Is there any real hard film sci fi? SPOILERS

Cafe Society
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Just to start with I hate the idea of hard vs. soft sci fi, I’m just curious and want to talk about it.

Films such as 2001 and Moon get held up as hard sci fi, but neither really fits. In 2001 you have the monoliths of mysterious origin that can do things like change the intelligence of animals/change their genes and transport people and many other impossible things, in Moon it is possible to read and write a human mind and create human clones already aged.

For 2001 I concede apart from the monoliths its hard sci fi, all the tech is physically possible and an extension of current science. If the argument is that alien tech so advanced it is identical to magic is allowed well hell then hard sci fi is meaningless.

But for Moon there is nothing to suggest we will ever be able to record and write human minds and memories in current science, not to mention being able to clone pre aged human bodies.

I’m trying to think of sci fi films that feature only physically possible or advanced forms of tech that already exist and coming up very short.

Outland - Sean Connery, space colony setting but nothing thats impossible by current standards(I forget if they ever mention anything about FTL on their ships).

There area LOT of near misses that feature one big impossibility, or alien tech or aliens.

On TV I have seen many call Babylon 5 hard sci fi which is a joke, and Star Trek is probably the softest sci fi unless you include sitcoms and obscure stuff. Not only do psychic powers exist but humans and aliens freely procreate together:smack:

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Perhaps When Worlds Collide, that’s pretty hard as 50s SF goes.

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You should probably check out Channel 4’s recent short season Black Mirror. Three stand alone stories, the last two of which are brilliant near-future stories acted and directed in a very straight way. Worth looking for if you can find.

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This is a good question.

If someone did a movie adaptaion of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress properly, then maybe we would have a good hard SF movie.

Heinlein went out of his way to make the story believable and yet fascinating.
One of my favorites.

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While the stereotype of anime SF is that it’s the softest of the soft SF, if not outright fantasy, there are a number of gems of hard SF to found in the field as well.

Patlabor is a fairly straight treatment of what a society where giant robots are being used for construction work might encounter. Now, I’ll grant the technology for the labors is beyond our current capabilities (let alone those of 1999*, when the anime is set), there are no magic technologies - no fusion, no self-aware AIs, no aliens, no alien legacies. The show itself is a mix of police drama and comedy, and has a similar feel to Hill Street Blues for focusing on the personal relationships within the personnel of the police unit. The movies (P1 and P2, I’ve not seen PXIII, so I can’t comment on that one.) are a bit talking head-ish, with a lot of political background that may or may not be accessible to the average American viewer. The TV series, and two OAV series I would recommend to anyone.

Mighty Space Miners (yes, really awkward title) is a surprisingly technically accurate anime, set in an earth orbit asteroid mine undergoing a catastrophe. It’s an OAV, and seems to have had poor sales, so the story has never been completed. In spite of that, it’s got some very nice examinations of realistic space hazards.

Two series I haven’t had a chance to see myself, yet, but that I’ve heard good things about are:

Planetes, a series focusing on a team of personnel dealing with cleaning up orbital debris in earth orbit. A good solid series from all I’ve heard, and excellent engineering treatments.

A more recent series made with technical support from the JAXA (and a cameo from at least one JAXA astronaut) is Rocket Girls. It’s very light fare from what I understand, but the technology involved I’ve heard is very well done and plausible.

I can’t speak definitely for either of these titles, I’ve not been able to keep up my anime watching in recent years, but they’re on my list of titles I’d like to see.

Dealing with US productions there was a pilot/special program, Plymouth which was produced and shown dealing with life on a community being established on the moon. The characterizations were a bit shallow, and it was not standard TV SF fare. What it was, however, was a technically excellent depiction of the hazards a massive solar flare would prove for a shallow colony on the moon. Obviously there wasn’t enough interest to promote a series based on the premise, but it was a very good effort for hard SF on TV. (Also as a rad tech, I loved the way that a TV show actually got radiation hazards right.)

*The series was first produced in 1988, so I am willing to give it a bit of a bye on having a 1999 tech level that’s above what we actually lived.

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Surely if you’re requiring that everything be tech that already exists, it’s just “fi”, not “sci-fi” (hard or not)? Sci-fi surely has to include imaginary stuff; otherwise it’s a true story or it’s just contemporary fiction.

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Thinking and doing some reading I’ve got a few more:

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - The way the tech is presented(selective brain damage or using heat to kill parts of the brain) is plausible with some advances in medical science. The way its presented is a bit fanciful.

Gattaca - Everything in the film could be expected from several decades of advancement in genetics, some is possible right now and even happening.

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Hard SF is defined by what we know now and can implement with technology.
Soft SF is based of what we can imagine and implement.

Isn’t that the definition?

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If you accept the premise of Children of Men, it has a reasonably realistic view of a near future, dying world.

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Hi CandyMan74. My fine English friend.

Not being a sci-fi buff, so possibly out of my league, I think I understand what you are getting at, so here’s my take on it:

my favourite tv sci-fi of late is V, it had the imagination of lizard creatures but it incorporated things of an everyday modern world like the 5th column, and freedom fighters and the debate of what is an insurgent versus what is a freedom fighter, and modern statements on current political problems regarding race and acceptance of others.
In other words if you took away the colour coating of sci-fi it just becomes a modern tale about the state of affairs of how they stand today. Hence a soft sci-fi?.

A hard core sci-fi would realise that time, space and motion moves on and even though some of the fundamental realities of human/(alien) existence wouldn’t change the political, social and cultural values would. Therefore makers of hard core sci-fi would be more imaginative about these social and cultural norms and incorporate them into their stories. Rather than create a basic commentary of modern life.

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The definition of hard sci fi I am working from and that I have seen used is tech that already exists, or can be reasonably expected to exist with advancement of the sciences. So for example space colonies on Mars would be hard sci fi, they don’t exist but they could. If the colonists find an alien artifact that allows the bearer to perform telekinesis it would be soft sci fi as thats basically magic.

Like I said in the OP I’m mostly looking for discussion and personally I like both soft and hard sci fi. I’m wondering what a lot of people mean when they use the term hard sci fi, like I said I’ve seen it applied to even Babylon 5 which is only slightly harder than Trek.

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Star Cops, on TV.

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Silent Running

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If you pretend it didn’t really happen, Apollo 13 would be quintessential hard sci fi.

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Pretend?:smiley:

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That’s basically the definition that most science fiction fans use. If something is based in current science, or can reasonably be extrapolated from current science, it’s considered hard SF. If it’s based on stuff that’s basically magic, it’s soft SF. Sometimes the same ability can be considered hard or soft SF, depending on how it’s treated.

I don’t like most video SF, because so much is written or rewritten by people who have no frigging clue of what is SF and what is simply lazy writing. However, I started reading Analog magazine and various other hard SF short stories and novels before my age could be reckoned in double digits, because of my maternal grandfather.

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Close. Of course the economics of what they were doing (sending our nation’s forests to the outer solar system :dubious: to protect them) made zero sense, but most the the technology was possible (at least in theory) with current science. The major flaw was that the ship had artificial gravity. If instead of a series of “glass” geodesic domes (with the bottom of the domes facing the core of the ship) it had a large spinning ring (or 2, spinning in opposite directions) to create centrifugal force it would’ve been pretty hard scifi. Of course I don’t remember what was powering the ship or how one dome was expected to sustain itself indefinatly. :smack:

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My personal favorite here is Wings of Honneamise. It’s set in an alternate world (but not one particularly different from ours), and tells the story of the project, in that world, to launch the first man into space.

Back to live-action, another good one is Deep Impact (not to be confused with the terrible Armageddon). The tech of the ship is a bit of an extrapolation, and the science is sacrificed a bit for the sake of the plot in a few places, but very little, and they actually paid attention to their science advisors and changed several things to be more accurate.

Going back to the golden age, I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned Destination Moon, based on a Heinlein story. I won’t recommend it as a movie, but it’s undoubtedly hard SF.

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Plenty of them, but some people won’t consider them science fiction
John Campbell listed Fail Safe among the best science fiction films ever made.

I’d include Creator, with Peter O’Toole. It’s well-written and witty, with no special effects, but it makes no sense unless you accept that the Nobel KLaureate O’Toole plays really does have a chance of cloning his deceased wife.

Lots of after-the-bomb films don’t require any special assumptions:

Five
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
The Day After
Threads
The War Game
On the Beach
Panic in the Year Zero
Some 1950s space films fit the bill, too
Destination Moon
Conquest of Space

How about Curt Siiodmak’s F.P. 1 Does not Answer from the 1930s? In the era before transatlantic planes were feasible, he imagined Floating Platforms built for stops and refueling mid-ocean. Or H.G. Wells’ Things to Come? He got the actual technology wrong, but muvch of the technology is straightforward extrapolation and doesn’t demand absurd changes.

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some others:

The Man in the White Suit (Alec Cuiness in SF movie years before Star Wars!)

Operation Moonbase (Heinlein-written TV series about space exploration turned into a feature film against his wishes. Parts are embarassing today, but other parts are clever)

Earth II – awful TV movie about life aboard a space station. IIRC, it involved no impossible technology, and no aliens.

Countdown – virtually forgotten movie about astronauts going to the moon, with a pre-Godfather James Caan as one of the stars

Marooned – by test pilot-turned-novelist Martin Caidin (whose novel Cyborg gave us The Six Million Dollar Man, although I don’t think it’s his fault). Kinda clunky and boring, but certainly not impossible. They changed his Ironman 1 into an Apollo capsule for the film. This is the movie that convinced the Russians to do the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Gog – pretty much forgotten 1950s Ivan Tors 3D movie about out-of-control robots (actually controlled by some Evil Other Nation) at an underground nuclear base. The same company and setting was used for Tors’ other 1950s film, The Magnetic Monster, which actually involves an element, not a monstrous creature. A lot of the scenes in this one were lifted from the German science fiction movie Gold, which I think also fits the Op requirements.