I'm super into mountain and alpinism novels at the moment, but also love hard SF, so I thought how cool would be a mixture of both. Is anything like that out there?
It’s deep-sea survival, so the opposite of mountaineering, but *Starfish* by Peter Watts is great and may scratch a similar itch.
Katharine_Heartburn on
It isn’t *about* this, but there’s a bit of traversing of some pretty harsh terrain in *The Left Hand of Darkness* by Ursula LeGuin, which is a sci-fi essential anyway.
bhbhbhhh on
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson has a good deal of transiting the Martian terrain
Andnowforsomethingcd on
So this is almost the opposite if what you’re looking for, but definitely extreme terrain. The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is set well after man has spread across the cosmos. The book centers on a young woman on an ugly and harsh planet, mostly inhabited only by the spelunkers who are paid exhorbutant fees to lower themselves into the deepest cracks of the ground, looking for new mineral/ore veins their employers can claim and begin to extract.
THe woman wants nothing more than to get off this rock, so she fudges a little – or a lot – on her resume to get a highly lucrative – but highly dangerous – job finding a new vein. She gets the job, which requires that she get a surgery to be compatible with her new suit – there is no room to bring food or make a bathroom, so both her nutrients must be administered – and her waste disposed of – through cannisters attached ro her suit.
Once she gets so far underground that she has lost akk sense of time and space, she realizes her new employer lied about the job too.
JackarooDeva on
Not a novel, but there’s a long Roger Zelazny story called This Mortal Mountain about a guy climbing a super-high mountain on another planet.
More-Birb on
it’s been a long time since I read it, but I would swear there’s a decent bit of what you’re describing in Jack McDevitt’s The Engines of God
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The Martian by Andy Weir
It’s deep-sea survival, so the opposite of mountaineering, but *Starfish* by Peter Watts is great and may scratch a similar itch.
It isn’t *about* this, but there’s a bit of traversing of some pretty harsh terrain in *The Left Hand of Darkness* by Ursula LeGuin, which is a sci-fi essential anyway.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson has a good deal of transiting the Martian terrain
So this is almost the opposite if what you’re looking for, but definitely extreme terrain. The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is set well after man has spread across the cosmos. The book centers on a young woman on an ugly and harsh planet, mostly inhabited only by the spelunkers who are paid exhorbutant fees to lower themselves into the deepest cracks of the ground, looking for new mineral/ore veins their employers can claim and begin to extract.
THe woman wants nothing more than to get off this rock, so she fudges a little – or a lot – on her resume to get a highly lucrative – but highly dangerous – job finding a new vein. She gets the job, which requires that she get a surgery to be compatible with her new suit – there is no room to bring food or make a bathroom, so both her nutrients must be administered – and her waste disposed of – through cannisters attached ro her suit.
Once she gets so far underground that she has lost akk sense of time and space, she realizes her new employer lied about the job too.
Not a novel, but there’s a long Roger Zelazny story called This Mortal Mountain about a guy climbing a super-high mountain on another planet.
it’s been a long time since I read it, but I would swear there’s a decent bit of what you’re describing in Jack McDevitt’s The Engines of God