I have strong opinions about this. My criteria for a book being science fiction and not fantasy is that is must be based on scientific thinking. The author must have done some work to determine whether whats happening in his book is at least plausible according to real science, and then work out the details of how it would actually function. So I regard most "science fiction" books and almost all "science fiction" films as really being fantasy. Essentially they are works of fantasy or dramatic fiction re-skinned with lasers and aliens instead of magic and goblins (to a great or lesser extent).
So dune is a great book but it is 90% fantasy, there is only a little bit of research done by the author on desert ecosystems.
My favourite real science fiction author is Arthur C clarke. some good books by him...
earthlight
the fountains of paradise
islands in the sky
the sands of mars
rama
songs of distant earth
Also would recommend accelerando by Charles Stross and the mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson
Your opinion is very good. The "and then something magic happens" solution in fantasy is what really turns me off.
But in SF it is sometimes hard to distinct magic from plausible albeit far fetched science. Is FTL possible given the science of tomorrow, or magic?
If you want to have (imho) really, really good SF, chec out Ted Chiang. Very low production, but he takes science in SF very seriosly. His collection of short stories is some of the best I've ever read:
Somebody else mentioned Anathem. And if one want deep mathematics mixed with wild ideas, language theory I strongly recommend it. It is hard to get going (at least it was for me). But very rewarding. Probably the best read the last year.
Finally, if one really wants to go the "no magic" route. I strongly recommend Netptunes Brood by Charles stross. The book is based on the idea that FTL is not possible, and as a consequence how the economics behind interstellar migration and stable exchange currencies works. Bitcoing and slow money. Just that somebody actually has been considering the finance structure behind generation ships makes it worth reading.
You might like to check out Brandon Sanderson's work (if you haven't yet). It's all fantasy, but it tends to avoid the "and then something magic happens" problem.
I'd interpret the thing you dislike about fantasy as a violation of Sanderson's first law: "The author's ability to resolve conflicts in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how the reader understands said magic."
I'm sure you know this, but you never say so which makes it a bit frustrating: what you refer to as "real science fiction" is commonly known as "hard science fiction" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction).
The "opposite", i.e. what you refer to as re-skinned fantasy, often falls into the "space opera" subgenre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera). For instance, "Star Wars" is often referred to as being space opera.
IMHO sci-fi = set assumptions, follow them consistently to conclusion, telling an interesting story as a byproduct.
I don't think all science must be true (otherways old books would lose sci-fi status as we discover things contradicting them), but it must be consistent with the assumptions, and the assumptions should be "elegant".
And if you have technology, that can trivialy be abused for infinite power after 5 minutes of thinking - people in the story should be abusing it too, or there should be reasonable explanation why it doesn't happen.
When I read your comment I'm strongly reminded of myself ten years ago. I held almost exactly the same view on hard scifi, and was similarly obsessed with Arthur C Clarke. But I've since loosened my definition of scifi for a couple of reasons:
a) I now think of scifi as any work intended to do more than tell a story or explore a world. Focussing on just hard scifi causes great works of social and sociology fiction like The Dispossessed to be left without a clear pigeonhole. Which is a great pity, IMO.
Perhaps the biggest chunk that gets miscategorized is cyberpunk; works like Snow Crash and Hardwired are clearly about more than whether the ending is happy or sad, or whether the hero gets the girl. Doesn't seem right to categorize them as fantasy. Better to narrow Arthur C Clarke into the sub-category of hard scifi. Loosening my uptight definition caused me to better appreciate Snow Crash in particular on a second reading a decade later. It's aged wonderfully.
You could even imagine a book with fantasy 'props' that feels scifi-like. I haven't seen it yet, but I have no doubt it can be done. (Any recommendations from others?)
b) Not even everything Arthur C Clarke wrote was hard. Rama series, c'mon! Kim Stanley Robinson is a great author, but I fail to see how he's 'more hard' than Asimov or Heinlein. Somebody described the Red Mars series to me as a reality show with dune buggies, and that seems about right. You certainly couldn't call it 'more hard' than Anathem.
Anyways, for hard scifi readers the top author today is probably Greg Egan. That I think everybody can agree on. I have other recommendations elsewhere on this thread.
Oh, I love some good world-building, and especially when there is a set of rules that's followed to their consequences. [Ayuc sums it up nicely in this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056594 ]
If you look at it this way, it CAN be done in fantasy. Check out Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker (a great one-off), or the Mistborn series. (There are quite a few similarities between them.)
Or Max Brooks' World War Z was great in this way, I think. Although it's been quite a while since I read that.
(I know this is an older thread, so I hope you'll find this comment. Made a HN account for this. :D )
"I can point to two writers who stand outside, who aren't like anyone before them, and whom nobody has really tried to write like since: Cordwainer Smith and R.A. Lafferty. And of the two, Lafferty is the more sui generis ... Lafferty's approach to the universe was somewhat skewed and very much his own. He looked at things in a new, fresh way, and caused his readers to do the same (and often walk away scratching their heads)."
You might try Mordant's Need by Stephen Donaldson for a fantasy-skinned, scifi-like approach. The magic in the books is based around mirrors, and a large part of the book is spent researching how the mirrors actually are working, what are their limitations and possibilities.
It occurs to me that the opposite category is also quite interesting. Books like Hammerfall and Snow Queen by Joan Vinge are fantasy with scifi elements that are hard to dismiss.
I agree but I realized that the fantasy opens the door for unconventional thinking for us scientists.
By the way, I got the chance to have tea with Sir. Arthur C. Clarke at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka when I was only 18 years old... He gave me a copy of his article in which he uses physics to show that telecommunication by satellite is possible. It was a great experience.
That reminds me of one reviewer who described the weirdest aliens in any science fiction novel as the human characters in a particular Robert L. Forward novel....
That sounds tantalizing. I tried googling around but couldn't figure out which book that might be. Can you try to dig up the name? The only Robert Forward I've read is Dragon's Egg, which was great. I should read more by him.
Hard/strong arguments are always strange. Some of my childhood aesthetic favourites bridge the gap (Golden Witchbreed and the like). Some try to be hard sf, and concentrate hugely on one aspect but miss others (Niven, the integral trees). Clarke has his own hand-wavy moments (Cradle?). I'm not sure it's a dichotomy that yields that much value. Le Guin, Pohl, others - often venture into very fantasy settings, and still tell such wonderful tales, that tell us something about the very real, very unscientific and utterly irreducible human nature. Which I think is the true point of SF at all. Fresh landscapes, same paint. New stories.
You might try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot - unlike most of the books down by Niven and Purnell, this one tries to keep the science realistic (possibly due to them having a third author for this book - Barnes), and has one of the better descriptions of an alien ecology that I have read. Another Liven and Purnell novel, Footfall, does probably the best job of describing a realistic militaristic exploitation of space that I have read.
How big of an expert on deserts do you have to be that Dune stops being interesting? Unless you still find it valuable emotionally or philosophically and just reject is as 'science fiction' I think it's a bit sad to just flat out get rid of such an interesting book!
Interesting that you mention Dune here. I have a similarly strict approach to classifying works as sci-fi for myself as OP and Dune is the worst offender of everything I consider sci-fi.
To me, Dune is some new-age mumbo jumbo. It's fanatasy in space. Or it is contemporary social criticism (the whole thing is a metaphor for the oil industry, no?), but it's definitely not sci-fi.
By the way, I loved the first half of the book. The world building is fantastic, the characters are interesting (and the villains are really villain-y) but after the Duke dies, the whole book goes down the toilet and becomes a series of random adventure-in-the-desert encounters that couldn't be more shallow and predictable.
That being said, I'm probably too young to get it's larger impact on the "genre" (I heard that it's something like the defining space opera?).
Pretty much the defining space opera, yeah -- I mean, it's set in the year ten thousand, what else can you fairly expect it to be? While I quite like it (and can't abide its sequels), I do concede it takes a peculiar taste to appreciate it on its merits.
the whole thing is a metaphor for the oil industry, no?
No, not really, or at least I think not deliberately; it's much more Lawrence of Arabia in space.
So dune is a great book but it is 90% fantasy, there is only a little bit of research done by the author on desert ecosystems.
My favourite real science fiction author is Arthur C clarke. some good books by him...
earthlight
the fountains of paradise
islands in the sky
the sands of mars
rama
songs of distant earth
Also would recommend accelerando by Charles Stross and the mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson