Does anyone know any Hard Sci Fi books about humans surviving without any hospitable worlds?
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.
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.
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.
I was going to suggest Tau Zero. It might not be exactly what he's chasing but there's are some similar points. Plus it's really good and fairly short.
Seveneves Neal Stephenson
Tau Zero Poul Anderson
Metro 2033 Dmitry Glukhovsky
The Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky
Lucifer's Hammer Larry Niven
Pushing Ice Alastair Reynolds
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Diaspora by Greg Egan
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martin
The 100 Kass Morgan
Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi.
Silo series of books by Hugh Howey
Seveneves is incredible, with the caveat that the last chapter of the book was almost handwavey with regards to the author's conclusion of where humanity ended up. 10/10 otherwise.
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.
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.
It deals with a small fleet of survivors desperately seeking a new home planet, who live in constant paranoia due to the enemy being able to plant sleeper agents within their crews. I remember they had to mine asteroids for fuel.
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.
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 @[email protected]
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Children of Time is nearly exactly what you're looking for. The whole series doesn't follow nicely with what you're looking for but the focus remains on that aspect of things for lack of wanting to spoil anything. If nothing else read the first book, it's exceptional.
You might want to check out Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. The book is about the people of the Exodus Fleet, a group of multi-generation ships that left Earth years ago. Even though the fleet eventually found other planets for them to live on, many are content to continue living out in space. It's a neat little slice of life book about this community doing their part to keep these ships going.
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.
People already mention the Mars series by Orson Scott Card, the Expanse series by Corey, and Seveneves by Stephenson, which are all fantastic and all fit your request well. Two others you might consider are:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. Very old school classic that features a moon colony fighting with earth.
Beggars in Spain by Kress. Most of it is on a near future earth, but the last hunk of it involves a segment of people relocating to a space station.
The belters make a pretty solid example of what it sounds like OP is looking for. The entire setting doesn't match to a T but there's enough interaction with inhospitable environments to be worth looking into, I think.
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.
“And all the stars a stage” (1971) by James Blish is another one where human-like aliens escape the destruction of their home world in 30 ships just to wander the galaxy looking for a new home, running into one disaster after another as their attempts to settle on various worlds end in failure and lives lost, until they happen upon a tiny, blue-green world with the most hospitable climate imaginable… with only one ship and a handful of survivors left.
It’s a poignant story of endlings, and the extinction of one species at the civilizational dawn of another.
Tau Zero is essentially where eventually within a few months no hospitable worlds exist. This is due to a spacecraft being out of control and reaching relativistic speeds.
Completely different angle towards the question but Metro 2033 (and sequels) might be a good source of inspiration. Not space themed but there might be some elements that can be a source of inspiration.
It's about a post nuclear war Moscow where to survive humanity has set up a series of interlinked communities in the underground metro tunnels. The book talks a lot about the daily life in the stations. One is known for growing mushrooms used in tea. One was burnt down leading the rest of the system to strictly control fires. Another gained a reputation as a capital like station because it's entrance was next to a university and government building.
Not a true hard sci fi book (has things like irradiated mutants) but a lot of thought went into the logistics of living in the metro.
I'm going to go the other way and recommend The Fifth Season, which is technically a fantasy trilogy but which has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, because (as if that wasn't a spoiler) it's got a ton of sci Fi in it.
It's basically about people on a planet that keeps dying. They've had to deal with so many apocalyptic events that prepping for the next one defines the entirety of their civilization. If you want a window into the psychology of a society constantly on the verge of destruction, I can't think of a better series.
You might get some value from Stephen Baxter's Manifold series; while they aren't central to what you're asking for they definitely deal with humanity coping with a hostile universe. Heinlein wrote a couple of short stories set on a generation ship, although I can't bring the titles to mind. Accelerando takes place in many manufactured settings, rarely earth like (past the first major part). Brin and Benford's Heart of the Comet may also point in the direction you want.
John Varley's 8 Worlds books (pre- and post-reboot) have had to colonize the rocks of the Solar system, tho they're not that technical, and he rarely moves past the Moon. Also Gaea (Titan, Wizard, Demon) has an extremely alien habitat; there are other Gaea creatures, just the protagonist one is crazy but also Human-friendly.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is about life on STL, multi-generation starships.
Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix is mostly set in habitats, asteroid mining, and Martian terraforming, but also a very alien hive.
NEVER BORN. “You mean we all came from Earth?” said Nikolai, unbelieving.
“Yes,” the holo said kindly. “The first true settlers in space were born on Earth—produced by sexual means. Of course, hundred of years have passed since then. You are a Shaper. Shapers are never born.”
“Who lives on Earth now?”
“Human beings.”
“Ohhhh,” said Nikolai, his falling tones betraying a rapid loss of interest.
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.
The Culture series novel, my favorite optimistic and hard sci fi that includes artificial intelligence (minds that have giant ships or habitats for bodies and humanoid avatars to interact with people).
They basically never live on planets because they are inefficient and "inelegant". They live on gigantic ring orbitals that have a fraction of the mass of a planet but multiple times the surface area. No big take-off energy needed either. They also live on gigantic ships that endlessly cruise the milky way. Highly recommend!
Another thought about "colonizing planets" would be that it's basically a form of genocide. Imagine someone had colonized earth half a billion years ago or just a few million years ago. Humanity would never have existed. Just stepping foot on a planet like they do on star trek is basically ecocide - with the introduction of completely foreign and possibly incredibly disruptive micro organisms. Besides the ethical aspect there would also be the loss of information - if you imagine a pristine planet to be a bio computer creating countless unique and new genetic variations and new forms of chemistry. Quite possible not something that can be covered with a computer. Or observing primitive planets as a source of entertainment. There are lots of reasons why outside of a few "home planets" advanced civilizations would never terraform existing biological systems, and would find artificial habitats far more efficient or practical.
Great book (author's last name is spelled Martine), but though a hunk of people are on a space station I don't think it goes into as much detail on making that work as OP is asking for - at the time of the story they'd been there for generations.
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.