I'm not sure what you expect of scifi; the same can be said of Heinlein and Clarke (maybe Heinlein a bit more than Clarke). Night's Dawn (Hamilton's second tri

I'm not sure what you expect of scifi; the same can be said of Heinlein and Clarke (maybe Heinlein a bit more than Clarke). Night's Dawn (Hamilton's second trilogy) was pretty well done in that respect if you ask me. Sure, the premise is far-fetched, but the background and technology was pretty compelling in my view. Hamilton clearly has a grasp of orbital mechanics, for example. And you gotta admit you would _love_ to get a set of Neural Nanonics installed :). I don't know, but I just can't fathom classifying Banks and Hamilton as anything other than hard scifi.