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Surface Detail by Iain M Banks
Part of The Culture series but can be read standalone, potential for being one of the best hard scifi books out there
I love this book and all his stuff, but this is not hard sci-fi at all.
Just so if anyone takes the recommendation they know what they are getting into :)
How is it not hard scifi? Genuinely curious given the whole hyper advanced civilisation, interdimensional space travel, transhumanism as a part of daily life,
spoiler
entire chapters that introduce characters and settings that are wiped out of existence in a single sentence along with the underpinning story showing the contrasts between interstellar warfare and microscopic warfare over the artificially created representation of capital H Hell being used as a prison for political dissidents.Or is my understanding of hard scifi wrong?
Yeah, I'm afraid your understanding of what the "hard" part of hard SciFi is not correct.
Most people who use the term refer to SciFi that does not exceed the bounds of what we know to be physically possible, e.g., no FTL, not sapient AIs, etc.
Although I can see how you might misinterpret it to indicate anything that might be possible.