Hard Science Fiction Done Right - The Mohs 5.5 Collection
Hard science fiction is a dying genre. We live in a world where alternate facts and shared beliefs are allowed to trump facts. Television pundits who don't understand climate change feel that gives them grounds to deny it. Hysterical parents Facebook-evangelize against vaccination, to other hysterical parents. NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstone went on public record saying that Pluto ought to be a planet again because that's what astronomers thought, was when he was a child:
In such times, is it any surprise that a genre based specifically on getting its facts right, is getting gut-punched?
Standing out as a hard science fiction writer in self-categorizing systems like Amazon is difficult because many who don't write it, just see it as another category to try and collect rankings in (thanks romance writers!). There is a lot of noise in the signal ratio: both hard science fiction readers and writers have trouble finding each other.
As such, some of us got together to do a curated collection of hard science fiction short stories. 'Mohs 5.5' is an anthology of hard science fiction stories curated by Nebula-nominated author, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. It has stories by established names, new talent, and indie writing market leaders: and it's completely free. You can download it here and read it on any device.
Peter Cawdron is a leading hard science fiction writer today and his books are consistently in the Amazon hard science fiction top 10. Kate Pickford is a huge post-apocalyptic writer (under a pen name) who decided it was time to put out the story under her own name. Craig Martelle who is probably the biggest name in independent publishing, doesn't normally write hard science fiction but he did so when asked to for this.
Even I have a story in it :) . It's about a perfectly normal human being, living out in the Oort cloud in his millions, fighting a war against what he sees as the next evolutionary Cambrian Explosion (my writing is nothing if not bizarre).
Do give the collection a go. You'll enjoy it!