I'm a huge fan of sci-fi books like Dark Matter and Recursion by Blake Crouch, plus Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Could you recommend a pure sci-fi story with no fantasy elements that features realistic, grounded scientific concepts feeling more like plausible science than wild fiction. Thanks, and happy reading.
by Alternative-Bit-999
6 Comments
That really depends on how grounded you want it to be. At some point sci-fi has to take some liberties to be interesting.
The Expanse starts off that way, but eventually becomes pretty fantastical. (Great read, though.)
I’d recommend the Bobiverse though, if you liked PHM. The first book is *”We Are Legion (We Are Bob)”*.
*To Be Taught, If Fortunate* by Becky Chambers
You might like the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is futuristic and not of this world per se, but the way it is written feels very believable and grounded as a potential real future in our universe. A lot of really interesting hard science speculation. No aliens or things like that, but there is a bit of an otherworldliness, but it’s through the distinct lens of “how would evolution realistically continue in this timeline” …that kind of stuff!
TLDR; Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Cool and pretty realistic hard science fiction.
The books by David Brin and Gregory Benford – not just when they write together – are science based for the most part as both are physics professors. Brin has written some fantasy but most of his work has well explained accessible science. I’m a big fan of Brin’s Earth. The uplift books are great too but they posit people from other solar systems and galaxies and many would argue that’s wild fiction.
David Weber’s Honor Harrington series is very science and military strategy based, especially for space opera, but it posits a sentient race of small cat-like creatures.
You might check out David Weber’s Out of the Dark, which is an aliens invade earth series but it’s set in the near future and the science is current for earth. That’s the name of the first book of three. The aliens technology isn’t outside what we can understand now in general terms.
Maybe the Murderbot books by Martha Wells?
3 body problem by cixin liu
Seveneves. Like someone else said, all sci-fi takes some liberties and this one does too (especially at the end) but Neal Stephenson loves to put an extended math/science rant in the middle of his books, pacing be damned!