Hard-science science fiction is what you get when the author emphasizes the science in "science fiction." Typically the author tries to make the science accurate, and the scientific aspects form a major component of the story.
For example, some people call Michael Crichton a writer of mainstream thrillers. And he is. However, I think a couple of his novels also qualify as hard-science SF, because he really did try to make the science as good as he could while he was writing them. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN
c.1969, Dell
Crichton's first published novel. It describes the eleven days of a fictional "biological crisis" that allegedly happened in the early 1970s, when a United States Air Force spaceprobe returned to earth carrying an extraterrestrial life-form which had lethal effects on Earth animals. And on humans too. The contaminated satellite is taken to the top secret laboratory called Wildfire, along with the two known survivors. At Wildfire, a team of life-sciences specialists set about trying to identify the organism and find a way to kill it. While the plot has some holes, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN is a fast-paced, tight story written with a lot of verisimilitude. It's not hard to believe that the events described really happened, more or less as described.
JURASSIC PARK
c.1990, Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0-345-37077-5
Probably Crichton's most famous book. If you've only seen the movie and never read the book, then I highly recommend that you do read it, because the book is far better than the movie in the science that it contains. The story is pretty much the same: multi-millionaire John Hammond decides to clone dinosaurs from fossilized DNA and make them the star attractions in a huge island amusement park. He invites a panel of experts to review the park before it opens. Major players on the expert panel are lawyer Gennaro, paleontologists Sam Grant and Ellie Sattler, and mathematician Ian Malcolm. During their tour of the island, Something Goes Wrong. Well, not exactly. More like Everything Goes Wrong more or less at once, in a wonderful illustration of Murphy's Law at work. The science of the cloning and the details of how the park falls apart are described much more clearly and strongly than they were shown in the movie. Like many good SF books, JURASSIC PARK the novel is an absorbing and entertaining yarn that also contains some food for thought.
THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK
c.1995, Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0-345-40288-X
The sequel to JURASSIC PARK. Years after the events at Hammond's island, one of the survivors, Ian Malcolm, discovers that the pretty, pristine lab he saw on Hammond's island of Isla Nuebla was a fraud, a showpiece. The real work of cloning dinosaurs took place on a second island, Isla Sorna. When the project collapsed, Isla Sorna was abandoned and the dinosaurs were turned loose. One of Malcolm's students gets it into his head that Isla Sorna, with the dinosaurs loose on it, would make a perfect example of a "lost world:" a tightly closed, easily studied ecosystem. So he mounts an expedition to go there. At the same time, the industrial spy who suborned Hammond's man Dennis Nedry and indirectly caused the disaster on Isla Nublar also mounts an expedition to Isla Sorna, hoping to retrieve some of the dinosaurs. The two expeditions run afoul of each other and also of the dinosaurs, resulting in a mad scramble to survive. This isn't nearly as good as the novel JURASSIC PARK itself is, because it has far too many recycled plot elements and none of the characters are particularly likable, not even the dinosaurs. But as bad as it is, it's light-years ahead of the wretched second Jurassic Park movie.
One type of hard-science SF that's gotten popular in recent years is something I call 'bio-SF,' because it's based on biology rather than technology. The Jurassic Park novels are one example. Here's another:
DARWIN'S RADIO
Bear, Greg
c.1999, Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0-345-43524-9
This story starts with a sophisticated and not-well-understood type of virus and runs from there. Fifty thousand years ago, something rapidly transformed Neandertal Man into modern Homo sapiens. That something has slept in our genes ever since. Now it's waking up again, and no one knows what the results will be. A pretty good yarn, all things considered; my only real problem with it is that the premise of Neandertals being the direct ancestors of modern humans was made obsolete by recent discoveries in genetics. But it's hardly the author's fault that his premise was destroyed by something that was only discovered after the book was written!
James P. Hogan is a master of hard-science SF. In fact, in some ways I don't think anyone has ever handled the hard-science genre any better than Hogan did in some of his earlier novels. I have a number of his books, mainly his earlier ones because those are the ones I liked the most. My Hogan list includes these novels:
THRICE UPON A TIME
c.1980, Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0-345-27518-7
Perhaps the only time-travel novel I've ever read that made the time-travel make logical sense. In this story, time travel is restricted to information, carried by pulses of a new type of physical phenomenon called tau waves, which travel backward in time. Hogan has quite a bit of fun with this concept, exploring how this time transmitter would work and what effects it would have on the world around it. The novel actually consists of two major sections which describe the same period of time twice, including the effects caused in the second 'version' by a message sent back from the first 'version.' It's very well done, very plausible, and quite a lot of fun to read.
THE GENESIS MACHINE
c. 1979, Ballantine Books
The story of a major breakthrough in theoretical physics, and the men who make it. Dr. Bradley Clifford is an iconoclastic theoretical physicist who hates the fact that he's been forced to work on weapons projects in a world that seems headed for a nuclear holocaust. Dr. Aubrey Philipsz is an equally iconoclastic technical genius who can turn Clifford's flights of theoretical fancy into technological reality. Together they explore Clifford's discovery of an entirely new realm of physics, and use it to build a weapon that may mean the end of the world -- or a new beginning for it.
THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROW
c. 1979, Ballantine Books
An exotic journey into the realm of computers and artificial intelligence. As it begins, a world-wide network of extremely powerful computers called TITAN has begun to malfunction, doing things it was never intended to do and inadvertently endangering humans in the process. A team of experts in artificial intelligence sets out to build a supercomputer that will avoid the kind of mistakes the TITAN network has been making. But there's one problem: what to do if the supercomputer gets too smart, too fast, and tries to take over? There's only one way to find out: build a miniature version of the supercomputer, give it a miniature world to run in the form of a large space station, then try to turn it off and see what happens. What happens, of course, is rather different from what they expected... the supercomputer proves more than equal to the humans' opposition, until it makes another connection that no one ever expected.
VOYAGE FROM YESTERYEAR
c.1982, Del Rey
ISBN: 0-345-29472-6
The story of Earth's first interstellar colony. In the early 21st century, with a nuclear war threatening, an automated starship named the Kuan-yin is sent on a journey to the Alpha Centauri star system. Once there, it uses electronically stored DNA to grow a population of humans and start a human colony on an Earth-type world orbiting Alpha Centauri. Thirty years later, after Earth has recovered partially from the nuclear war, three new colony ships, all of them heavily armed, are sent by the three major warring powers to claim power over the colony. First to arrive is the ship of the New United States. Unfortunately, the colonists have their own ideas about their destiny, and it doesn't include being the subjects of armed conquest. What results is a war between the colony and the starship, but it's not any kind of war you ever heard of before. This isn't a great novel, but it's a good one, and the culture that Hogan devises for the Centauri colony is fascinating because it seems completely illogical, and yet it seems workable at the same time.
Hogan's masterwork is a series of three novels called The Giants Novels. (There's also a fourth book in this series, but I didn't particularly like it so I didn't keep it.)
INHERIT THE STARS -- In the early 21st century, explorers on the Moon have found a spacesuited human corpse in a cave. Dating tests show the man has been dead for approximately 50,000 years. Problem: Where did he come from? Using objects discovered with the body, and other discoveries that turn up as time goes on, Dr. Victor Hunt and a group of scientists from the UN Space Arm attempt to unriddle the origins of "Charlie" and the origin and fate of the Lunarians, the race to which he belonged. However, they don't have a lot of evidence, and much of what they do have seems contradictory. All they can establish for sure is that the Lunarians are apparently from a planet called Minerva, which once existed between Mars' and Jupiter's orbits, and that they destroyed their civilization and their planet in a catastrophic thermonuclear war.
Then the crew of Jupiter Four, a spacecraft sent to explore Jupiter's moon Ganymede, discovers a wrecked starship entombed within the Ganymedean ice sheet. This ship was crewed by a totally alien race, named the Ganymeans, and was wrecked a *long* time ago, long before the time of the Lunarians. Hunt and some of his colleagues join the next manned Jupiter mission, Jupiter Five, and head for Ganymede. They find that the Ganymeans are also from Minerva, and it seems that they may well be a key part of the Charlie problem. But despite the important finds made onboard the Ganymean craft (the principles behind many of its systems are totally unknown to Earth science), there are still plenty of questions about the Lunarians. And it seems that no one theory can answer everything. I consider this one of the best SF novels I've ever read. Not because the characters are particularly memorable (they aren't), nor because the plot is complex (it isn't). No, I place this novel so high on my list because it's a science mystery, where the problem is a scientific one and it's solved via the scientific method. And the whole mystery and solution are presented in the best traditions of the best science puzzles. It's a believable science mystery, and that's extremely rare.
THE GENTLE GIANTS OF GANYMEDE starts a few months after the end of INHERIT THE STARS. Dr. Hunt and the scientists from Jupiter Five are still deeply involved in figuring out the technology and cargo of the wrecked Ganymean starship when a functional Ganymean starship appears from deep space. This starship, the Shapieron, left the Ganymean homeworld Minerva about twenty years ago, ship-time, to perform an experiment at another star. But the experiment went wrong, and the Ganymeans had to flee to survive. Their high-sublight-velocity stardrive resulted in a staggering relativistic time-dilation effect, with the result that the Shapieron returned to the Solar System twenty-five million years after it left. Even worse, the ship is crippled and in desperate need of repair, as well as medical aid for its crew. The Terrans of Jupiter Five make friendly contact with the Shapieron and offer what assistance they can, and the mingling of the two species that follows leads to results that neither could have predicted.
GIANTS' STAR is the final volume in the trilogy. It's set about six months after the end of GENTLE GIANTS OF GANYMEDE. Quite unexpectedly, Earth finds itself in contact with an advanced Ganymean civilization based on a world orbiting a star called the Giants' Star or Gistar. The world is named Thurien, and these Ganymeans call themselves Thuriens. The Ganymeans have received a message that Earth sent out about the Shapieron, and want to make sure the ship is safe.
The Thuriens warn that nothing concerning the contact can be sent by electronic communication, for Earth is under surveillance by another part of their interstellar federation, and they don't want that other organization learning of this contact. This makes very little sense to the Earthmen, whn know how Ganymeans act and react from their contacts with the Shapieron. After some dialogue by radio, the U.S. arranges a landing by a Thurien starship, and the two sides are able to interact in person. They both soon find that many mysterious things are going on behind the scenes on both Earth and Thurien, and the solution to those mysteries is a long and complicated one. This novel resolves many of the lingering questions from the first two books and puts the entire trilogy into a nice neat package. It's a good story; lots of twists, some reasonable science, and good writing of the interactions between human and Ganymean. But it suffers from a couple of substantial flaws: somewhat flat characters and a few too-neat or implausible solutions to knotty problems. Hogan also violates a few of the rules he set previously for the behavior of both Terrans and Ganymeans.
The Giants Trilogy is currently available only as a single omnibus paperback, titled THE GIANTS NOVELS. The Science Fiction Book Club also once published an omnibus edition of the three, titled THE MINERVAN EXPERIMENT.
