from frozen mummy to supercomunicating kids

[Lydell]

The book started with finding a frozen mummy in the alps. Then there was some sort of virus, and then kids being born "the next stage of human evolution" super smart with glowing faces who could talk to each other like cuttlefish. Lots of primal fear and ordinary humans who wanted to destroy that which was 'other'.

 

[Vertigo]

Darwin's Radio and there's a sequel called Darwin's Children both by Greg Bear. Pretty heavy hard SF set in the near future.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Pretty heavy hard SF

"hard" as in real science or hard to read? Seems more fantasy than science to me.

 

[Vertigo]

It's speculative of course but he has an afterword which discusses in great detail the science it is based on complete with references and further reading. So I would say a hard SF is a fair description. It's almost impossible to write hard future science fiction that doesn't have some speculative element. If you restrict the category of hard SF to absolutely only using current known science then you restrict the number of books in that category to very very few. For example Tau Zero is considered classic hard SF but the concept of a ram drive is still very speculative with considerable debate about whether the thrust would actually be greater than the drag.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

It's almost impossible to write hard future science fiction that doesn't have some speculative element.

It's not SF unless something is speculative or fantasy, I agree!
But one or two unlikely speculative elements maximum, and not contradicting fundamentals and especially not logic. Everything else should be real.

Most stuff listed in Amazon under hard SF seems to be "space opera", which IMO is the softest SF.

 

[Vertigo]

It's not SF unless something is speculative or fantasy, I agree!
But one or two unlikely speculative elements maximum, and not contradicting fundamentals and especially not logic. Everything else should be real.

Most stuff listed in Amazon under hard SF seems to be "space opera", which IMO is the softest SF.

I'd agree with that.

But I would classify this as hard (and believe me I'm a terrible critic of science that goes too far off the deep end). The final scientific concept that forms the core of these books is a little extreme but the steps by which Bear gets to it are logical if rather heavy going if (like me) you're not a biology graduate; in particular regarding viruses and retroviruses.

On re-checking the book I find I misremembered; whilst there is a "biology primer" he doesn't provide suggested further reading but he does, in the acknowledgements section, list a number of doctors/professors who read the drafts to keep his science straight.