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.
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.