Is SF generally better the harder it is?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@silenus

You’re going to have to be more specific. That description could be half of Weber’s output!

You have justified my decision not to read any more of Weber’s output.

But if it helps, and here’s I’m gonna “spoil” the book in the same way that you can spoil surstromming by not refrigerating it: the unbeatable aliens were beaten when Count Dracula sneaked onto their ships and drank their blood.

[BigT]

Not even remotely. The harder the SF, the more you have to get bogged down on the details and miss out on the exploration of modern humanity that is common to all the best SF.

And, of course, the hardest stuff has no speculation at all, and thus isn’t speculative fiction–and therefore isn’t science fiction.

[Lamia]

@kayaker

I remember a Phillip K Dick (short?) story set in the distant future, where someone recieved a message via courier. The message was on a reel of film, which he placed in a film projector that made the typical “click-clack” 16 mm projector sound but projected a holographic image of the sender that spoke as if he were right there.

What? He could imagine a hyper-realistic holographic image but assumed it would just be an incremental improvement on the movie projector he was familiar with?

I’m not familiar with that story, but from other things I’ve read by him it’s not my impression that Dick was even trying to be a “hard” SF writer. I was amused when I read his Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, written in 1974 and set in the then-near future of 1988, and there were flying cars but also an important scene that involved the main character putting a vinyl record on a turntable to find out what was on it. It seemed really off that, in the same fictional world, technology that’s still sci-fi today and technology that’s largely fallen out of use were both common. I don’t know that Dick actually thought that in 1974 we were on the verge of having flying cars though, he may have just included them because he thought they were cool.

While it seemed funny to me to have vinyl records still common (and not just among audiophiles and hipsters) in a “futuristic” setting, Dick was actually right that many people were still listening to music on vinyl into the late 1980s. In the US, it wasn’t until 1988 (the year the novel is set) that CD sales first surpassed record sales, and while record sales dropped off sharply from there people didn’t immediately throw out their old record collections and turntables.

[Broomstick]

Actually, some of us never threw out our vinyl, although I did eventually have to get a new turntable.

[Lamia]

@Broomstick

Actually, some of us never threw out our vinyl, although I did eventually have to get a new turntable.

Oh I know, but vinyl records stopped being the way most people listened to music back in the early '90s…well before we got flying cars. (I’m still waiting on that one.)

[Broomstick]

Yeah, flying cars … well, I have my pilot’s license, so I’m ready when they are!