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"Hard Sci-Fi" Trek style

MikeS

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
I like a book to challenge me, I'm not into pulp-fiction serials - I also like Star Trek, so when the two meet I really enjoy it. The last experience I had of Trek meeting "hard sci-fi" was the excellent Destiny series. I've just read reviews on here for the two Department of Temporal Investigations books so I'm going to give them a whirl.

Any more recommendations?

I'd love if Stephen Baxter or Iain M. Banks would do a Star Trek book, but I think I may be waiting a long time for anything like that!
 
Christopher Bennet has a deserved reputation for taking a hard-science approach to Trek fiction, although he's hardly the only one.
 
Hard science fiction is incompatible with Star Trek. That's not a bad thing. If you were to do hard sf you would lose Spock (and all the other human/alien characters), warp drive, transporters, phasers, subspace radio and time travel just to name a few.

You can use actual science to serve a particular story but Star Trek as a whole wouldn't work as a hard SF series. Often times you'd find that an established technology of Star Trek would work better than a real world science solution. It's part of the fabric of the show.
 
^ Did Sho said anywhere that that thread should be used?

He just pointed to information regarding the OP that was already available here.
 
A thread that's nearly a year and a half old and just over twenty posts, also started by you. Trying to mini mod again Sho?

Ironically, quite the contrary: Remembering the last time you tried to pick a fight I deliberately phrased things to make clear that the older thread might serve as an additional source of recommendations (which was what MikeS was looking for, after all), not to suggest that discussion should move there. At this point it's your bit of grandstanding disrupting this thread's purpose, which I guess belies your intentions.

As for the older thread being by me: Well, duh - having had the same question in the past is why I remembered it, so there's your causal link. As far as conspiracies go, that makes for a small one.

To get past this crap: In the timespan since that old thread I read one of the books mentioned there, Dyson Sphere by Pellegrino and Zebrowski. I'm afraid I found it to be a bit of a mixed bag. There's a fair bunch of interesting ideas in it, which I guess is what one hopes to find in something harder, but the treatment of the characters and the setting (the Trek tapestry, not the eponymous sphere) just felt too off for comfort. I kept thinking it felt like an early season tie-in novel, before the characters had become more defined, but it was actually released only in 1999. I liked the idea of all-Horta crews in solid-bodied Starfleet ships that the crew keeps rearranging the internals of, though; makes you ponder how that might work ...
 
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Hard science fiction is incompatible with Star Trek.

I'm not sure it is. We can accept the fantasy that is Star Trek and use it as a vehicle to explore Strange New Ideas.


Christopher Bennet has a deserved reputation for taking a hard-science approach to Trek fiction, although he's hardly the only one.

Thanks for the recommendation. And I hope you didn't think me rude by stating that I did not enjoy serials. Well written ones such as your Khan series are immensely enjoyable. :techman:

I'll put in a vote for "The Wounded Sky" by Diane Duane

Thank-you :techman:

See http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=145190 for some earlier discussion and recommendations.

Thank-you. :techman:

...And also to everyone who responded to Sho's post - politics is another genre that interests me! :lol:
 
Christopher Bennet has a deserved reputation for taking a hard-science approach to Trek fiction, although he's hardly the only one.

Thanks for the recommendation. And I hope you didn't think me rude by stating that I did not enjoy serials. Well written ones such as your Khan series are immensely enjoyable. :techman:

No offense taken! Glad you liked the Khan books.
 
Hard science fiction is incompatible with Star Trek.

I'm not sure it is. We can accept the fantasy that is Star Trek and use it as a vehicle to explore Strange New Ideas.

Strange new ideas don't require hard science fiction. Hell, Star Trek has lasted 45 years with hardly any real science at all.

Trek's best ideas rarely have anything to do with the science (or "science") anyway. They're about the people. The science is just the painted backdrop that they people's stories take place in front of.

In most instances when Trek tries to make the science a part of the solution we end up with two and a half minutes of technobabble and a special effects sequence.
 
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