizing quantum physics at the end of his book, and not sticking the hard sci-fi landing, because the rest of Blood Music is kinda mind blowing!
I'm really glad that Inherit The Stars by James P. Hogan is on your list. I was lucky to find it when it was first published in 1977 and it turned me into a fan of Hogan for life. All of the subsequent sequels are very good too, especially the second book, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.
I loved loved loved Quarantine, after that I read every Egan thing I could find, short story books are phenomenal. I am also quite sure that much of the Black Mirror early episodes took inspiration from his short stories.
Hi, the writer I'm about to praise may not fit today's genre perfectly, but I can't help but ask - Why does everyone keep overlooking Bruce Sterling? The writer who is at the top of Gibson's thank-you list when you open his Neuromancer. A.Reynolds was another writer heavily influenced by Sterling's work. His complete collection of Shaper/Mechanist universe stories released as Schismatrix Plus is such a masterpiece and a staple of modern scifi and cyberpunk. He deserves more attention. Thanks for the video, cheers!
I think this a first for your recommendations; I haven't read a single one (!), although all five are sitting in my 'to read' queue. 😲 As for my own recommendations, I think that any of Hal Clement's 'weird planet' stories deserve to be remembered (I'm showing my age, again). The scientific accuracy is not so much in the technology, but in the conditions to be found on planets which differ wildly from Earth. 'Mission of Gravity', 'Starlight' and 'Cycle of Fire' come straight to mind but I think my personal favourites are 'Still River' and especially 'Close to Critical. All good stuff.
Hal Clement wrote a lot of my favorite hats sci-fi. His shirt story collections, *Music of Many Spheres* (I think there are three volumes,) are essential. Probably my favorite short story and favorite hard sci-fi story are one and the same: Clement's *Planetfall.*
I love the Giant’s star series; at least the first three books, I can’t get through the first chapter of the fourth book. The Mote in gods’s eye and its sequel by Niven & Pournelle could perhaps fit in this video. And Greg Bear’s The forge of god and sequel Anvil of stars might also.
I thoroughly enjoyed Inherit the Stars when it came out and recently re read it and its sequels. Great stuff. I certainly agree that Fire Upon the Deep should be on this list.Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a seminal hard sf novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy would satisfy the requirements of hard SF too.
@@christophersmith8316 I dunno.. _" _*_soft sci fi_*_ deals more with sociology, history, politics, psychology, and economics [..] _*_hard sci fi_*_ is more concerned with having realistic science based on currently proven facts about the world."_ Question for me would be - why is "futuristic" sociological science not considered realistic when it comes to it? IMHO is above definition (and the one u also make) not holding up to scrutiny. PS: ..unless 'hard SF' has a different definition to the one I found?!
Thanks for this video, I will look for "Evolution". Hogan was a highlight in SF during the late 70s and 1980s. I have the Minervan series, plus more. He also wrote at least one hilarious short story, which I enjoyed immensely! "Neander - Tale" I read a lot of Greg Bear, I should reread. "Blood Music" it was strong SF, I preferred the short story version, a little.
I really liked Darwin’s Radio. If you want something similar, but with a bit more speculative touch, you might check out Entheòphage by Drema Deóraich - kind of Darwin’s Radio meets Andromeda Strain with a touch of climate fiction and medical mystery
If you want to read the hardest of hard SF, you need to read more Greg Egan. He has created plausible universes based on entirely different physics than ours, and makes them work incredibly well. And he's a bit eccentric, claiming there is no true picture of him on the internet. Personally, I think he's an AI masquerading as a human. :)
Great video thanks. I read Darwin’s Radio when it came out and liked it very much. I’m definitely interested in Inherit The Stars now (although it’s a little expensive that one, I’m seeing). Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement would fit on this list well too. I’d like to also recommend a quite overlooked movie called Moon, from 2009 with Sam Rockwell that is a great hard sci-fi flick 👍🏻
Everything Baxter writes fills me with hopelessness, dread and alienation. So of course, I've read every book he's ever written. Some, a couple of times. Most hard SF makes me feel like that. Benford, Bear, Clarke, Baxter, have a special talent for sucking the joy out of me. I treat it by reading masses of Neal Asher and Charles Stross. Techno-porn Space Opera and British Cthulhu spy comedy are just the thing.
Baxter and Bear are great but I'd like to put in a good word for Peter Watts and his amazing novels Blindsight and Echopraxia, the two most mind-bending super-hard sci-fi novels (with copious references!) I've ever read. All I can say is "wow!"
Yes! I added all five to my list. In august I leave for a roadtrip of eight weeks through the U.S. (while it still is a democracy) a I will download them to my kindle. Thanks Darrel! Kind regards, Jasper
Good video, especially since I haven't read any of the books reviewed. I have read some of the authors. I've read Greg Bear's Blood Music twice. It's a fun book.
Very very few books get me to read them more than once. Top of my list is Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, about the emergence of a human hive. Not Star Trek's Borg, but much more basic and primal.
I tried looking up these books on audible and most don't have audiobooks available... Surprised that Stephen Baxter only has 3 audiobooks available there!
GREG EGAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My favorite author of all times 🔥🔥🔥 His novel Schild's Ladder is, in my opinion, his absolute masterpiece. It's pure hard sci-fi, but with deeply touching characters, a beautiful fusion of mathematics, speculative quantum physics and genuine human connection.
Thanks for this! I recently discovered Freehold by Michael Zimmerman. I found it extremely well written and very Heinlienesque. Not surprising since I discovered the book because of an Afterword he wrote in the Kindle version of Stranger in a Strange Land which I recently re-re-re-read after not having picked it up in a very long time.
I loved "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter. Fascinating read, one of my favorites of him. Your video is well made. Thank you for sharing. Do you read unknown authors, too?
My novel, Book of Answers, is like Baxter but without hard science. My book is a tongue in cheek look at human devolution through the perspective of a lost hippie immortal and the aliens the intelligent designer hires to find him and that takes ten million years. And so it goes
... I was going to make a joke about "darn, should this scale not be called 'Moh' scale"... and then I found out that TV Tropes had done that and Wired had written on it.
Kudos for mentioning Stephen Baxter; few people do because there's this lame belief that his characters are wooden, even though no one should read Baxter for his characters but for the concepts; characters are for soap operas or general fiction dramas; sci-fi and fantasy are about the exotic...
His text definitely follows a rigidly-defined structure and there is a lot of repetition of certain words and phrases, in virtually every video I’ve seen on this channel.
"Inherit the Stars" has been one of my favorites since I read it in the early 1980s. No antagonist. No action. Just a fun story. Enjoyed the 2 next sequels too. I've re-read that trilogy several times and love it each time.
It was one of the first sci-fi series I really got into once I progressed past Dr Who novels. Loved it then, still love it 35 years on from my first read.
@@lanokia Similar. I read most of Hogan's books, but the Giants series is his best in my opinion. I've read it several times and it it's like comfort food to me now. :)
You cited two of my favorite authors, James P Hogan and Greg Bear. Another by Greg Bear I'd recommend is "The Hammer of God." I won't spoil it, but toward the end this one section was so well-written that I literally felt ill, being able to picture it all. Makes me shudder to think of it, but I've re-read it many times it's that great!
Also, "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, in which a race of intelligent beings evolves on the surface of a neutron star. Reviews from other well-known hard sci-fi authors like Asimov and Clarke were very glowing!
Forward wrote excellent aliens, but his humans would need to evolve to become wooden!
Do you mean "The Forge of God"? Pretty sure "The Hammer of God" was an Arthur C. Clarke joint...
@@Sephiroth144 Yes, I was just going to say that The Hammer of God is definitely written by Clarke (though I suppose it's possible that Bear wrote a book with the same name).
I've had my copy of "Inherit the stars " for decades. A great book. I would also add Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". A hugo winner, back when the award meant something.
I really struggled with A Fire Upon the Deep, but really enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky.
i just finished a fire upon the deep. certainly not a bad book, but somehow not really my cup of tea. not sure i‘ll give the prequel a shot.
@@nyps Each to his own. It tied for the Hugo with Connie Willis "Doomsday Book". Maybe that would be more to your tastes?
@@jaimeosbourn3616 i just read a summary and it does sound interesting. thanks a lot for the suggestion! :)
@@nyps Glad to help
I'm a big scifi reader and I love that you still show me books that I either never heard of or heard of but never got to.
Can't wait to read one of your books
Stephen Baxter’s Evolution is my all-time favorite novel. I’m glad you included it in this list because it really deserves more recognition.
I haven’t read the others on this list, but I’ll try getting around to them sometime.
So an update of "Stapledon's "Last and First Men" from 1930?
@@user-sl2ng2hr1k Well, kind of. Baxter himself acknowledged that Evolution was indeed influenced by Last and First Men. But they’re still fundamentally different.
- Last and First Men focuses entirely on how humans might evolve in the future as understood by 1930s science.
- Evolution focuses mostly on the history of human evolution (and life on Earth in general) after the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as a few fictional animal species that weren’t preserved in the fossil record. It’s not until the last 3 chapters that the book really delves into how humans, along with animals and plants, might evolve in the distant future. It’s still a fascinating read though.
Same - have gifted Evolution to many friends!
Evolution and Anathem sit side by side on my shelf. Maybe some day i'll be brave enough.
Anathem is an astonishing book that you will loose yourself in. The notion of mathematical perfection being tied to physical space travel is mind blowing. It is like nothing I can easily summarise, almost as if there are layered Platonic realms available for exploring.
You may want to mention David Brin's 'Earth', that back in 1989 was the most comprehensive forecast for the next 30 years. Mostly optimistic but very grounded in facts
James P. Hogan and Greg Bear are high on my list of favorite sci-fi writers. Code of the Lifemaker and The Two Faces of Tomorrow by JPH and Blood Music by GB are three other fairly hard sci-fi books I've enjoyed very much. The Two Faces of Tomorrow is about mankind's need and attempt to create strong A.I., basically (had that term been invented yet?). However, both Code of the Lifemaker and Blood Music are about intelligence manifesting in unexpected places. I can forgive Bear for likely mischaracterizing quantum physics at the end of his book, and not sticking the hard sci-fi landing, because the rest of Blood Music is kinda mind blowing!
I'm really glad that Inherit The Stars by James P. Hogan is on your list. I was lucky to find it when it was first published in 1977 and it turned me into a fan of Hogan for life. All of the subsequent sequels are very good too, especially the second book, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.
I am gonna look hard for that one
I’m not sure if this is considered hard sci-fi but Robert Sawyer’s Flashforward is a great read that kept your attention until the end.
I assume that’s the book that inspired the TV show?
I loved loved loved Quarantine, after that I read every Egan thing I could find, short story books are phenomenal. I am also quite sure that much of the Black Mirror early episodes took inspiration from his short stories.
well the first episode of Torchwood steals from the opening scene of one of Egan's books
Thank you for this video. Stephen Baxter and Greg Bear are two of my favorite authors.
Hi, the writer I'm about to praise may not fit today's genre perfectly, but I can't help but ask - Why does everyone keep overlooking Bruce Sterling? The writer who is at the top of Gibson's thank-you list when you open his Neuromancer. A.Reynolds was another writer heavily influenced by Sterling's work. His complete collection of Shaper/Mechanist universe stories released as Schismatrix Plus is such a masterpiece and a staple of modern scifi and cyberpunk. He deserves more attention. Thanks for the video, cheers!
I think this a first for your recommendations; I haven't read a single one (!), although all five are sitting in my 'to read' queue. 😲
As for my own recommendations, I think that any of Hal Clement's 'weird planet' stories deserve to be remembered (I'm showing my age, again). The scientific accuracy is not so much in the technology, but in the conditions to be found on planets which differ wildly from Earth. 'Mission of Gravity', 'Starlight' and 'Cycle of Fire' come straight to mind but I think my personal favourites are 'Still River' and especially 'Close to Critical. All good stuff.
I would love to see a video on military sci-fi or space operas that are not the normal candidates.
I'm a fan of Beutner's Orphanage series as well as Campbell's Lost Fleet series.
Although only a duology, Westerfeld's Risen Empire is well done.
Wonderful list, thank you for this. Can’t wait to check out Evolution and Flight of the Aphrodite.
This is wonderful. Thanks for the recommendations, especially the way you presented them.
Damn my TBR just got 5 books longer 😡
Hal Clement wrote a lot of my favorite hats sci-fi. His shirt story collections, *Music of Many Spheres* (I think there are three volumes,) are essential. Probably my favorite short story and favorite hard sci-fi story are one and the same: Clement's *Planetfall.*
All written down! Love Greg Bear!
A reviewer once said that Greg Egan burns through more strange and bizarre ideas in one chapter than most other authors do in their entire careers.
I love the Giant’s star series; at least the first three books, I can’t get through the first chapter of the fourth book.
The Mote in gods’s eye and its sequel by Niven & Pournelle could perhaps fit in this video.
And Greg Bear’s The forge of god and sequel Anvil of stars might also.
Bear with me, but I don't think I can bear to read Bear because his prose is a bear to get through.
I thoroughly enjoyed Inherit the Stars when it came out and recently re read it and its sequels. Great stuff. I certainly agree that Fire Upon the Deep should be on this list.Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a seminal hard sf novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy would satisfy the requirements of hard SF too.
Got me a couple of new things to read. Thanks for that. An addendum I'd like to point out is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.
I'm almost done with this series and will be sad when it is over. Highly recommend it.
Voyage from Yesteryear by J.P.Hogan is my all time fav due to what it actually is about.
Great book, but not really hard SF. It is more of a clash of cultures book, societies under strain. A dual first contact book.
@@christophersmith8316
I dunno..
_" _*_soft sci fi_*_ deals more with sociology, history, politics, psychology, and economics [..] _*_hard sci fi_*_ is more concerned with having realistic science based on currently proven facts about the world."_
Question for me would be - why is "futuristic" sociological science not considered realistic when it comes to it?
IMHO is above definition (and the one u also make) not holding up to scrutiny.
PS: ..unless 'hard SF' has a different definition to the one I found?!
Thanks for this video, I will look for "Evolution".
Hogan was a highlight in SF during the late 70s and 1980s. I have the Minervan series, plus more. He also wrote at least one hilarious short story, which I enjoyed immensely! "Neander - Tale"
I read a lot of Greg Bear, I should reread. "Blood Music" it was strong SF, I preferred the short story version, a little.
"Evolution" arrived today. 600 pages, I will start after finishing a re read of "Odd John."
I really liked Darwin’s Radio. If you want something similar, but with a bit more speculative touch, you might check out Entheòphage by Drema Deóraich - kind of Darwin’s Radio meets Andromeda Strain with a touch of climate fiction and medical mystery
If you want to read the hardest of hard SF, you need to read more Greg Egan. He has created plausible universes based on entirely different physics than ours, and makes them work incredibly well. And he's a bit eccentric, claiming there is no true picture of him on the internet. Personally, I think he's an AI masquerading as a human. :)
Great video thanks. I read Darwin’s Radio when it came out and liked it very much. I’m definitely interested in Inherit The Stars now (although it’s a little expensive that one, I’m seeing). Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement would fit on this list well too. I’d like to also recommend a quite overlooked movie called Moon, from 2009 with Sam Rockwell that is a great hard sci-fi flick 👍🏻
Everything Baxter writes fills me with hopelessness, dread and alienation.
So of course, I've read every book he's ever written. Some, a couple of times.
Most hard SF makes me feel like that. Benford, Bear, Clarke, Baxter, have a special talent for sucking the joy out of me. I treat it by reading masses of Neal Asher and Charles Stross. Techno-porn Space Opera and British Cthulhu spy comedy are just the thing.
I love that these aren't all new releases. There are so many great SF books to read!
I read Darwin’s Radio a bunch of years ago when I was on a Greg Bear streak. I’m thinking I need to read that one, and a couple others of his, again.
I have enjoyed Greg Egan's book Quarantine.
Thank you for sharing all of these gems here.
Brilliant list. I need to get started with Darwin's Radio. Cheers.
I would also recommend “Blindsight” by Peter Watts. It’s the book that got me into hard sci-fi.
Baxter and Bear are great but I'd like to put in a good word for Peter Watts and his amazing novels Blindsight and Echopraxia, the two most mind-bending super-hard sci-fi novels (with copious references!) I've ever read. All I can say is "wow!"
Yes! I added all five to my list. In august I leave for a roadtrip of eight weeks through the U.S. (while it still is a democracy) a I will download them to my kindle. Thanks Darrel! Kind regards, Jasper
For lesser known I'll put in Patrick Chiles' near future Perigee, Farside, and Frontier.
Good video, especially since I haven't read any of the books reviewed. I have read some of the authors. I've read Greg Bear's Blood Music twice. It's a fun book.
good work nigel. inherit & aphrodite added on the tbr. darwin already was as i loved blood music and this seems similar. 🎉
Very very few books get me to read them more than once. Top of my list is Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, about the emergence of a human hive. Not Star Trek's Borg, but much more basic and primal.
A Darwin's Radio cameo out of nowhere! I can't recommend this novel a lot. I think about the story quite often ❤
I tried looking up these books on audible and most don't have audiobooks available... Surprised that Stephen Baxter only has 3 audiobooks available there!
Add "Sister Alice" by Robert Reed to your list.
GREG EGAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My favorite author of all times 🔥🔥🔥
His novel Schild's Ladder is, in my opinion, his absolute masterpiece. It's pure hard sci-fi, but with deeply touching characters, a beautiful fusion of mathematics, speculative quantum physics and genuine human connection.
Well done, I'd had given the same ratings
Thanks for this! I recently discovered Freehold by Michael Zimmerman. I found it extremely well written and very Heinlienesque. Not surprising since I discovered the book because of an Afterword he wrote in the Kindle version of Stranger in a Strange Land which I recently re-re-re-read after not having picked it up in a very long time.
I loved "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter. Fascinating read, one of my favorites of him.
Your video is well made. Thank you for sharing.
Do you read unknown authors, too?
3:52 K.S Robinson's Mars trilogy is one of the all time classics. Too bad Mars is uninhabitable (no magnetosphere, don't ya know).
Hi love SYFY tanks to you I have discovered some great books I have a question ware do you get your background the look amazing
Awesome list
Baxter’s characters are the Achilles heel
Great choices - although I found "Darwin's Radio" to be impenetrable - and a case of making the reader suffer for the research the author's done.
I remember thinking "Did he accidentally send his biochemistry thesis to his publisher instead of his professor?"
@@stevenscott2136 LOL! Yes, this!
Thanks for this video!
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space
7:45' is this picture from some comic book? If yes, what is it?
I would suggest Linda Nagata
Hi, if you have read non English Sci Fi, can you please make some recommendation videos?
My novel, Book of Answers, is like Baxter but without hard science. My book is a tongue in cheek look at human devolution through the perspective of a lost hippie immortal and the aliens the intelligent designer hires to find him and that takes ten million years. And so it goes
... I was going to make a joke about "darn, should this scale not be called 'Moh' scale"... and then I found out that TV Tropes had done that and Wired had written on it.
"Quarantine" has a similar premise to "Spin," which is also a great hard sci-fi novel (first of a trilogy).
👍✌🖖🥃(Good Job,Peace,Live Long, and have a Drink(responsively of course))
Kudos for mentioning Stephen Baxter; few people do because there's this lame belief that his characters are wooden, even though no one should read Baxter for his characters but for the concepts; characters are for soap operas or general fiction dramas; sci-fi and fantasy are about the exotic...
What will happen if I don't read it?
Terrible things, one must imagine
were these reviews written by ChatGPT?
His text definitely follows a rigidly-defined structure and there is a lot of repetition of certain words and phrases, in virtually every video I’ve seen on this channel.
Who can say. For all I know you’re just a chatbot? 😂
@@ianmills5210 “For all you know” is not very much.
I always thought they should have made a movie for Inherit the Stars. Such a great story.
Evolution is a great read, one of my all time faves.