Can you recommend any near future Science Fiction, with a focus on space exploration and colonization? I'm looking for stuff along the lines of Robinson's RGB Mars or Bova's Mars or Moonbase books, which deal mostly with technology that is within reach today.

Message edited by its author, Sep 20, 2008, 8:06am.

I quite liked Greg Bear's Moving Mars. I wouldn't recommend any others of his that I've read though: he proposes and describes some very interesting ideas, but usually doesn't quite manage to pull off a satisfying story. (His other books also tend to be based on more futuristic technology.)

How about Allen Steele's Coyote series? I think that'll tick all your boxes.

Stephen Baxter's TITAN comes to mind.

Ian Sales is the guy who should be throwing down suggestions for this one...

Well, yes, except I think Ben Bova's books are terrible...

However, I can recommend:
White Mars, Brian Aldiss
Fellow Traveller, William Barton & Michael Capobianco
Voyage and Titan by Steve Baxter
Ascent, Jed Mercurio
Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson
Mars Crossing, Geoffrey A Landis
The Olympus Gambit, William Rollo

There's also Back to the Moon, by Homer H Hickam, although I've not read it.

I'll see if I can dig out some more titles when I get home this evening.

I wouldn't say that the tech in Coyote is close to being reached today. Neither suspended animation or interstellar travel are close.

If you are looking at in reach today and a book focusing on space exploration/colonisation you are limiting yourself to books about the High Frontier.

A lot of Allen Steele's earlier books would count Orbital Decay, Clarke County, Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night and A King of Infinite Space are all set in near-space.

Ben Bova's Grand Tour series would count - but some of the books have some terrible reviews.

Mars crossing by Geoffrey A. Landis is another Mars book which seems pretty decent.

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2008, 11:20am.

Most of Kim Stanley Robinson, really, are quite near future extrapolations..from his Gold Coast SoCal sequence to 50 degrees below and others mentioned above - kind of his specialty. I'd say that William Gibson's recent books are VERY near future...Slightly advanced applications of current tech.

ooops...i forgot about the space bit....stuck here on earth, my bad.

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2008, 10:41pm.

Gibson's a good choice, dunno why I missed that.

Oh, hold on, the original post wanted stuff on space exploration and colonization, which probably counts Billy-boy out...

I liked Orbital Decay by Allen Steele, but it is about Earth-orbit satellite construction. So is Space Doctor by Lee Correy.

Here are some more:

Red Moon, Michael Cassutt
Ice, Shane Johnson
Red Moon, DS Michaels
Starfire, Paul Preuss
Freefall, Garfield & Judith Reeves-Stevens
The Orion Protocol, Gary Tigerman

I've not read any of them.

I have Starfire (in hardcover no less - bought second hand for peanuts) by Preuss. I have even read it. Can't remember much except it was very near future.

I'm not sure any of the books in message 10 are going to be very easy to find.

Moonfall by Jack McDevitt

> 11 yes, they might difficult, although the last two are thrillers and I've seen plenty of copies on bookmooch.

>6: Yeah, andyl, you're right about the tech levels in the Coyote series. But that's only true of the tech used to get to the planet in the first place, really. Most of what the colonists then have on the ground is pretty recognisable. Which is why I thought of it. Depends on exactly what Hanno's interested in, then.

I haven't read any of Steele's other books. Are they worth checking out?

They are OK in the same way that Coyote is OK. Nothing outstandingly good but they are readable entertainment.

If you are looking at recognisable tech once you are on a far distant planet then there are going to be many more books to choose from.

I was thinking Arthur C. Clarke would be perfect to recommend but his stuff is so outdated that I guess it doesn't count anymore.

Isn't it weird to think of 2001 or The Sands of Mars or A Fall of Moondust as alternate history?

Still worth a read, though I guess the whole technology that is within reach today would be hard to apply.

Message edited by its author, Sep 25, 2008, 7:00pm.

I don't know I reread The Fountains Of Paradise recently and it would work, although not much space exploration but a beanstalk is the first step right?

It has been ages since I have read Imperial Earth but that would work surely, but maybe as the setting is in 2276 it may not be near-future.

Thank you everyone, I'll check those suggestions. :)

Michael Flynn's Firestar series. I think that's the name of the series. It's near future, as in, just getting a small number of people off of Earth. It doesn't just deal with technical hardware this would require but with the political, social, and financial needs also. This loses a lot of readers in SF because they don't want to deal with politics and economics.

I think I finished the first two but they had a bit more soap opera-ness than I like. Lots of tangled human relationships and such. I don't mind the politics and economics but I get bored with humans and their emotional/social foibles. Others eat that stuff up. One of the books won a minor award. The one endowed by the Heinlein foundation.

>14, 15

Steele's earlier work Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, and Clarke County, Space are solid examples of the kind of "space travel procedural" stuff that Heinlein wrote between 1947 and 1950. The first two, especially, are notable for having (reasonably) plausible working class heroes rather than the vaguely middle-class technocrats who usually colonize fictional near-Earth space.

I had to force myself through A King of Infinite Space and was sorry I did. The Coyote series left me cold.

#20

To be fair, we will need technically experienced people when colonising a planet, and considering the cost of transporting people, we are not going to merely ship across people that are there to provide extra bodies, rather, we are going to deliberately select for people with special skills.

"We"? Are you recruiting? Sign me up, man!

When I saw Neil Armstrong on the moon when I was six, I swore I'd be the first man on Mars. Now I'd settle for them taking along a tea spoon of my ashes and dumping them on the red sands...

Message edited by its author, Oct 1, 2008, 2:08pm.

Not extra bodies. Remember, humans are the only workers that can be assembled from the materials at hand by unskilled labor. :)

#22

I'll put you on my secret passenger crew list of people going to Mars, Cliff.

As a Canadian writer, you will most likely have had plenty of practice writing literature that appeal to the Canadian psyche and concern themselves with situations, problems and characters unique to Canada, and hence, can be our writer that does this... for Mars.

>24 Don't just make it a Canadian thing… remember that Australia is part of the Commonwealth too. I'm not real smart, but I can lift heavy things (especially on Mars).

Besides, Cliff wouldn't travel with you to Mars, you own at least one alleged "Dune" book by his least favourite authors (Brian; Anderson, Kevin J. Herbert)

#16

I was thinking I would reread, if I can find it, The Sands of Mars. Just recently it strikes me as possibly being an allegory of Zionism.

Are you allowed to use the word "Zionism"? Isn't that just teensiest weensiest bit critical of Israel? I thought they sent you Gitmo if you said anything bad in the US about Israel.

I've taken my lumps for saying Israel is a pimple on the ass of Satan. I'm not PC nor am I afraid. We have "Freedom of Speech" in this country! Well, sort of.

Now for my bona fides: my daughter and her wife are both Jewish. Some of my best friends are Jewish. (Here in America when you want to trash an ethnicity you are obliged to say "Some of my friends are ________"). My religious beliefs are follow ons to Judaism. I am not an anti-Semite. I AM anti-bullying and I find Israel a great bully.

However, Zionism is a fact and will not go away, so I see no problem with referring to a Science Fiction work that has someone returning "Home" after some time and finding your enemies living next door as an allegory for Zionism, especially given the time frame of its creation.

To hurl the epithet "Anti-Semite" is a method of inhibiting free speech and squelching debate. I have no patience for that kind of bullying.

I know this is way more than you expected from your jest, Ian, but the state of Israel and its behavior with regard to the Palestinians is a discussion that needs desperately to be had in this country, but everyone seems to be afraid to have it.

Message edited by its author, Oct 2, 2008, 11:18am.

I love words.

Wouldn't a member of the Jewish faith who has negative feeling towards members of the Islamic faith who’s ancestors were from what we generally refer to as the 'Middle East' be an 'anti-Semite'?

I really don't have any friends but I am going to stop with that right there because up to now I don't really have that many enemies either.

Arabs and Jews are both technically Semites and speak semitic languages. However, the term "anti-semite" was actually coined to mean specifically "anti-Jewish". Which is silly... but as soon as you point out that Arabs can't be anti-Semitic, the etymology of the word is trotted out. (And yes, Arabs can be very anti-Jewish. Most, however, are anti-Zionist.)

Message edited by its author, Oct 2, 2008, 3:00pm.

Zionism itself was a 19th C response to the general rise of nationalism and the pervasive anti-semitism in 19th C Europe. Herzl (sic) was the primary initial advocate of a Jewish state in Palestine (then under the control of the Ottoman empire iirc) and was politically rather than religiously motivated.

Personally, i always thought that the USA should have given the state of New Jersey to the Jews..the Garden State would bloom again; Paterson, where my Jewish mom was raised, could've been the capitol city. There would be proximity to NYC, arguably the 2nd most prominent "Jewish" center, after London before the creation of Israel. When a particular spot of land is held sacred by 3 separate, albeit closely related, faiths..nothing but trouble could be expected. But no one people or group has been left "clean" in the attempt to resolve "the Jewish Question" (itself, generally, an anti-Semitic term; much as "the Irish problem" was a perpetual problem in the Brit Isles.

#25

There are quite a few people that have the bastardised Dune books to have a complete collection.

Australia has actually made several contributions to the space race, and was the fourth country in the world to launch their own satellite into space (behind USSR, USA, and France), and helped NASA send and receive information to the spacecraft.

And, by the way, I am from Australia too, and I also need to come up with a way that I could contribute to the Mars colony to get on board.

I have 1st editions of the Dune House trilogy, Legends of Dune trilogy, The Road to Dune, and both Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune. I bought them to complete my collection, and foolishly read them. I hoped it would there, but no... There's now a new trilogy, beginning with Paul of Dune, and Pinky & the Brian are planning another set of three after that - about the setting up of the various "schools" in the Duniverse. There's only so much I can take. I have said, "No more!" The collection will have to remain not "complete".

The British space programme was based in Australia too, at Woomera.

Ian,

You have to get that monkey off your back.

Those schmucks will continue to churn out new Dune books, crapping all over Frank Herbert's legacy as long as folks buy them.

Once they finish the trilogy about the schools it will be a trilogy about the creation of the stillsuits.

They are doing to Dune what is done to so much fantasy. They take an intriguing idea and explore every single nook and cranny until a reader is just sick and tired of hearing about that world.

Message edited by its author, Oct 3, 2008, 9:13am.

"Explore" is too considered a word. What they do is poke a stick around, like a chimp pokes a stick up its arse to see if there's anything left.

The tag page for near future gives:

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (21)
Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson (13)
Halting state by Charles Stross (13)
Sixty days and counting by Kim Stanley Robinson (10)
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (16)
Market Forces by Richard Morgan (12)
Hammered by Elizabeth Bear (10)
Earth by David Brin (14)
Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack (6)
Choosers of the Slain by James H. Cobb (4)
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (10)
Shooting War by Anthony Lappe (3)
Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson (8)
Invasive Procedures by Orson Scott Card (4)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (23)
Scardown by Elizabeth Bear (6)
Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan (7)
Choosers of the Slain by James H. Cobb (3)
Choosers of the Slain by James H. Cobb (3)
Fat by Rob Grant (3)

Not all of which involve exploration of course. You could try tagmashing the two terms

#35 Ian, you have set off another extremely painful laughing jag. And I'm supposed to be recovering, you bastard...

Equating the DUNE hacks with a monkey and stick...

Dear God. Funny and right on the mark as always, Sales.

Might not fit exactly in the genre, but Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. The style seems very "10 minutes into the future," full of European coolness, Russian gangsters, and wonderful prose.

Well there is always the tongue in cheek novel "Fallen Angels" by Pournelle / Flynn / Niven would qualify for near future I think.

Does 1984 count as "near past"? ;)

I'm more concerned with message over measurement.