Just read The Martian by Andy Weir and you will know what HardSF is 
spoiler alert: amazing book
It’s so hard that IMHO, it’s barely Science Fiction - I love the book (and movie!), but there’s virtually no imagination involved in its creation, only extrapolation. It’s closer to a techno-thriller.
Yes, it’s about as hard as it gets… but to be honest, even though I like hard SF, I found it boring and the main character irritating. I know I’m in a minority here.
The technical detail was excessive for telling a good story, there was no character depth, and I didn’t think the writing and dialog were good.
Hard SF, good writing, and good characters are not mutually exclusive.
I agree. There was no interesting or thought-provoking new technology.
Is there such a thing as SF that’s too hard?
Heh. I tried reading Artemis, by Andy Weir, and had similar issues with it. The prose was amateurish IMO, and nothing about the character or setting was especially compelling, so I put it down after a couple of chapters.
Not all hard sf falls into the pitfall of thinking that good science obviates the need for good writing. There’s some hard sf that I love. But in my experience, hard sf falls into that trap more often than soft sf falls into anything similar.
True. But people who specifically seek out hard SF don’t do so for the characters or the prose—they can get that elsewhere.
These days I don’t have the patience to read any fiction in any genre if the writing is substandard.
Good writing certainly doesn’t mean prose with purple passages, or pretentious writing that calls attention to itself.
Good writing means that you’re so caught up in the book that you don’t even notice the writing.
It means three-dimensional characters, good dialog that doesn’t sound fake, good pacing, believable events (within the framework set out) without plot holes.
Fun discussion. To me the question is really what purpose the distinction is supposed to serve. As pointed out before, the boundaries are fairly fluid. The series about Gil The Arm involved telekinesis and for that reason may seem soft/fantasy, but the plot of most stories is actually rather hard, involving consequences and use of specific technology. Jack Vance’s SF is really rather soft, mostly, as it doesn’t deal with the technology but rather with the effects on people. Still, the setting of many of his stories of the Gaean Reach is traditional ‘hard’ SF, humans colonizing planets with space ships. But his later novels are pure fantasy: they involve wizards and spells. Wizards do not understand their spells, that’s why it is no technology.
Really hard SF to my mind is where the writer is like an engineer, thinking about how the technology will really work out in practice, taking into account the kinks in the tech itself. Asimov may be the best example. His robot series (and his famous three laws) can be read as a sustained meditation on the consequences of intellilgent robots. But he does use this same approach elsewhere too. I like how in his novel Nemesis the plot also depends on specifics of the FTL technology involved.
That attitude has done a huge disservice to the genre over the decades. It’s why so many people still say “Science Fiction isn’t literature”, even though there’s absolutely no reason why it can’t be.
IOW:
SF: Bodice rippers for nerds. Shallow and stupid, but it scratches that highly specific and slightly embarrassing itch.
Not that I propose that’s all SF is, but that’s the characterization @Alessan alludes to.
Bodice rippers aren’t taken as serious literature either. But serious literature can be written that contains those elements.
That distinction makes me wonder, though: how would you classify a work where the guy who uses the item doesn’t really understand it, but maybe the guy who made it does?
Let’s say it’s, oh, a guy who keeps turning invisible to investigate crimes, or to commit crimes, or whatever; and say the author plots it with exactly as much taking-account-of-kinks as you like, when thinking about how it’d really work out in practice.
And let’s say our hero doesn’t know why it works; he just knows that it works. So what, in your opinion, changes if he keeps making use of an invisibility serum brewed up by a scientist instead of an invisibility potion brewed up by a magician?
In the better kind of SF, there is consideration of the larger effects of the gimmick - will the scientist start selling invisibility potion to other people, will the victims catch on and start using countermeasures, etc. In fantasy, things like invisibility potions tend to be monopolies of one guy, and no one is ever going to be able to figure out how this one guy did it, so such issues don’t come up.
That’s interesting–I really don’t agree with your standards for good writing.
That is, good writing can be writing that doesn’t call attention to itself. Much of Le Guin’s prose is this way: it’s limpid, nigh-invisible, foregrounding the story. But other amazing authors, e.g., Bradbury, write poetry prose, full of rich imagery and rhythm and other poetic techniques. Nobody would accuse Bradbury’s prose of receding into the background, and if you don’t like prose that calls attention to iself you’re going to loathe his work.
Both styles can be a real pleasure to read.
There’s also prose that calls attention to itself in a bad way. Andy Weir’s prose did that for me: his workmanlike writing rubbed me wrong. Other authors try for poetry and end up falling flat as well.
If you’re going for poetry, you’d best know your business.
This might be analogous to hard vs. soft sf, as I proposed: in hard SF, the science is in the foreground, whereas in soft SF, it’s in the background. A novel like The Three-Body Problem, even though it contains some real scientific whoppers (I’m led to believe), is hard SF by my definition, since the scientific ideas are the stars of the show. A novel like Ninefox Gambit is softer SF in part because so much focus is put on the relationships between the various characters.
Folks in this discussion who don’t know about Pratchett’s Corollary need to know about it: any sufficiently advanced magic becomes indistinguishable from technology.
edit: after some Googling, I’ve learned that this is probably not a Pratchett quote, so I’ll call it instead by another popular name, “Clarke’s Third Law of Wizardry.”
Fair enough as far as it goes, but those lines seem pretty blurry: it seems like a dead scientist could set an SF plot in motion by dint of having brewed up a serum that now can’t be sold to others, and that victims in a fantasy setting could start using countermeasures against an invisible foe once they catch on, and et cetera.
So let me throw a real grenade into the discussion; The Martian isn’t science fiction at all.
Literally everything in “The Martian” is something we could build right now. If NASA was given the budget they could put together Ares missions; I mean, NASA’s proposal plans are pretty much where Weir got a lot of his ideas. There is, really, very little difference in genre between The Martian and The Hunt For Red October, which no one calls a science fiction novel. In fact, you could argue Red October’s caterpillar drive is more futuristic than anything in The Martian.
So how is The Martian science fiction? Just because it’s in space? That would be a strange definition; I don’t think anyone would say “Apollo 13” is a science fiction movie. Because it’s in the (near) future? That doesn’t really work either.
I don’t really think SF had a precise definition, but I’d say it has the following general characteristics:
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Integral to the story is the use of technology that is beyond the engineering means or understanding of human society in the time of the contemporaneous reader.
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The story makes an effort to present the technology in a consistent manner and as true science and engineering in the world of the story, rather than as overtly supernatural.
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The story deals, in some way, with how the difference in science and technology in the story, versus science and technology known to the contemporaneous reader, would affect human nature (or humanoid nature, whatever.)
So if we examine these things, Star Wars is only partial sci fi; it meets the requirements of 1 but not 2 and 3. Star Trek meets both 1 and 2 but if it ever touches on 3, I do not recall it. A lot of Asimov hits all 3, as does a lot of Philip K. Dick. Some of Ted Chiang’s stories hit all three.
The Martian includes a description of a human-rated ion-drive spaceship, which also has a rotating section for artificial gravity; that’s the best kind of science fiction, describing something that could be possible but we are nowhere near building yet.
Yes, you’re right - and I love Ray Bradbury’s writing.
But if you’re going to write in a style like that, you have to be outstandingly good to be able to pull it off. Very, very few are.
I’d say Bradbury’s work is an example of how F&SF can be literature.
But take Asimov for a moment: figure he built what seem like gold-standard SF stories around how society would be affected by Three-Laws-compliant robots getting sold to lots of people; but what interests me about this question is, he eventually wanted to go big on what’d happen if a robot gained telepathic abilities and started reading minds and controlling minds and so on…
…and, as far as I can tell, he sidestepped all the usual SF stuff in doing so: he made it a one-time accident that its creator promptly got mind-controlled into forgetting, which neatly keeps the secret under monopolistic control instead of ever getting sold to anyone else; and it drives the heck out of the plot from that point on, in book after book, even though it AFAICT might as well be supernatural instead of involving science and engineering. So — what?
I still don’t agree. I think that both limpid prose and poetic prose can serve (or disserve) their texts. Bradbury and Le Guin might embody the best of both traditions (although some of Le Guin’s stuff is more poetic and some of Bradbury’s more prosaic); but even folks who don’t reach their levels can still be very good. The Vanished Birds is probably my choice for best SF of 2020, and its prose is gorgeous, but I’m not sure it’s quite at Bradbury’s level.
I disagree. It’s fiction based on science. Science fiction seems like a good term for that.
Apollo 13 is based on a historical event that really happened. The Martian is based on a future event that could happen. I feel there’s a major difference there.