I like playing a fun game where I download a highly rated scifi book and intentionally don't look at the author. Then I try to guess what kind of person the author is, their beliefs, where they live, etc. Then once I finish the book I read their Wikipedia page and see how right I was. Although there isn't even remotely a way of measuring how "correct" I am, I think I am getting a lot better. I read mostly female authors before this, and I think the most distinctive departure from that style has been a skew of varous British men writing in the 90s with bad ideas about eugenics and all the half-unpackaged baggage of fallen empire, which is probably more towards the average for the genre as a whole. There are all kinds of words that I am really glad don't get used anymore which were big with that type of guy. The rule with this is that once I read the first paragraph I must commit to finishing the book. I am not allowed to read the wiki article until the book is finished. That's the only way I can stomach a lot of this kinda stuff. It has been interesting to see where ideas come from this way.

As an aside: I think "hard sci-fi" is such an unserious genre. All it indicates is a certain disdain for social sciences and an obsessive focus on contemporary pop-futurism. That shit ages like uncorked wine in a swamp, and can only ever seem 'serious' in the context of its time period. All the pop science theory that is not widely known to be disproven yet always becomes pivotal plot devices that can come off as laughable a mere decade later. Imagine how tacky all the "what if the AI but singularity" and "quantum xyz" writing of this decade will be in 5-10 years when it is clear that stuff has barely changed our world, unlike the books where it somehow fantastically contrives moves a plot along by unlocking secrets of the universe or whatever. Yeah like sure, the doodad of the day from last decade toootally turns out to be super true and change everything radically in practice through inevitable consequence technology alone, sure. I'd like a hard scifi writer to think for a second just how many inventions, refinements, and discoveries amount to basically nothing on their own, versus the rate at which technology has ever really changed human history in vast and sudden sweeps. Incredibly rare. It ain't gonna be the silly pop-science doodad of the decade. Maybe if you had to make up something that wasn't the leading pop-science theory in popular media and design around how it actually changes things massively it would be too hard for hard scifi. Also so much of it is fashy british admiralty style crap, there's no way spacebound people are doing British Empire navy roleplay in anything other than your dreams lmao. The least realistic part, only second to every mention of "quantum" or "string theory" or "graviton" or whatever changing everything.