Wait, you think Terminator and I,Robot are somewhere in between The Martian and … Neuromancer in terms of plausibility?
I wasn’t trying to define a hard and fast continuum there, but yeah. Both are pretty well grounded in reality. Sure there’s the time travel thing in Terminator, but that one contrivance doesn’t invalidate the fact that for the most part the movie is practical.
I don’t understand how those are “grounded in reality” and Neuromancer … isn’t.
It is. I said it’s clearly “Hard Sci-Fi.”
Curiously enough, I think Neuromancer is more likely to reflect the future than any number of space operas. Because of physical limits, travel to the stars is likely to remain extremely difficult, if not impossible. But advances in neurotechnology and biotechnology will almost certainly change our human experience in a radical way over the next few centuries, so much so that Neuromancer will seem tame.
Travel to alien worlds is definitely in the realm of fantasy. As is travelling through worm holes and the like. But basic sub-light speed travel is I think far closer to reality than downloading, transferring, reading and directly manipulating “consciousness”. People dramatically underestimate it’s complexity and overestimate how much we understand.
We already have ‘basic sublight travel’, and its limitations are well understood. It will take centuries to establish colonies on Mars and the other bodies of the Solar System, and travel to other stars will remain difficult for the foreseeable future if not permanently impossible. We can’t change the laws of physics.
But information technology and biotechnology have an almost limitless realm of possibilities to explore; the human body and mind, and the possibilities of artificial intelligence represent far more interesting and challenging spaces to investigate than the cold moons of Jupiter.
I agree those six options are equally magical, and have little chance of becoming reality. But there are other ways to get between the stars, that could qualify as hard science fiction. Some of these have already been mentioned in this thread before, others require advances some might regard as unlikely, but none of them break the laws of physics or thermodynamics.
1/ Sleeper ships - if spaceships take an inordinately long time to get between the stars, then put the passengers to sleep for hundreds or thousands of years then wake them up at the destination. Note- you also have to protect the sleepers from cosmic ray damage, as well as the general effects of entropy and decay; but that’s a medical engineering problem.
2/ Generation Ships - make your ships big enough to hold a breeding population, and send them on a voyage that lasts thousands or tens of thousands of years. The slower you travel, the lest thrust is required per kilogram for acceleration or deceleration.
3/ Methuselah ships - advanced in biological sciences mean that people might become effectively immortal at some point, so travelling on a trip that takes hundreds of years would be possible, if somewhat boring.
4/ Seed ships - an idea by J D Bernal, which uses smallish craft to take life to other stars. Maybe we could use this system to grow humans at the destination; I suspect that if we ever do it, the end result would not be humans as we recognise them.
5/ Data only ships - this is a kind of seed ship that takes only the information required to build competent minds at the far end. These competent minds may eventually include close analogs of human minds, but I’m not convinced that will be necessary or desirable. By the time we are ready to send spacecraft to the stars, I expect we will be up to our necks in various types of competent mind.
I first wrote this list in 2005, so it predates a number of more recent versions by other people (you know who you are); of course it wasn’t original even then. There may be more possibilities you can think of, and I’d be interested; so let me know, and I’ll probably steal them.
That’s pretty close to how I think of it. Who’s in the driver’s seat: the science, or the fiction? If the characters are an excuse to showcase some amazing new technology, then I tend to think of it as “hard.” If the technology is there to showcase some interesting character behaviors, it’s a little more soft.
I enjoy both, but gravitate toward soft. And I can put up with super-soft SF (where the tech is completely implausible) way more than I can put up with super-hard SF (where the characters are completely implausible).
Which doesn’t mean that super-soft SF can’t have bad characters, and super-hard SF can’t have good characters.
Like anything, it’s not a simple binary hard or soft; it’s a continuum. Having an FTL drive makes a story less hard than a story without an FTL drive, all else being equal, but that all else might still be fairly hard.
But if you insist on a single bright-line test, my standard is that it’s hard if the author had to do calculations to write the story. Especially if they show their work.
To me, “hard” doesn’t mean an absence of constraints, but rather using authentic scientific detail to augment whatever universal constraints the author chooses to include. Or even just to use such concepts just to tour those same concepts.
For example, The Martian is rightfully considered a “pure” form hard SF, but I would have still found it hard enough to my taste if he’d traveled between Mars and Earth in an hour.
Sometimes the speed of light is an important constraint in SF and sometimes we want to explore that specific constraint. But oftentimes it’s an impediment to exploring pretty much everything else. If we were that serious IRL about only talking about realistic possibilities, nobody would even talk about interstellar human travel because it’s simply not going to happen for beyond the foreseeable future, if for no reason than the politics of humanity pooling its resources to invest in the very basics. Mars colonies barely even scratch the surface of that challenge.
I think it’s OK to call a story “hard sf” if it just violates one rule and sticks with it, and explores the consequences. In Joe Haldeman’s Mindbridge, a scientist accidentally discovers a slingshot effect – pour a bunch of energy into a certain type of coil and whatever is inside the coil goes immediately someplace far away. Then, after a certain amount of time, it comes back.
OK, that violates faster-than-light travel. However, in addition to explaining the mechanism in some plausible way, Haldeman also explores the consequences – eat too much food when you’re on an alien planet and after you come back, those atoms slingshot back to where you were, so you could end up sick or dead. If you want to colonize another planet, you have to have the mother get pregnant and have the baby there (there’s a bit more of handwaving there).
Otherwise, the rest of physics is left alone.
Similarly, in Forever War, it turned out that if you accelerated towards a black hole, you jump someplace else immediately (in your reference frame). However, relativity still counted, so many years would pass on Earth.
Anyway, I would say that hard SF is fiction that explains the mechanism and sticks to that explanation, and hopefully includes some exploration of the consequences.
Most hard SF grants FTL travel in some form as a plot convenience*. It then sticks to science fact from then on.
A classic example (and perhaps the first of the subgenre) is Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, which is all about the science involved on a planet that has different gravity at different latitudes. Much of the story explore the effect on its life forms and what they have to deal with, and the end includes a paeon to science and scientists. Hal actually calculated the numbers involved to make the planet work.
Prior to that, no one worried about accuracy. They were more interested in plausibility and story. John Campbell said you need to be as close to reality as you could, but didn’t require rigor and gladly printed SF stories with obvious gaps in science. Even Jules Verne, who supposedly insisted on following science, ignored it when he needed to do it for a story.
There were very few pure hard SF novels. Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero is one, with no FTL and no violations of science as known at the time. So is The Martian.
Many readers liked the idea of scientific rigor (other than FTL). And some feel that anything else is not SF.
*It was handwaved away by saying it’s not absolutely impossible. “Anything not forbidden is allowed” is the operational quote.
To me the distinction between hard and soft SF is whether the technology changes anything and how plausible and central it is. But the “plausible” and central part is extremely subjective.
If you have starships but all of your story of interstellar intrigue could easily have been changed to intercontinental intrigue on Earth, it’s soft SF. If you have intercontinental intrigue on a planet substantially larger than Earth so the continents become days apart even with current technology, and you realistically describe how this changes the calculus of economics and trade, it’s hard SF even if the technology level is just what we have now. (I hate that almost all SF gloss over the ridiculousness of interstellar trade.)
And what technology is allowed changes. I can, just barely, accept a story with ESP as hard SF if it was written in the 60s or 70s, I cannot today. Unless the analysis of consequences is really interesting.
One humorous way to make the distinction is by extending the AM/FM division (I learned of it from the Turkey City Lexicon). “Actual Machines” vs. “Fucking Magic.”
But I think (unless you’re using the term “hard sf” as an insult or a weapon, as some do) that it’s really most interesting if you think of it as a continuum and pay attention to the mistakes and exceptions that stretch the boundaries.
Hartwell and Kramer’s excellent (and huge–close to 1,000 pages) anthology, The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF, includes some real surprises that, once you think about them, really do fit whatever definition of hard SF you want to use. And the thinking about them is sort of the point. Anne McCaffery’s “Weyr Search” (the Hugo-winning novella that started her Pern novels) is a good example. Except for the small prologue, it would be very easy to read that whole story as medieval-ish fantasy.
I really recommend The Ascent of Wonder if you want to explore this question. In addition to a whole lot of great stories (and of course some near-misses and clunkers), there are great essays on the subject by Hartwell, Kramer, and Gregory Benford.
That’s interesting. I was just thinking about Pierce Brown’s excellent dystopian/military science fiction trilogy Red Rising. Set entirely in our solar system 700 years in the future, by the definitions in this thread it’s very much hard SF, with no interstellar travel of any sort, no weird technologies, and no psychic powers. There artificial gravity and a reasonable level of genetic engineering, but the only real implausible thing there is the advanced levels of terraforming technology (could there ever really be an atmosphere on the Moon)? That aside, it’s as “hard” a series as I’ve seen in a long time.
That said, it’s a series that has virtually no interest in science, except for the sciences of sociology, anthropology and political science. It uses hard science fiction as its setting, not its subject. Reading it, I was struct with the idea that it would be very easy to re-write the series as softer SF, with FTL and a galaxy-spanning empire, or even as pure sword-and-sorcery fantasy, without losing anything of its essence. Hard SF, it seems, was just an artistic choice.
This isn’t criticism. Unlike others, I consider distinctions between “hard” and “soft” science fiction, or even between science fiction and fantasy, to be pointless and restrictive. As long as you have a good story, good characters and good prose, I don’t care if your book has spaceships, wizards, neither, or both.
Exactly. It’s the idea that technology or scientific concepts are what the story more or less revolves around- they not only set the stage, they are usually an integral part of the conflict and the solution to it.
So something like “The Cold Equations” is absolutely hard sci-fi, even if the actual technology involved is undescribed, because the physics are what drives the story. Similarly, “Mote in God’s Eye” is also hard sci-fi because it’s centered around and focused on the unique physiology of the Moties and how it shapes their society and technology.
Meanwhile, something like “Left Hand of Darkness” is soft sci-fi, as it centers almost entirely around interpersonal relationships and dealings of a Terran human in the face of a very science-fiction scenario. (the Gethenians have no fixed sex- they alternate male & female through time)
Something like Star Trek blurs it all together pretty hard; there’s a definite emphasis on technological solutions to problems, and there’s a sort of technological canon that’s accreted over nearly 60 years, but there’s not so much consistency, and most of the technology is even beyond what could be extrapolated, and is (IMO) deliberately conceived to avoid most hard sci-fi constraints.
Star Wars is what I’d personally call “space fantasy” in that it’s got a bunch of fantasy style tropes- heroes, villains, mysticism, etc… and a lot of advanced technology that’s not really explored and that doesn’t play a plot role- it’s just like the rocks or trees or whatever in that it’s ubiquitous and part of the environment.
Some literary or cinematic genres are defined by what kind of setting they have (e.g. Westerns, sea stories, historical fiction). And some are defined by what kind of plot they have (mysteries, romances, coming-of-age stories).
Part of what makes science fiction tricky to define is that some people think of it in terms of setting, some in terms of plot.
By the setting criterion, if a story takes place on spaceships or other planets or in the future, it’s science fiction. By the plot criterion, if a story’s plot hinges on some form of science or technology, it’s science fiction.
If a book or movie has a science-fictional setting but not a science-fictional plot (like Star Wars), it’s not hard science fiction. Having a plot involving science or technology is a necessary (though probably not a sufficient) condition for hard science fiction.
I think it was Ray Bradbury who said that by certain definitions, Singing in the Rain is a science fiction movie.