Is there really such a thing as "hard science" fiction?

Cafe Society
1

The Sad Puppies thread and the discussion of fantasy and science fiction made me think of a question I ponder from time: what really is the difference between sci-fi and fantasy? Put another way, is there really anything that qualifies as “hard” science fiction?

Intrepid future voyagers travel from star system A to star system B by a number of means:

  1. Inertialess drive (Smith)

  2. Jump (Asimov)

  3. Time-space bending (Heinlein)

  4. Warp factor five (Roddenberry)

  5. Alderson points (Pournelle and Niven)

  6. A wizard did it.

How are answers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 “hard science fiction” and 6 is fantasy? Every one of them violates the fundamental principle that c is the fastest speed in the universe, so why are 1 through 5 considered “hard” and 6 is “fantasy”?

2

There are some sf novels that don’t involve interstellar travel. The Martian by Andy Weir is an example I can think of offhand.

3

Right, Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke all wrote stories limited to the Solar system. But, are those considered the standard works, and the inter-stellar ones the exception?

4

Sure. Vinge’s “A Deepness in the Sky” is pretty hard SF (no FTL etc.). Greg Egan writes hard SF. Hal Clement, too (though he had FTL sometimes - but only as a way to get to a neat planet with real chemistry and physics to look at).

Also - when the author provides specific rules on how the FTL works, and follows those rules rigorously, there is the “effect” of appearing “hard” - because the made-up physics is being treated as a law of the universe that can’t be gotten around, and that feeling of being constrained by solid rules is a big part of the Hard SF aesthetic (I think). If the wizard discusses the residual velocity his ship acquires due to the change in gravitational potential after magicking his ship a few hundred light-years, and has to collect another ton of manna from the thaum-collectors attached to his ship before he jumps again, even 6) starts to feel hard-ish…

5

Almost all the travel in Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series is sublight (occasionally, there’s an attempt to go faster, but it’s always disastrous). The engines are a bit of handwavium, and there’s plenty of speculative engineering, but the plots all take sublight travel time into account (and it’s ususally an important factor).

6

“Hard SF” just means there’s an emphasis on technology. The plausibility of that technology doesn’t really matter.

7

I’ve not read the novels, but the TV adaptation of The Expanse starts out pretty seriously “hard SF.” The series is limited to the Solar system, there’s no FTL travel, and things like ship movement, acceleration and deceleration, and the time involved in interplanetary travel and communication all play important plot points.

I won’t give specific spoilers, but by the latter half of the third season, there’s some of Clarke’s Third Law going on.

8

Well it’s still fiction, so necessarily includes some extensions to our scientific knowledge or at least to our engineering ability.
So if I write a story where I accept the c speed limit, but propose a specific mechanism, with limitations, that can sidestep it in a specific way…that can still be hard sci-fi.

Meanwhile “a wizard did it” is not even engineering. And further, gives no clear limitations or conditions.
Not to imply all science fantasy is bad.

9

Personally though, my definition for hard SF isn’t whether it breaks the laws of physics–it’s whether the author really set up some rules in advance and adhered to them. Star Trek isn’t soft because of the warp drive; it’s soft because the ships always get to wherever they need to be without any thought to how fast it actually is. It’s not soft because of inertial dampeners; it’s soft because somehow they’re always damaged just enough to bounce people around without splattering people on the walls.

10

Agreed @Dr.Strangelove

11

I kind of feel like with “hard science” fiction they at least try to make a serious attempt at speculating how some new technology would impact society. So it tends to be much more grounded in contemporary culture, known science, and technology that seems like it’s almost within our reach. Or at worst, extrapolates current technology we understand.

The Expanse is a good example (mostly). Sure, their rockets run on “Plotonium” reactors that enable travel within the solar system to take days and weeks instead of weeks, months, or years. And like all Plotonium drives, their reactors can be disabled or fixed as the story requires (instead of, you know, being irreparably damaged requiring a month in space-dock or simply exploding/irradiating the crew). But generally the Expanse tries to present what a colonized Sol system would look like, given our current understanding of the effects of space travel, living in low-G environments, and the sort of economic conditions that might arise.

At the other extreme you have Star Wars, which is basically just fantasy.

12

My sense of the argument is it’s not so much “hard science” fiction versus "soft, so much as the notion that traditional science fiction was about people being just as they are in the world we know, and society being just as it is in the world that we know, but gee, Wally, technology!! Hard science is, like, amazing!! Whereas this newfangled stuff is maybe giving a wave of the speculative hand at future tech but it focused on how human (or nonhuman) experience could be very different, and/or how society’s mores and systems could be very different. So it’s more like social science can be amazing. And the puppy folk don’t like the shift in focus.

EDITED TO ADD: I shouldn’t attribute that attitude to the Sad Puppies without reading what they’ve actually said in more detail. It’s my “sense” because of what I’ve read or heard other people complain about, to be honest, and I’ve just sort of projected that onto the Pups because of similarities in the tone of their complaints such as I’ve read them.

13

There is a different term that is relevant here: mundane science fiction.

14

For one thing, there is no such fundamental principle. In relativity (both special and general), there is a speed, c, that’s the same to all observers—meaning that no matter how fast different observers are moving, they all agree on its value. That speed happens to be the speed massless particles naturally move at, so if light is massless (as current best measurements show), then c is the speed of light.

But there’s, despite some unclear presentations of the subject, no actual prohibition to traveling faster than that speed—there are solutions of the theory that describe faster-moving objects (tachyons). However, what you can’t do is take something that’s moving slower than light, and accelerate it beyond c, as that would need infinite energy—so in that sense, it’s the fastest speed you can attain. (And also, once you include quantum physics into the mix, tachyons become problematic, because they end up destabilizing the vacuum, which would be bad.)

However, there may be ways to go around this minor engineering issue. For one, general relativity has wormhole solutions, and wormholes, if they are traversable, would allow going between their openings faster than a ray of light could traverse the distance without ‘going through’. But there’s also the possibility of ‘warp drives’—basically, generating a superluminally moving ‘bubble’ by contracting and expanding space in front of and behind the ‘spacecraft’.

A problem with this is that while it’s a solution of general relativity, it’s only a ‘solution’ in the sense that you can write down a spacetime deformed in the right way, and from that, generate a matter distribution that would lead to such a spacetime—but that matter distribution doesn’t end up making a whole lot of sense, containing things like ‘negative energy’ etc. But there’s been some recent buzz around a paper soon to be published that might make this sort of thing a little more plausible.

So, to answer the question in the OP: it’s hard science fiction if the above is taken into account, and at least some plausible story exists to justify the fictional conceit. So one might posit that the new paper actually leads to the creation of a feasible warp drive—which it probably won’t—and then explore the effects of that in a consistent way. ‘Soft’ science fiction, on the other hand, just goes with the ‘finger-snapping’ approach, and uses technology as a means to advance plots—if you need something to get you from A to B faster than a ray of light, you just conjure something up. That is, to me, the most succinct distinction: scientific plausibility is a constraint on hard SF-stories, while technological miracles are just a means to an end in soft SF.

15

Right or wrong, the term “Sci-Fi” essentially means “space fantasy” today. It doesn’t really mean science fiction any more, pretty much anything that’s traditional sci-fi but isn’t a space fantasy is now usually lumped into “Hard Sci-Fi.”

Within Hard Sci-Fi there’s of course a spectrum of plausibility. You have the stuff like The Martian which borders on actual, literal real science-based fiction. Then you have stuff like Neuromancer which is pretty hardcore futurism and pushes the limits of plausibility. Then you have a bunch of stuff in the middle like Interstellar, Terminator, Ready Player One and I, Robot.

16

Well, sci-fi does, but not necessarily science fiction. I consider almost all movie stuff sci-fi. But Stephen Baxter, for instance, isn’t writing space fantasy.

17

This. I think of it this way - hard sf is kind of like coming up with a new scientific hypothesis. It can go beyond what we know, but it had better not violate what we know. In keeping with what you said, we’ve done tons of experiments verifying time dilation - your hypothesis or story better not just say time dilation doesn’t happen.
On Star Trek, for instance, warp drive is closer to hard science fiction than the impulse engines which seem to be able to get you close to light speed without either time dilation or the immense power required.

18

I don’t quite follow what you’re trying to say here, but both the Time Machine and Time Ships are definitely fantasy. Calling them “sci-fi” fits with my description of the shifting language.

19

I continue to argue that a substantial effort was made to try to keep Interstellar grounded in science, mainly due to the efforts of the physicist Kip Thorne, who got into a few heated arguments with Chris Nolan but ultimately prevailed on some key issues. Thorne wrote an entire book – The Science of “Interstellar” – explaining why many of the fanciful ideas in the movie were scientifically plausible (even if, in some cases, unlikely).

And Arthur C. Clarke, in my view, usually tried to strive for scientific plausibility. 2001 was certainly plausible, even if it pushed the limits of our imagination. A really good example of Clarke’s “hard” science fiction is the short story Technical Error. I won’t spoiler it because it’s a great read, but it concerns a maintenance worker who climbs down to do some work on a huge power generator from which the rotor has been removed. There is an enormous accidental power surge and he emerges … changed. Everything that follows is grounded in plausible science, including interesting implications that most of us would never have thought of.

20

I would consider none of those “hard”

The “hard” ways of getting from A to B are sleeper ship and generation ship.

Ironically, the master of soft SF, Le Guin, actually didn’t have FTL travel in the Hainish books. So in a sense was “harder” than many other doyens of hard SF. But the ansible was also a violation of the c limit.

But quite a lot of people go with the “one rule violation” variant of hard.