One of the essays I have long been considering is a piece on that subgenre known as hard science fiction. But before I could write an essay on hard SF, I had to figure out just what is meant by hard SF.
Now it may seem odd that I, someone who thinks of himself as a fan of hard SF, who could point to his shelves of books by Poul Anderson, Robert Forward, and Hal Clement as evidence, cannot, when I come down to it, come up with a canonical definition of hard SF.
I recently realized that there is no such thing as a unified subgenre; rather, there are a number of things that are often considered hard SF but that don’t necessarily share all that much in common.
Wikipedia puts forth a definition: “Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.” Interesting phrasing, that “concern”. Not “demonstration of,” or “adherence to,” but concern. Concern is nicely fuzzy. There is a lot of wiggle room in “concern.” Enough for at least five overlapping, intermingled, but sometimes separate hard science fictions.
The first variety is orthogonal to the other four. It’s pure marketing, and has little to do with actual science content. Hard SF is used to denote the work of science fiction authors in a particular social circle largely but not entirely based on the US West Coast. Their books are usually at least a little bit science-ish, but really what’s being sold here is a set of overlapping conservative and libertarian political and social views. Do you like Larry Niven’s books? Well, you might like Greg Bear’s. Do you fancy Poul Anderson’s later SF novels? Consider Vernor Vinge’s.
Purely marketing-based hard SF overlaps with the other varieties but does not fully contain any of them. The other four flavors of hard SF each engage with science and related activity in different ways.
There is what one might call phase-diagram hard SF1, in which the well-informed author entertains the reader with stories illustrating little known or counterintuitive aspects of science as it is known at the time of writing2. The author tries their best to play fair with the reader, sticking to the known facts as best they can. Such impossible or dubious elements as are included will likely be present to facilitate getting the protagonist somewhere where they can appreciate phase equilibrium curves up close and personal… but those implausibilities won’t be the focus of the story.
Not terribly distant from phase-diagram SF is the “here there be dragons” variety. This type of hard SF plays with possible science—fields lacking consensus and, in some cases, any concrete data. The stories explore what might happen if some as-yet-unsupported theory turned out to be true (or at least true as far as we know at the moment). The author is still playing fair, but the foundation of their story is conjectural and may later be shown to be impossible.
Either of the above may also exemplify the sort of hard SF founded in the author’s confident misapprehension of science as known at the time of writing3. The author is trying very hard to write phase-diagram or here-there-be-dragons SF, but alas, their reach has exceeded their grasp. I have a certain fondness for this variety, partly because it facilitates snarky potshots at certain authors’ grasp of planetology, biology, or basic thermodynamics, but also because it’s possible to be educationally wrong. Understanding how and where someone erred often helps one avoid mistakes of one’s own4.
Finally, there’s the sort of hard SF that embraces the superficial forms of either the phase-diagram or here-there-be-dragons type, but in which the author deliberately fudges the science. There are any number of reasons why this might seem the logical thing to do. This is my least favorite flavor, as it seems a bit dishonest, and also because authors are sometimes excessively convincing in their whimsy. It is left to others to explain why, for example, one cannot shed heat by radiating it away with a laser.
Did I miss anything that gets lumped under the umbrella of hard SF5? Is there a coherent, unified taxonomy that makes sense of it all? Let me know in comments below.
- In his introduction to the 1965 Ace reprint of Hamilton’s Crashing Suns, Donald Wollheim fulminated that “today’s slide rule writers are too brainwashed to attempt” stories with “color, excitement and adventure.”To this day, I have no idea whether D.A.W. was vexed by a few specific authors or the state of the field in general. 1965 is the era of New Wave SF, hardly slide rule friendly. The lesson is that there is no lawn so large as to lack at least one person demanding other people get off it.
- Strictly speaking, phase-diagram SF could include every mundane novel without egregious science errors that has ever been written. In practice, only weirdos try to claim that Singin’ in the Rain, The Count of Monte Cristo, or Hec Ramsey are SF.
- We will leave aside for the moment the problem posed by Science Marching On. It renders unconvincing once plausible tales of Mercury’s eternal nightside and a 2020 discovery of a twelfth Saturnian moon.
- Sometimes I think of all the people who, having read my true-life anecdotes, have learned not to strike a match while standing in a giant cloud of gasoline vapor, have never rudely mocked a home invader, and have not attempted to hand-feed a vicious dog. Although to be fair, mocking a home invader did accomplish its intended purpose, albeit through unforeseen means. My third instructive experience (vicious dog) vastly exceeded its goals. I recommend it to anyone who has at least one superfluous hand. Again: It’s important to learn what NOT to do.
- “What is hard fantasy?” is a different essay.
Maybe it’s called ‘Hard Sci-Fi’ because it’s hard to read? All that technobabble, maths, physics etc can be pretty taxing on the old grey cells.
As long as there’s no poetry, it’s readable.
There is no requirement for hard SF to include detailed math and physics on the page. That’s a frustratingly common misconception. The research is for the writer’s benefit, to build the setting correctly. Most of it can be left backstage. For my part, I generally save the detailed stuff for my website annotations or novel afterwords, unless there’s a specific need for it to be discussed in the story.
I was going to ask what is so hard about [long eqn] but I cannot get the image to load.
That’s what’s so hard about it.
It is simpler if we let marketing departments define genres, so crabby academics can vent their scorn upon such definitions. Kind of a professional and managerial class twofer. But, to be contrary, I would say that science fiction, especially “hard” science fiction, should feature scientists or engineers solving an in-story scientific or engineering problem/challenge using what is the best scientific and engineering knowledge at the time the story is written. All the stories where all that we see is marvelous technology that perhaps resembles something scientists or engineers may have thought about, but without any importance given to how it works or how it might be improved–in other words, over 95% of what is now usually classified as science fiction–should be called technology fantasy instead. It substitutes a seeming technological marvel in place of a magical or surreal or folktale marvel to provide the otherworldly or fantastic element that is an essential part of fantasy.
Can you give an example of a work that satisfies your definition?
I’m not sure I can cite one that matches exactly, but books that I read a long time back that seemed to come fairly close were A Fall of Moondust (Arthur C. Clarke), Permutation City (Greg Egan), and Starfish (Peter Watts). I’m not sure who is doing anything in that vein now.
I see you beat me to Watts two days ago!
I just feel like the definition might be overly restrictive, if no examples of works that meet the definition come to mind. I guess it could be useful as a platonic ideal that works can be compared to.
I think more examples might be found in short stories (of the Campbell era, particularly), but I read way more novels and novellas than short stories. But I believe the terms science fiction and hard SF are mostly wrongly applied. Technology fantasy is more descriptive of what you’re encountering in most speculative fiction that pretends to a scientific basis for the marvels therein. Often it’s just adventure fiction that might as well be about the Age of Sail but with spaceships and exotic planets taking the place of galleons and faraway continents (and with travel times and communication lags more appropriate to oceanic voyages). The only thing scientific is the implied basis of the wonder technology, whatever that is.
Sometimes a term may have narrow applications but just gets generally misused. Like referring to politicians and media in the US as communist or leftist. There are such political movements in other countries that you could apply those adjectives to, but there’s no one with power or widespread influence in the US that they apply to. The terms just get misapplied because they’ve become a convenient shorthand for “people we don’t like”.
My definition of what “Hard Science Fiction” is, is based on being consistent with the rules you set out for your story. Some may be based on real world science, and others on your made up stuff, but you strictly abide by them, and don’t spout technobabble when you inevitably break those rules… koff Star Trek koff.
People like to rag on Trek’s bad science, but what people have forgotten is that when it was new, it was practically the only SFTV franchise that even tried to acknowledge real science at all. Roddenberry consulted with scientists and think tanks and tried to get it right within the bounds of dramatic license and budgetary compromises. TOS actually knew what the word “galaxy” meant and understood that the speed of light is a thing, and those alone put it far above the curve for 1960s-80s SFTV in terms of science literacy. And Roddenberry took it even further in the first movie and early TNG. The movie had NASA rocket scientist Jesco von Puttkamer, astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and Isaac Asimov as science consultants, and von Puttkamer’s production memo on how warp drive works was basically the same theory Miguel Alcubierre formulated 16 years later, just without the formal math. Early TNG often had excellent science; its depiction of a periodic nova star in “Evolution” was so good you could use it in an astronomy class. TNG was one of the first works of screen SF, if not the very first, to feature nanotechnology (and coined the word “nanite”), and was the first screen production to popularize wormholes after Kip Thorne revitalized interest in them with his theoretical work for Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. Usually it takes 10-20 years for a concept from real science and prose SF to make it to the screen, but TNG was much more current.
Unfortunately, few of Roddenberry’s successors have made any attempt at scientific credibility, and other SF productions have increasingly started using science consultants over the decades, so ST is no longer as far ahead of the pack as it was when I was young. But that early credibility (at least relative to the utter inanity of practically everything else in SFTV/film) was a key factor in why ST succeeded while its contemporaries failed, because its creators put in the effort to build a universe that was at least credible enough to allow suspending disbelief.
I’ve always used a loose, very subjective version of hard SF: Hard SF are those stories which involve speculative technologies or scientific principles and yet also does not contain anything that I–a person who has some interest in science but not any particular formal training–can immediately call out as fundamentally bullpucky. Like, anything which has ‘sound in space’ – not Hard SF. If it’s got a human-built ‘universal translator’ that can understand an alien language the first time it’s experienced it after only hearing a few words? Not Hard SF, even if anything else is (an otherwise promising book not only failed the test but very nearly got thrown against the wall for this). Large scale wormhole that can be traversed by a space ship?Alien megastructures? Virtually anything with ‘Quantum’ in it? All these are iffy, and a lot depends on how well they dress it up and do the song-and-dance to convince me. But if, a layperson who reads a lot of SF can confidently say “That’s not how that would possibly work!” it’s not hard SF.
Actually (pushes glasses up nose), there is “sound in space.” It’s just that it’s either at very low frequencies (wavelengths significantly greater than the mean free path of particles in the local space) or mediated by charge interactions between ionized particles. See, for example, https://www.sciencealert.com/sound-can-travel-through-space-after-all-but-we-can-t-hear-it
On the other hand? Universal translators are likely impossible.
you need this little fish in your ear :D
I was much taken with Alastair Reynold’s close-to-prohibition on exceeding the speed of light, as that’s his bright red line for crossing into fantasy. Been enjoying novels since that hold themselves to that hard-to-take limitation on the drama.
Having said that, I just enjoyed the hell out of “Excession” because I blew $70 on “Iain Banks Culture – the Drawings” which contains all sorts of very “hard SF ” type of specifications for his many Ships – how many kilolights they clock in at, how many million passengers…was able to follow along on just how big each of the ship “Characters” were…
Banks gave himself maximum dramatic room, his characters could do just about anything. Yet it “feels like” hard SF, because he set out rules at the start, and all the books hew to their (minimal) limits.
I think we might have just witnessed the creation of Nicoll’s Law.
There is already a Nicoll’s Law, which I will explain in a forthcoming essay.
Somewhere out in left field, there’s Greg Egan’s _Orthogonal_, which is set in a universe with very different rules than our own, and has lengthy online Supplementary Materials.
Greg Egan may well write the “hardest” sf out there.
I need to read Egan. The hardest I know of is Catherine Asaro (yes, the one who writes the romance SF). PhD in chemical physics from Harvard. She was disatisfied with the usual hand waves for FTL travel so she devised a fictional physics that did not conflict with known physics at the time. It’s included as supplementary material in one of the early installments of the Skolian Empire series. It’s not as easy to understand as the Alcubierre space warp. No plans for experiments to see if high energy physics really works that way.
His social media can certainly be extremely hard, in the sense that he frequently muses about possibilities in exotic geometries (mostly, I think?) requires both a very high level of mathematical education and also a very, very sharp brain.
When he’s not just pondering about things that make my not-nearly sufficiently mathematical brain hurt, he has all sorts of other interesting things to say, however. (Plus he’s a local author that is globally successful, and there’s not nearly enough of those here!)
@JDN: do remember that experience is a lousy teacher, because it’s test first, lesson after.
——
I think another factor involving hard sf is that many of its practitioners have advanced degrees in physical sciences (Vinge, Brin) or engineering (Baxter). This isn’t a defining factor, but I suspect the Venn diagram of “hard sf authors” and “advanced physical science or engineering degrees” has a lot of overlap. While this isn’t necessarily defining (I’d not call Catherine Asaro’s sf particularly hard), it may be diagnostic.
In my opinion, quite a lot of genre distinctions and all of the sub-genre distinctions are primarily driven by marketing concerns. This obviously means that each publisher would have their own definition, with the interesting possibility of the exact same book being advertised as “hard sf” by one publisher but as some other sub-genre by another.
However other people’s experiences can be a great teacher, especially if they have those experiences where you can see, hear, and possibly smell them.
“A smart person learns from their mistakes. A wise person learns from the mistakes of others.”
The aforementioned Peter Watts has both a PhD in marine biology and a Hugo award.
I’m embarrassed to have to say that I forgot all about Watts, especially so because he and I attended the same university and took courses from some of the same faculty members, although I think I’d graduated just before he got there.
And when it comes to getting the biology right (or at least plausible), Watts is hard to beat.
I can’t, off-hand, think of any notable author commonly regarded as a “hard-SF” type who has an advanced degree in the biological sciences (Michael Crichton does not count). Or geology, for that matter. Some of the more prominent hard SF writers with physics/engineering backgrounds (the ones you mention are good examples) do appear to take their forays into biology seriously when contrapting extraterrestrial species etc.
Perhaps I’ve missed a hard SF author with a biology background – if so, I hope that someone will name one or two.
Vonda McIntyre
I know Julie Czerneda is a biologist. I’m not sure how advanced her degree is, though she does make a reference to graduate studies on her website.
She has a MS in Environmental Science. Her Species Imperative series is a great example of getting the biology right.
Another Paul McAuley, who also has a PhD in Marine Biology. His The Secret of Life has a great biology macguffin, as well as a main character who is completely believable as a microbiologist.
Paul McAuley’s PhD is in botany, not marine biology. (He was a researcher and a lecturer [equivalent to professor in the US system] at St. Andrews University before he became a full-time writer.)
And it has a main character with a life history loosely based on that of Richard Feynman
OK, thanks, that’s one I was unaware of.
Wasn’t Isaac Asimov a biochemist? Although when I reread his Robot/Empire/Foundation series recently, I found that his work was much less “hard” than I remembered, often very fanciful even aside from the scientific assumptions we now know to be incorrect.
I believe Asimov’s degrees were all in chemistry, but he was professor of biochemistry at Boston University.
That’s another complicating factor in the discussion; there’s a lot of stuff out there that treats ‘hard’ as an esthetic rather than a matter of content as such. It’s detailed, reasoned, logical analysis of made-up stuff, somewhat akin to the “hard fantasy” briefly mentioned in the article.
Joan Slonczewski has a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.
And then she went ahead a wrote a book about intelligent bacteria. Sorry, not gonna happen. Not enough processing power in a bacterium to even match tithe intelligence of a flatworm.
I would have mentioned her, but I couldn’t remember how to spell her name.
And would she count as “notable”? Not many novels.
I consider myself a (relatively) hard-SF writer, but I only have a bachelor’s degree in physics, and I could never get the hang of calculus, unlike my two physics-professor uncles. My BA in history has actually been more useful to my SF writing, because I focused on non-Western history and cross-cultural interactions.
I resist labels, since people too often mistake them for definitive answers or inflexible boundaries, when really they’re just rough, oversimplified descriptions of isolated aspects of something multifaceted. Hard SF, to me, is an ingredient in the mix. I’ve written what I consider hard SF about aliens, hard SF about superheroes, hard SF about kaiju, hard SF murder mysteries, hard SF comedy, etc. I like to apply hard-science thinking to genres that don’t usually have it. Even my Star Trek novels are more scientifically grounded than most of the franchise, as I’ve tried to come up with relatively plausible explanations for many of that universe’s fanciful elements.
Granted, some of my original universes are harder-SF than others. For instance, the main one has FTL travel but no time travel or parallel timelines, while others have no FTL. My Hub universe has no FTL except for the title anomaly, which is purely conjectural but whose consequences I’ve striven to work out as plausibly as I could. I have one multiverse based on brane theory and another based in many-world quantum theory. My approach is to ground something in known theories and extrapolate what might happen if a given one were true.
I see hard SF as basically just a matter of doing your homework. It’s analogous to writing historical fiction and researching the period thoroughly to make it as accurate as possible, or writing a story in a given setting and going there personally or studying maps and Google Street View and the like to depict it convincingly. It’s just the way my mind works — whatever I write, I want it to be as believable and error-free as I can get it. That happens to correspond to the hard SF genre, but it’s just the way I need to approach my writing, my need for accuracy and attention to detail. I don’t want to settle for making something up if there’s a real answer out there.
Can it hammer a six inch spike through a board?
A fan’s got to have their standards.
Points for the “Real Genius” reference! (and sort of a sub-reference as well, seeing as how it’s all
characters that would probably concern themselves with the scientific accuracy of most any literary workscience guys)Hard SF, as a term, was created to distinguish stories about plausible scientific extrapolations from sword-and-planet yarns or pulpy raygun gothic stuff. So, the basic character is its relation to science as it is known at the time of writing. (To be Science Fiction, a story pretty much requires the existence of one or more scientific principles, technological developments and/or feats if engineering that do not actually exist).
That said, hardness is a scale or continuum, not a binary switch; there are various ‘Mohs scales’ of SF hardness about, mostly derived from the TVTropes one created ~20 years ago. On one end we have The Martian, which is about a mission to Mars that could have been launched at the time Weir wrote the book, and everything happens in ways that agree with science as it is known (except IIRC hearing he made an error regarding the Martian atmosphere, but that’s not a deliberate change; people writing contemporary and historical fiction also make science errors sometimes). On the other end we have Barsoom, which routinely spits in the eye of physics, biology, and eventually history and doesn’t even pretend to explain anything whatsoever. Most of what’s called “Hard SF” is a little softer than The Martian, often involving FTL travel but otherwise basically rockets are rockets and you need to worry about thrusting too heavily and spinning for gravity and etc.
Of course, that’s just the rockets and aliens side of sci-fi; cyberpunk, post apocalypse*, and these days solar- and eco-punk are often (not always, but often) much harder, not least because they don’t need to explain how we got to alien planets or how they got to ours, as the case may be. The 2020s of Islands in the Net could have been ours if politics and international affairs had gone differently.
*which I realize may not fit my earlier definition of science fiction, but so it goes. It’s almost always categorized as sci fi IME
IIRC Andy Weir didn’t make a mistake about the Martian atmosphere; he knew that it was too thin to have storms with the force described, but chose to ignore that and have a dramatic and easily understood setup for the protagonist being stranded instead of a more contrived but scientifically plausible option.
Yes. Hard SF doesn’t mean everything has to be exactly right; it means the writer followed the principle that you have to learn the rules before you know when it’s appropriate to break them. There’s a big difference between ignorance and poetic license. A lot of writing hard SF is earning your audience’s trust that you know what you’re talking about, and that any departures from reality are there for a reason.
Hard SF is fiction based on the so-called hard sciences: meaning physics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physics, maybe a little biology, and of course physics. Mathematics is permitted as long as it limits itself to strictly practical, hardheaded engineering applications. Stories based on less tractable fields, for example Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao or anything by Cordwainer Smith need not apply.
I don’t much care for this definition but it has some explanatory power.
I don’t accept that definition in the least; I think it’s erroneously conflating two unrelated uses of a “hard/soft” analogy and bears no relation to my actual experience with hard SF as either a reader or a writer. I draw just as much on history, sociology, etc. in the hard SF I write as I do on physics, astronomy, and biology, and I’ve seen other writers do the same. The only thing that defines hard SF is that it’s plausible and grounded in real theory or credible extrapolations therefrom. If you want to write credible fiction about people, cultures, and their interactions, you’d damn well better pay attention to the so-called “soft” sciences like history and psychology. The idea that there’s some kind of segregation between SF that focuses on hard science and engineering and SF that features plausible characterization and psychology is entirely antiquated, a relic of the 1950s and earlier.
And none of this is about what’s “permitted.” As I said before, it’s a profound mistake to think labels are strictures or absolutes. They’re nothing more than oversimplified descriptions of isolated aspects that various things have in common. They’re anything but complete descriptions, and it is absolutely absurd to mistake them for actual rules that are binding in any way. Labeling a work of fiction as hard SF is like, say, labeling a person as ectomorphic in build, or having A-positive blood. It may be an accurate description of that one aspect of the person, of something that person has in common with other people, but it’s only one aspect out of many, and it doesn’t define, dictate, or limit who they are. Labels are descriptive, not prescriptive or proscriptive.
I agree, but maintain that this definition is more a description of how the term has been used than a prescription for how I would like it to be used. To the extent that we have moved past this, the field is the better for it.
I have rarely if ever seen it used that way. It sounds like an assumption that somebody who’s not familiar with hard SF might make based on the label alone.
Being an ‘old guy’ (70+) and reader of Science Fiction, I and fellow readers used the terms hard/soft SF to describe the stories and novels we were reading.
Soft SF was a story that involved psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and economics, among other similar fields. The story focused on a theory from those disciplines.
Hard SF involved technology, engineering, physics, and astrophysics theories and applications in those stories.
Having space travel and/or robots in your story does not make it Hard, SF.
Having an alien species evolve on a planet with incredible gravitational forces does—see Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity or Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, for example.
The terms are descriptive and are not prescriptive.
Footnote 2– I guess you are too young to have attended TorCon II, where there was a Georgette Heyer Tea Room, because of heavy lobbying by Dr. Susan Wood et al, on the basis that Heyer was writing an alternate history series and therefore qualified as SF/F.
Dr. Wood who taught Canadian, Children’s and Science Fiction Literature at the University of British Columbia, not all at the same time, was a well-know fan at the time.
I was 12 in 1973, and while not terribly far from Toronto, didn’t hear about TorCon II until I read Spider Robinson’s review of Bakka Books in the December 1976 issue of the late, lamented Galaxy Magazine. Also, I didn’t get up the gumption to go a con until… Helix in TO, I think.
Possibly the most famous example of “Hard Sci-Fi” in the mainstream is James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse series, both the original novels and the more wide-reaching tv show. The reasons it is held up as a shining example of hard sci-fi mostly has to do with the way gravity works on spaceships and how it influences their design. In nearly all of the popular SF works, ships have their decks laid out parallel to the direction of primary thrust, with gravity provided by some hand-wavey “artificial gravity.” In The Expanse, ships are built like skyscrapers, with lots of small decks laid out perpendicular to the direction of primary thrust. This way, when the ship accelerates, passengers feel a force in the “down” direction identical to gravity. Once you’re halfway to your destination, you flip the ship around and decelerate towards it, meaning the passengers have gravity for the whole trip. For many, this “thrust gravity” stands so outside their otherwise “soft sci-fi” experience (Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, etc.) that they are quick to hail The Expanse as one of the most hard SF shows they’ve watched/books they’ve read. Despite this, Corey (actually the pen name of duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) insists that the story is not hard SF. One reason they give is to actually achieve such use of thrust gravity, you must have enough fuel to be constantly accelerating, which is impossible given our current understanding of rocketry (when asked how their starship drive worked, Corey responded “very well”). Other examples of fans claiming the work is hard SF are the combat system (since space is so big and empty, combat takes place at such distances that the crew of a vessel can fire their missiles, step away to get a cup of coffee, and then come back to see if they hit), humans who grew up in domes on Mars being unable to withstand Earth’s gravity and wide-open spaces, and the detailed evolutionary history of a certain race of aliens. Corey uses examples such as the almost magical, borderline physics-defying alien tech and handwavy-ness of human tech (if the ships really did use so much energy, they would burn up without huge radiators to dispose of the heat, etc).
Point being, people who are used to soft sci-fi have a lower bar for what counts as hard, and people who want to make a story that is as realistic as possible while still permitting for the story they want to tell are more hard-nosed.
I loved the series. As I understand it, Abraham and Franck have said in interview it is not, though, hard SF. They mentioned specifically that they did not try to estimate how travel times between planets, etc. changed as they moved along their orbits. And when someone brought up how the Epstein Drive works, the response was “it’s VERY efficient”. I was reminded how stardrive equipped ships in the Traveller RPG would be mostly fuel before a long jump and would still need to refuel to return.
To me, a working definition of hard SF is that some things are NOT possible and therefore affects both what characters do and what they can’t do. Yes, vague as all gets out. I’m currently reading old RAH stories that, apparently, were based on physics available to the public in 1940-41. They’re spectacurly wrong relative to the next few years. I see that he realized that technology would have consequences, and those consequences would have more of their own. It’s a step beyond “it would be so cool if this capability existed”
I’m partial to Hal Clement’s definition that hard SF is a friendly competition between the writer, who tries to convince the readers that something is possible, and the readers, who try to catch the problems and mistakes. Basically, it’s not about whether what you postulate is actually possible — just whether you can sell it convincingly enough that it sounds possible, and whether you can anticipate and address the likely objections.
I also tend to liken it to the old joke: “The key is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Though I enjoyed the Expanse books and appreciate that they get some things right that are often done wrong, the books get some basic science wrong even when you allow for the alien tech to be magical (and allow for the Epstein drive that lets the plot happen). For one thing, if you spin up a large asteroid enough to have significant gravity inside, it will fall to pieces in short order – and the Belter characters who dismiss the Sun as just another bright star at the Belt’s distance from Earth are underestimating the brightness of the Sun considerably – it’s the brightest object in the sky even out at the Oort cloud.
Also, they decided to depict Ceres as lacking in water ice at a time when the scientific consensus was already leaning toward it probably being largely made of ice, which the Dawn probe soon confirmed. Luckily for me, I made the opposite gamble in my 2012 novel Only Superhuman, which turned out to be the right choice. (Yet they’re the ones who got the lucrative TV series deal…)
They’re already TV writers, that’s where they made their chops, they have friends in the industry sort of thing
A few years ago (in the context of working out how bright the sun is from Pluto) I had an epiphany that in retrospect was obvious: for the sun to be as dim as a star, it would have to be as distant as a star.
I don’t know how they do it in the books, but I can’t stand the Expanse TV series’s use of magnetic boots as a substitute for artificial gravity. There are so many reasons that just wouldn’t work. Spaceships tend to be made of light, non-magnetic metals, so they wouldn’t grip anyway. If they did, the magnets could interfere with sensitive electronics. And sticking your feet to a surface with magnets is nothing like walking under gravity; it makes as much sense as trying to swim by strapping weights to your feet and walking along the bottom of the pool. Moving in microgravity is much easier than walking anyway, once you get the hang of it. If you want to stay in one place, just hooking your foot under a beam or something is good enough.
Of course, I understand that they have to account for filming on Earth’s surface, and they can’t keep the ships under thrust all the time. But I would rather have a black-box artificial gravity system than The Expanse‘s magnetic boots. I mean, we can’t rule out that some currently-unknown future breakthrough might allow artificial gravity, much like the putative breakthrough of the Epstein Drive that propels the ships in the series. But we do know why magnetic boots wouldn’t work as shown, so it’s not merely an unproven conjecture, it’s straight-up wrong. In the context of a series where most other stuff is quite plausible, it’s constantly jarring.
(Although it’s not the only thing the show gets wrong. I can’t get over the Rocinante having a drip coffee maker. If the thrust shuts down while it’s brewing, you’ll have globs of scalding coffee flying all over the compartment, which is a lawsuit waiting to happen. And there have been some big-time errors of orbital mechanics, like what happened to a certain moon of Saturn.)
“Spaceships tend to be made of light, non-magnetic metals, so they wouldn’t grip anyway.”
Starship seems poised to make that age poorly. And not a lot of bears on the outside of a ship (what you are doing walking around outside your ship is left as an exercise.)
I have no idea where you got “bears” from, unless you misread “beam,” but why you’d bring up the exterior hull of a ship is a mystery when I’m specifically talking about the interior surfaces that people would walk on — or rather, would not need to walk on, because there are far simpler, faster, and more efficient ways to move around in microgravity.
Incoming: lots of people to remind you stainless steel is also non-magnetic…
Kate Wilhelm liked to write about scientists doing science, sometimes while wearing lab coats: for example, “The Planners” or The Clewiston Test. Not usually marketed as hard SF, perhaps because people who like Niven or Anderson might not reliably enjoy Wilhelm.
Another edge case: Lem’s The Cyberiad is about cybernetics (it’s right there in the subtitle), but the approach is playful rather than rigorous.
I think of hard SF as being specifically interested in the science and mechanics of it. Where other SF might be “hand-wavy” (ex. AI/robots/space travel exists now) in regards to the details, hard SF likes getting down and dirty with the details
I’ve generally divided hard SF into two groups. “Push the heck out of known science and its possibilities”, aka “diamond hard SF”, basically your “phase-diagram” and “dragons” categories. And, “make one change and explore the consequences”, which is like your “deliberately fudge” but for my examples I’d disagree about it being dishonest. The classic example of that one is Vernor Vinge, e.g. with his bobble stories, or _The Witling_ (teleportation, obeying conservation of energy and linear momentum.) It’s explicit what the “gotcha” is and the fun is in exploring what can be done with it.
I always liked Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought, where the laws of physics relaxed as you headed for the fringes of the galaxy, making all sorts of space opera fun possible. Still rigorous, but with the nets lowered to make more things possible.
Vinge’s books in that universe are terrific, but I don’t quite buy the Zones idea, since if the laws of physics changed with distance from the galactic center, we’d probably be able to observe it by the behavior of stars in other galaxies.
Although I did a similar “postulate an imaginary thing about galactic physics and explore the ramifications” trick in my Hub stories in Analog, positing that there’s a point at the center of mass of the galaxy (plus its satellite galaxies and dark matter halo) that allows instantaneous travel to and from any point within the halo.
This article has probably inspired some secret cabal wannabe to start composing the Unified Hard Science Fiction Specification.
I feel that we sort of have to first decide what we mean by hard sci-fi, is it based on tone and style of writing, content of the story, or worldbuilding. I think that stories can qualify as hard sci-fi from any of those categories. For style of writing, those stories that take a dry, analytical, empirical approach to their story. For content of the story, those that focus on technological advances with some amount of focus on the technical details, whether or not these advances are potentially possible to the best knowledge of the author or not. Finally for worldbuilding, I think this is where I would classify most of the types you mentioned with a focus on building believable potential future with our current knowledge or only speculating on a few specific things.
“For style of writing, those stories that take a dry, analytical, empirical approach to their story.”
I think that’s a very antiquated assumption about hard SF, one that’s been debunked over the past generation by writers like Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Joan Slonsczewski, and the like. For that matter, I can’t think of many older hard-SF writers whose writing style fit that description, Robert L. Forward being the main one who springs to mind (he was a better science writer and theorist than a writer of fiction or character). Even the more analytical ones, like Asimov and Clement, tended to have an entertaining writing style. Poul Anderson was a hard-SF writer whose prose style was beautiful and lyrical.
I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it. :) Or its beyond my freshman physics. Peter Watts, Blindsight.
Yep, after reading twice I still don’t understand how the human propulsion system works. But he says in the forward (epilog?) that he did research it.
Don’t forget, it only counts as hard SF if a guy wrote it. (never mind Slow River and everything Linda Nagata writes, that somehow Doesn’t Count).
Which reminds me of Mary Robinette Kowal and Catherine Asaro
I got some helpful science advice from Catherine Asaro early in my career, back when Analog had an online forum. I was working on a story set on a base in Mercury’s polar region, and she gave me technical details on what it would be like (mainly, whether the Sun would be constantly visible, which it would). I never sold the story, but I appreciated her help.
“the sort of hard SF founded in the author’s confident misapprehension of science as known at the time of writing”
Unfortunately, most attempts to do hard biology SF fall into this category (says the guy with a PhD in biology). It is often not just wrong, but hilariously wrong. The equivalent of having the sun go around the Earth. Note that there are great exceptions mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It’s just that SF authors seem to think that they do not need to do the same sort of homework for biology that they do for the other hard sciences. (And despite the arrogance of physicists, biology is at least as hard, if not harder.)
Yeah. If you’re going to fudge it (as opposed to an eddicated guess) then be a friend and bring in the elves too.