I’m looking to get inspiration for my own writing. I need a hard sci fi series where earth (and earthlike worlds) are too rare, inaccessible, and/or previously spoiled beyond ability to sustain life. Bonus points if it is set on a multi-generational space station or starship without any other options and goes into detail about life support, living space, mineral mining and expansion of the station to accomodate a growing population, and daily life of it’s residents.
If anyone remembers Drifter Colonies from Titan A.E., that’s what’s in my head.
I’m looking for The Martian levels of realism, and I’m fine with a bit of “Unobtanium” clichés if they’re not core to the story.
The Children of Time books by Adrian Tchaikovsky have a lot of those themes. Half of the first book is about an ark ship sent out to find a habitable planet because earth is dying. It spans hundreds of years as key crew members go in and out of hyper sleep. Relationships and political factions form and dissolve as the ageing ship continues its mission to find a new home.
The second book focuses on a terraforming crew that was sent to another star system to prepare a planet for humans. However, the planet’s ecology is so alien it proves very difficult to gain a foothold.
I’ll second this (though I’ve only read the first thus far). I don’t know that I’d consider it especially hard SciFi but it’s far from a space opera. I recall feeling like the justification for the creation of the arachnid race was a bit hand-wavey, but the level of thought put into their society more than made up for the required suspension of disbelief. Definitely one of my favorite books.
For something similar I’d also recommend Dragon’s Egg by Robert L. Forward. It’s about the discovery of intelligent life on a neutron star, who develop at a rate exponentially faster than humanity. Also not super hard SciFi, but a great exploration into truly alien life.
Not quite what you’re after but I absolutely love Diaspora by Greg Egan.
It’s a different take on the same issues you’re asking about (not at first, but it’s not really a spoiler to say that it explores them whether or not it’s as necessary as your examples state), a take that leans more into different forms of existence rather than supporting our current existence in a different environment (but touches on aspects of that too, kind of). It’s mega-multi-generational while also not being that at all, depending on perspective.
Not quite what you’re after but I absolutely love Diaspora by Greg Egan.
Came here to say that it’s the BOOK OP is looking for , Moreover, it’s one of the authors present on the fediverse @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz
I don’t know how the original version works, but in the French translation Francis Lustman made a real effort in building a coherent grammar with neo-pronoms which match very well the book tone, and is a great exercise.
However, Diaspora isn’t the most accessible Egan book. I mean, if you never heard about stuff like complex conjugate, or Penrose tiles you’ll struggle with some of the concept.
It was my first real Sci fi book haha. Definitely a struggle but I was hooked once I started grasping even a sense of what was going on in the conceptory at the beginning.
From there, I understood what I understood, and let the other concepts flow over me in a way. Sometimes they’d click once I was a few chapters deeper and something that was discussed earlier came into effect and I’d go back and re read, other things made more sense when I read the whole thing again years later.
Reading it, I definitely didn’t get the full intended effect that someone with more knowledge would have, but it still managed to stick with me for decades now and absolutely shaped my Sci fi tastes
Doesn’t quite fit the bill as there’s a planet eventually but Children of Time by Tchaikovsky is excellent and half the book follows a generation ship. The other half follows a successive evolution of uplifted spiders. It’s reasonably hard sci-fi not Martian levels of detail about the science but very well written and enjoyable. Could be worth a go for some inspiration.
Children of Time series goes over this a little bit, especially in the first book. Colonists end up waking up early due to a malfunction and end up falling into a devolving tribalistic race to the bottom on their journey to the planet.
EDIT: As for “hard” scifi, while I wouldn’t say this series is at the same level as The Martian or maybe The Expanse, it is pretty good with trying to keep things real, especially with regards to the human threads of the story.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaikovsky/113411?ean=9780316452502
Author and book information. Good series.
All tomorrow’s by c.m koseman may be interesting to you. It’s a short story that examines the state of humanity several billion years in the future after they have evolved to be unrecognizable. Some civilizations thrived and became better, many devolved and live tortured existances. Quite a few lose the ability to speak or lose intelligence in general.
Someone what mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, and that is really good, but his book Aurora is almost exactly what you are describing.
Highly recommend.
I was looking for Aurora. I also think it’s right on the money. Gets into the weeds with micro ecosystems.
The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.
The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.
Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.
It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge
The Expanse series is kinda like that. There are other planets, but most of the action takes place on ships, stations, and asteroids that have been converted into stations. It goes into depth about life in space, and everything from engineering to biology, sociology, politics, and theology.
The topic is straight brought up several times, including most notably in book 2 about the Jupiter moons, but they all claim it’s borderline impossible because all this is super delicate system only made possible by Earth anyway. Which is later proven true in last book.
Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven is a fantastic book that might be near what you are looking for. It’s about an asteroid impact on Earth, this removes a lot of the population and infrastructure and the story focuses on a few different groups of people as they make do with what they can find or scavenge, and then the resource battling that goes on between groups.
A story line I remember well is on a group that found an abandoned neighborhood and were astonished to find that it still had running water from the nearby local dam/reservoir. They lived here for quite a while in their relative luxury until it just stopped working one day. A burst pipe in some other neighborhood had slowly drained the dam faster than they would have used it up.
Anyway, it’s a great book because it feels so realistic as to what would really happen and the struggles people would actually be going through.
Alas, Babylon. Earth Abides. On The Beach. The Road. One Second After (this one is meh).
If you want some other good collapse survival books similar to Lucifer’s Hammer.
Yes, Earth Abides is also good! I had forgotten about that one until I saw your comment
The Interdependency series by John Scalzi portrays a society where some number of star systems, containing only one habitable planet which is at the very far reaches of the wormhole network, are connected together by wormholes. The society is called “the Interdependency” because every orbital habitat, dome and underground city is hugely dependent on trade with other habitats… without robust transfer of goods and raw materials EVERYONE would die… and this DOESN’T prevent stupid, short sighted, greedy humans from gambling with the stability of it all for their own personal economic and political gain. Fun books. Like most Scalzi, it’s not too deep. But it’s lots of fun.
That’s what immediately came to my mind!
Can vouch for that series. Great fun.
It’s a very non traditional story structure (at least to a western reader) but The Three Body Problem series has a lot of plot revolving around the lack of inhabitable worlds.
Wasn’t there a ship, or two, that had to escape into deep space for like, a long long time?
!yes, in fact those ships end up being very important to some big events in the last 2 books!<
The Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson definitely fits the bill. The Ministry of the Future does too but it is more about the coming climate change disaster.
Love me some KSR.
His Mars series is my sci-fi Lord of the Rings.
Ohhhhh boy, I get to nerd out. OK, super short story; reading and chatting about The Expanse book series got me pointed towards the work of Alastair Reynolds. The early parts of his universes arch aren’t really relevant for your purposes, but in the latter books, how humanity survives on lifeless rocks, is exactly what you’re looking for. Plus, he’s a astrophysicist doctor, iirc, and it is quite quite good hard Sci Fi.
I love Alastair Reynolds
ANOTHER series I just remembered and highly recommend is the Unincorporated Man series. I think there are 4-5 books in the series. Pretty good IMHO. Similar to The Expanse, it’s the Inners vs the Belters, and explores personal liberty and person hood from the perspective of owning “shares” of yourself like a company.
The conflict is awesome, and two military strategy geniuses duke it out in a Legends of the Galactic Heroes sort of way–one has all the resources and latest tech, the other is scrappy and has to deal with extreme resources shortages. Awesome story.
Maybe not “hard” enough for you (eg. it has absibles) but Becky Chambers’s Record of a Spaceborn Few is about life on a fleet of generation ships.
The whole premise of the book is returning to earth, but The 100 starts out in the way you’re wanting including multigenerational space stations and resource limitations.
