I do classify The Expanse as hard sci-fi, because even though there is unexplained/magic technology, it is used to cause the characters’ problems, not solve them. Contrast it with a technobabble heavy episode of Star Trek, where some magic technology fixes everything.
I don’t know if that is a common definition people use, but I generally prefer larger categories to smaller.
Agreed. I liked Reamde well enough (more a thriller than sci-fi), but Dodge wasn’t too good. If you haven’t read it though, I thought Seveneves was good. It is in many parts very sad, though, but that’s to be expected in a book that tells the store of a slow apocalypse.
Mission of Gravity is an absolute classic. You could also look at Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle (a professional astronomer); some of the technology is a bit dated but most of the science is still spot-on.
More recently, check out Greg Egan; he’s a computer scientist and some of the math and science may be a bit too dense for some people, but it is rigorously worked out.
A good distinction. The ideal of the scientist is not to never deal with anything they can’t understand; it’s to try to find the things they can’t understand, and then try to understand them.
And personally, I view “hardness” and “softness” of science fiction not entirely as opposites, but as different axes, and the best science fiction is both good hard SF and good soft SF.
Also, the magic technology is amenable to scientific exploration. That is, while it initially baffles the human scientists, and is millions of years more advanced than we are, we can at least start to understand how to use it, and gradually learn to understand at least some of the new science behind it.
That’s how real science works. Look at the high-temperature superconductors. Up until we discovered the first one, we weren’t sure if it was even possible, and after we found the first one, we still weren’t sure how it worked. But within a few years, we’d developed a whole new class of materials that gave even better results, and developed at least a few practical applications.
Bova was obviously a technology fan, but I don’t know about his scientific education. Rather often in his work I have run across points where one suddenly thinks: hang on, that’s not quite right, or that doesn’t really work. Not usually absolute plot-killers, but enough that I wouldn’t really classify him as a real ‘hard’ SF writer?
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon is realistic in that it makes it clear that mankind never leaves out solar system because it’s too hard to reach other solar systems. It accepts the fact of the limit for travel of the speed of light and the impossibility of having spaceships reach even any speed below that limit that would allow the spaceship to reach other solar systems in time. This is despite the fact that the novel takes place over a period of two billion years. Mankind evolves over those years and even figures out how to live on other planets of our solar system. Mankind then dies out at the end when the Sun becomes a supernova. It was published in 1930.
He definitely has a few of those (Venus, for instance, includes the ship using the heat of Venus’s atmosphere as an energy source), but he’s clearly at least trying, and he does get a fair bit right. It’s a sharp contrast to authors like LeGuin or Pohl who just don’t care at all about the science.
Spaceships are slow, but they’re not that slow. Two billion years is plenty of time to reach other stars, even with current propulsion technology.
I really enjoy The Praxis series of books. They make a few concessions to allow for the world to exist (wormholes that allow travel to distant star systems) but mostly the story elements stay firmly planet in science fiction instead of science fantasy. Plus, they’re well written and I think tell an interesting story.
Let’s be precise. How long does it take to reach other stars using current propulsion technology? It would take a huge generation ship with an enormous amount of fuel, right? Is that possible to build with current technology? Is communication from the Earth to any other solar system possible using current technology? Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the book:
Ah yes… thermodynamics eludes a lot of science students every year, it seems.
I’m not knocking Bova, his books are very entertaining. But he could perhaps have benefited from an editorial process including a bit more scientific oversight?
My focus is on well-written fiction rather than on scientific accuracy, but there are some books that aspire to both. In addition to The Expanse, there’s also The Sparrow. It takes some necessary liberties with interstellar travel, but nothing completely bananas: the book spends a long time explaining how a ship can reach a significant fraction of lightspeed, and travel to Alpha Centauri in just 17 years. I’m certain the fuel-to-acceleration ratios are nonsense, but fi you’re willing to put up with that, it delves deeply into the science; and the novel itself is a gem.
At the speed of Voyager 1, about 70,000 years, and that took almost no fuel. Now, I’m not saying that we have the technology now to build a self-sufficient habitat that will last that long, but billions of years are an awfully long time to develop that technology.