I highly recommend A Fire Upon the Deep. Its a rare mix of really interesting hard scifi with an actually good story and characters. Hard scifi often has very f

I highly recommend A Fire Upon the Deep. Its a rare mix of really interesting hard scifi with an actually good story and characters. Hard scifi often has very flat characters but this is not a book which suffers from it. It has a very very cool twist to explain the Fermi Paradox and is a really good example of a universe with one modified rule.