Alastair Reynolds

[suciul]

Nop, "hard scifi" is SF which doesn't contradict to at least high-school course of physics. For example faster than light shouldn't be possible at least locally and preferably globally. No force fields, lightsabers, perpetual motion, space pirates boarding moving ship, etc.

I disagree a bit - hard sf is something that has a universe with consistent laws based on our current understanding of physics; eg in Greg Egan upcoming Clockwork Rocket, the universe is not Einsteinian but Riemannian (the metric is ds^2 + dt^2 rather than ds^2-dt^2 in our universe, where s is distance, t is time, units are such that c=1); he worked very hard at deducing and speculating what happens in such a universe - check his website for a lot of such details in addition to what is in the book - and that book is hard sf otherwise the term means just mundane sf which is something very different imho

Reynolds is pretty hard sf under any reasonable definition

[pox]

...if it quacks like a duck...


sorry that adds nothing to the argument. I don't like his characters though. Probably about the 7th time I've said that in this thread...

[Fire Servant]

I agree his characters tend to be weak. But because of his ideas and settings, I tend to look forward to his stuff more than any other sci-fi...

[pox]

I can't disagree. I get and read them immediately too, but there's so little good sci-fi released that's in that sub-genre [ducks exact argument about which] that it's inevitable. Some of his stuff it great!

[Fire Servant]

his almost offhanded hard sci fi descriptions are great... his space situations are great... even his social structures are interesting. the first one i read was Chasm City and i remember thinking 'if only i cared about these characters, this would be flawless'...

[pox]

ha, yeah exactly that.

I suspect he's somewhere on the Autistic spectrum, which is of course great for technical detail....