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by flir
647 days ago
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He's everywhere, and not just as a PR presence, he's actually involved. I've had a couple of interactions with him on Reddit where he politely drive-by corrected me (a real brush with fame for me). Add to that everything he's written on antipope (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=antipope.org) and I find it amazing he gets commercial work done at all. The first third of Accelerando is a tour de force - the ideas-per-page ratio is just phenomenal, and 20 years ago it left me feeling future-shocked. But it's pulp, in the sense that it's very much rooted in the time it was written (the curse of near-future SF). If anyone knows of any works that idea-dense but written in the 2020s, I'd love to hear about them. Short fiction especially. |
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Fails for the 2020s part, but check out Greg Egan if you haven't already (his Diaspora is mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Dark Integers is a short-fiction collection. Also Vacuum Diagrams, by Stephen Baxter. These three authors are, IMHO, the absolute pinnacle of hard scifi. But be advised they are definitely kinda optimizing for being idea-dense. For more literary stuff with deeper focus on story structure & consideration of the individual characters, etc, you might want to look elsewhere.
EDIT to say, Dennis E Taylor is more recent and on reflection definitely deserves a mention. Also an ex-programmer-turned-author IIRC. The Bobiverse series is aimed at a wider audience of more casual nerds than the stuff above, and more of a recap of "big ideas" from other scifi without the head-spinning future shock of stuff like Stross and Egan. But it's solid nevertheless and easier to call it "fun". And despite the artistic license with the more dreamy far-future tech that's available to protagonists in the not-so-distant-future.. Bobiverse is kind of a "scifi procedural" flavor, so that probably makes it appealing to people who like stuff like Weir's the Martian.