This is one of those rare hard science fiction books that contrives to both invoke rigorous scientific concepts and offer interesting plot and characters. If some of the more advanced technology revealed at the book’s conclusion seems a bit like magic, well, that’s probably rather the point.
Nightfall
Another classic piece of science fiction, this should take you less than an hour to read, but it will set you thinking for long after you've finished it. You might say that it will keep you thinking after Nightfall.
Failing Writing Aliens
I wanted to dedicate a post to a specific aspect of writing science fiction: writing aliens. Or, as the title more accurately asserts, failing to write aliens.
The Universe’s Habitable Zone
Humans have a severe case of societal loneliness. We send signals out into the void in the hopes that someone might answer, we launch spacecraft into the interstellar medium with a record of our civilization, we push the edges of our technology to seek evidence of long-extinct microbial and unicellular life on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and other bodies in our solar system. On a less evidential level, we seek clues, stories, and anecdotes that could enable us to believe that our species is not alone in the universe: points of light in the sky, a circle painted on a cave wall ten thousand years ago, unexplained happenings all over the world.
Sententia Discussion Series 3: Habitability
The search for extra-terrestrial life tends to focus on the requirements for life on Earth: carbon, oxygen, liquid water, and so forth. There are arguments that support the idea that any life would have similar needs. Yet there are also arguments that life could be so alien that we might not even recognize it as life. Indeed, the biological definition of life can be interpreted to include things like stars, which are generally not considered "alive."
Ringworld Review
I love classic, hard science fiction (we've talked about the difference between hard and soft science fiction before). Verne, Wells, Asimov: I've read most of what they wrote. These stories, exploring scientifically rigorous possibilities and ideas, hold a unique place in the huge volume of work classified as science fiction. To use the MICE quotient, these are idea stories, through and through. I'd heard about Ringworld in a few different places, and decided that this was something I needed to read.
IGC Publishing 