Hard sci-fi and space opera are orthogonal concepts. The Revelation Space universe is usually said to be both space opera and hard sci-fi, or at least harder than usual.
If the tech available to the humans is mostly plausible, with the real out there stuff being either mysterious and alien or too dangerous to use, then I’d at least put it on the hard spectrum. There’s something to be said for acknowledging that, for example, if you’re going to try FTL, then you’re going to run into causality problems, and the universe may bite back–hard.
Again, though, I’m genuinely curious: spoilers ahead for the last two AVENGERS movies, where inventor Tony Stark says to physicist Bruce Banner, “dude, you’re embarrassing me in front of the wizards.” One of those wizards promptly uses a magic portal to lop an arm off an alien, and a spaceship takes the other wizard to another solar system — just like how Banner later uses a time machine built by Stark to chat with a Celtic sorceress — and at some point a Viking god shows up to aid King T’Challa in Wakanda, where the Scarlet Witch’s android lover is getting repaired. (Said android was named after a vision from water spirits, but that’s overkill; there’s also everything from a shield-wielding Captain America with supersoldier serum in his veins to a sword-wielding Valkyrie who rides around on a pegasus.) So: fantasy, or scifi, or both, or neither?
(Does the math hinge on a Soul Stone that, in its wisdom, demands blood sacrifices?)
It’s “Comic Book” , a separate genre. Comic Book take elements from any and every other genre, asks “Can I use this to tell a good story” and “Is it cool?”, and if the answer is “Yes!”, incorporates them.
As @Alessan says, comic book is comic book. This gets back to the concept that categories are artificial. There are lots of publishing industry reasons that books are slotted into one category or another, but the ideas in the story are only limited by the author’s imagination.
Categories can be useful, though. If I go out looking for a hard sci-fi story, I’m going to be pretty happy if I find Deepness in the Sky or Expanse. Sure there are elements of both that don’t conform to known physics (or even possible physics), but a hard sci-fi label is still appropriate. Contrast that to the Locked Tomb series, which is about space necromancers, and is definitely not hard sci-fi.
Then there are things like The Three-body Problem where even revealing too many details of the genre category are spoilers.
Where do the Culture books fit? To me they seem like hard sci-fi, probably because the plots often turn on in-story technology, but it is way beyond the bounds of known physics.
Not really. Publishers have one reason for slotting a book into a category–whoever is responsible thinks that it will sell better in that category than in another category. Your new book about a werewolf and a witch who meet cute and team up to solve a murder–SF? Romance? Mystery? General Fiction? The publisher will put it where they think it will sell.
Yes, exactly. That’s where readers expect to see the author, that’s where previous stories in the series landed, that’s the hot genre at the moment, etc., which all are just that’s where they think it will sell.
Yeah. I think of the Culture as “thr new Space Opera” - stories that take some of the tropes of classic space opera (technology on the edge of magic, easy travel to the stars, and stories about the fate of worlds depending on the actions of relatively few) and put them into stories with complex characters and deeper ethical issues) - Banks, Reynolds, Hamilton, Brin, Nagata do that sort of thing in at least some of their works.
And things like “that’s the hot genre at the moment” lead to things like spaceships being shoehorned into fantasy stories, just to say “This is technically sci-fi!”. I’m sure that, if fantasy had been more respected when McCaffery was writing, Pern would have just been called fantasy.
I think a lot of it is what we get out of the stories. I’ve always very much liked hard sci-fi. So that tends to be what I take away. Moby Dick (not sci-fi) was a long treatise on what we knew about fish in the 19th century, Seveneves was about orbital mechanics, Surface Detail is about mind uploading, etc.
The technology in the Culture is magical to us, but in the books it is never presented as magical, though often too complicated for a merely human brain to understand. It also follows rules that are broadly understood by the characters. That to me is one of the signs of hard sci-fi. Except of course Excession, which is about when some technology is not following the rules. Which makes me realize, the whole Expanse is just another outside context problem story.
Where I disagree with several people on this thread is the idea that ‘hard = tech, soft = characters’.
To me those are unrelated.
I think this similar to what @Dr.Strangelove meant by ‘Hard sci-fi and space opera are orthogonal concepts.’
Hard SF means good science and believable tech, with some future innovations.
Soft SF means things just happen without any logical or reasonable explanation of how.
You can have hard SF with good characters and an emphasis on the effect of tech on individuals and society.
You can have hard SF with flat characters, and an emphasis on the tech itself.
You can have soft SF with good characters and an interesting society, and magical tech.
You can have soft SF with flat characters, space opera, and magical tech.
To me hard and soft has to do with the approach to tech. It has nothing to do with whether the book is about people or not, and whether it’s space opera or not.
Only in the most superficial way. What it’s about is death and revenge and suffering and mercy (and the lack thereof), and how if we don’t have hell, many of us are all too happy to invent it (for others, of course)
Agreed. I’m still playing around with this idea, but I think the direction of how the technology is chosen by the author helps put things on the hard/soft spectrum. On the harder side, the author picks an advancement over current technology, and does some world-building to see how it plays out, trying to keep things as consistent as possible, and finally plucking a story from that universe. On the softer end, the author starts with a story and picks the tech needed to make it work.
So, The Expanse is hard because the authors took a significant advance in drive technology and played out what would happen. It’s fast enough to colonize the solar system, but too slow for interstellar travel (aside from generation ships), and trips are long enough that the colonies don’t stay in close contact (leading to political friction). Also, the physical conditions lead to a mild divergence in human biology. That doesn’t directly lead to a story, but does give a rich environment to pick stories from.
In Star Trek, the authors wanted the Enterprise to regularly visit different star systems, like a wagon train visiting different towns in the old west. Ok, so you give them a warp drive. Done. Or you need to get them to the planet’s surface easily, so they get a teleporter. Or some weapons reminiscent of naval weapons, so instead of a torpedo they get a photon torpedo. The technology is there, but it’s always a secondary effect.
I don’t like this because of the value judgment inherent in it; it’s gonna lead nobody to consider their work “soft sf.” If instead you talk about which gets foregrounded more, the science or the characters, some folks will be fine being hard sf. I cannot imagine that Asimov and Le Guin would have disagreed on which of them spent more time on the tech and which spent more time on the characters.
Do you mind, maybe in spoilers, saying what you mean? I know which category I’d put this novel in, based on my thinking about the terms, but it may be different from yours.
I think of it as soft SF - but it’s a great book. Haldeman invented technology and situations to create a fictional context for a story that reflected his Vietnam experience, but the technology was not intended to be realistic.