What exactly is " Hard Science Fiction" and would I like any of it?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve only heard the term in the letters section of the Sci-Fi book club, and since none of the people complaining about it’s lack actually define it, I’m left with a better impression of what it isn’t: apparently not the fantasy/horror/supernatural type books I joined the club to read :dubious:

So what is it, really? Does it involve books more science than fiction, or does it involve the hard sciences like chemisty, physics and biology, instead of psychology? If so, do books like Jurassic Park and Darwin’s Radio “count?” I do like those, but don’t read books like that very often.

As for the would I like it part of my question, I don’t like books involving robots or space travel. (with the sole exception of the Hitchiker’s trilogy). I suspect that this subgenre may involve them both, does it?

2

Hard science fiction, as far as I know, is science fiction in which everything can be logically explained with science and real facts. Hard science fiction wouldn’t include something like the Ender’s Game ansible or faster-than-light travel (unless there was some REALLY good explanation I guess…).

Again, just as far as I know, I don’t know if there’s an exact definition.

3

Hard science fiction usually has a rigorous scientific backing for its extrapolation. The ideal is that nothing is there that is contrary to what is known by current science. Very few novels live up to that ideal.

The classic hard science fiction novel is Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity. Everything in the book is based on Hal’s calculations about the planet he had invented (it was shaped so that it had Earth-normal gravity at the equator, but extremely high gravity at the poles). It was discovered that the calculations were incorrect, but since they were originally done on a slide rule and paper, no one is upset about it. However, the book does assume some sort of FTL drive.

Other hard SF authors include Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Greg Benford, and Stephen Baxter.

4

There are two different things which make a given work of SF “hard”. The first is when science and/or technology are the primary drivers of the plot, and the second is when the story is consistent with what is currently known of science. As with everything, of course, there are degrees of “hardness”.

For example, one author whose works are often described as hard SF is Larry Niven. In his novel Ringworld, he has things like faster-than-light drives, indestructible ships, psionic abilities, and materials capable of shielding neutrinos, none of which is consistent with science as currently known. But the main driving point of the story is the exploration of a huge man-made “world” forming a ring around a star. Technology drives the plot, so it’s generally considered hard.

By contrast, we can also look at “Inconstant Moon”, another story by Niven. It’s a disaster story, and both the disaster and the way that the characters discover what’s going on are perfectly consistent with what we know of science (or at least, what we knew: The story is mildly dated, now). But unlike Ringworld, the story isn’t so much driven by the disaster, as by the protagonists’ response to it. So here, even though it’s humans driving the plot, the events are scientific, so it’s also considered hard.

As for whether you’d like it, that probably depends a lot on the individual work. You say you’re not a fan of space travel; does that extend to stories about folks on other worlds if the travel itself wasn’t part of the story? Or what about stories which stay on Earth, set in an age of space travel? And with robots: Is it just humanoid robots that you don’t like, or are “thinking” computers OK?

5

To be honest, with the exception of short stories by Ray Bradbury, I can’t think of a single adult work I’ve finished that involved people on other planets. However, as long as it was a given they were there (the author doesn’t spend long explaining how they got there) I don’t think it would be a bad thing. I like stories with aliens too, but on Earth, not in space ships wandering the universe. (with tv shows for example: Roswell = good, any Trek other than TNG = bad)

Robots on the other hand…anything non-living with a personality/ablity to speak isn’t something I like. (unless it’s a humor story)

6

Perhaps it would be fair to say that, the more a person knows of and is interested in science, the more that person appreciates hard science fiction? That hard science fiction is (comparitively) about the science?

7

I once took a lit class in college that focused on sci fi, fantasy, horror. The prof. there explained it as short and simple as I have ever heard it. Hard science fiction is SCIENCE Fiction. Science takes the forfront. Soft science fiction is Science FICTION. I have always enjoyed the fiction aspect more than the science aspect myself. But that’s just me and it would be a boring, silly, old world if everyone was like me.

8

Uh oh, I feel an essay coming one. (Can you tell I’m procrastinating from writing my own sf story? Well, I am.)

Hard science fiction is not a thing, but one end of a continuum, and one that has varied greatly over the years.

The 40s and 50s were the era of classic science fiction, the big names, when Asimov and Heinlein and the crew at Astounding Science Fiction set their stories in what SF critic Steve Carper calls “The Consensus Future.”

This is the world image that culminated in The Jetsons, the future of soaring cities, flying cars, easy rocket space travel, four-hour workdays, robot helpers, and electronic marvels. This world was a strict and straight extrapolation off of current white, middle-class American culture. There were few aliens in these stories, because John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, didn’t like aliens (even earthly ones from other cultures) except as minor figures for his heroic Americans to lose to.

The Consensus Future is still the image of science fiction in many people’s eyes, because it is simple, optimistic, and oh-so-American.

But the world was always far more complex than these stories could portray and by the 60s and 70s a new generation of writers added sociology, anthropology, political science, media, and mythology to the list of sciences and resources that they would extrapolate from, and added minorities and women to the cast of characters. Many of the greatest works in the history of the genre came out of this period: Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness; Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light; Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17; Frank Herbert’s Dune; Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar; and the genius period of Robert Silverberg, when he put eight different novels on the Best Novel shortlist in six years.

The 80s saw the coming of cyberpunk, a worldview that extrapolated off the coming interconnectedness and fragmentation that writers saw that a wired world would bring. Although Babel-17 is the Ur-cyberpunk novel and Vernor Vinge really invented the genre with the novella “True Names” in 1981, William Gibson kick-started the genre with Neuromancer in 1984. He and especially Bruce Sterling took the effect that science had on societies to new levels.

Today’s hard science fiction has a variety of flavors. But the cutting edge belongs to writers who toss around cultures, futures, and universes in ways that Doc Smith could only envy. Stephen Baxter, Wil McCarthy, Robert Metzger, Iain Banks, and Charles Stross are only some of the new names working in this vein. Stross especially is so high-extrapolated-tech that his work can be as difficult to read as James Joyce. Mind-blowing, but no place for a newbie to start a journey into the field.

And that’s part of the difference between today’s hard sf and that of the Consensus Future. Virtually anyone who had read the morning’s paper and had heard about the wonders of science that were being promulgated everywhere could read Asimov and Heinlein and understand what they were saying. Reading a serious hard sf writer today is a feat even for the experienced. I still haven’t figured out how Wil McCarthy is working his science magic in Collapsium, which is a building material made of black holes that allows ringworlds and teleportation towers to be built.

But as I said at the beginning, these books are merely the far end of a continuum and there are many flavors of hard sf, most of which are not nearly as daunting. Biologically-oriented sf has been prominent for many years, from writers like Nancy Kress, Nicola Griffith, Octavia Butler, and Catherine Asaro, and while these may involve aliens, they are also more people-oriented.

In fact, when I look at the winners of SFWA’s Nebula Award, I see many of these names. Except for last year’s winner, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, every winner of the past dozen years has been hard sf of some flavor or definition.

There can be no way to say whether the OP will like hard sf or any particular book of hard sf, but that’s true of just about anything. Try some of the names and titles I’ve given and see if you want to read more.

9

Fantasy isn’t the only outside genre shunned by hard SF. Is there an online cite for the old Joseph W. Campbell quote about what he didn’t want to publish in his magazine? I think it involved cattle rustlers, with rockets and rayguns inserted into an otherwise conventional western story slightly re-tooled to sell to an SF editor.

Another term you might run across is “pure” Science Fiction. You know all those Star Trek stories, past and present, that obviously refer to contemporary events in some allegorical way? “Pure” SF doesn’t do that.

10

I’d like to highly recommend The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. A great reference work about the whole continuum of science fiction and all its subgenres; open it anywhere and there’ll be something interesting.

11

George Scithers dubbed this sort of story a “Bat Durston” – one that’s merely a western set in space. It’s considered bad SF by most SF writers and readers, but sometimes does get published (the most egregious example was the film “Outland,” which was just an SF reworking of “High Noon”).

12

Mainly its stories that are anywhere between 20 to 50 years in the future. All vehicles and ships are using theoretical drives that are possible , like the light sail , or nuke drives that are on the cusp of being introduced.

There are no magical transportation devices like the transporter beam , and no FTL drives that drive the space opera books.

Look for an author by the name of Allen Steele , and Ben Bova for the meat and potatos of hard sci/fi

Declan

13

All science fiction, no matter when or where set, is about the present.

If it is not about the present, then it is about nothing at all, and may as well be used for toilet paper.

14

In addition to the excellent comments and author suggestions already offered, I’ll toss in the work of the late Robert L. (“Bob”) Forward.

He’s got an extensive technical background, and he wrote a number of stories and novels to explore his scientific ideas. As he himself has said, he goes about the process backward: Rather than thinking about a story to tell and building the science and technology around it, he begins by exploring a scientific or technological idea and then constructs a narrative as an excuse to communicate the concept to the reader.

This, to me, is the hardest of hard SF, because the story is secondary. Some hard SF writers are good at synthesizing the two sides of the genre, and telling a riveting story while exploring and explaining the science along the way. Forward, by contrast, almost always uses his story as a skeleton on which to hang the scientific and technological speculation. He’s extremely rigorous about his conceptualizing, and never indulges in psychic powers or any of that sort of thing, so his work is quite thrilling on an intellectual level. But it’s hardly the stuff of page-turning drama.

Dragon’s Egg, for example, imagines life on the surface of a neutron star. It takes what we know about the extreme gravity and the behavior of matter in such an environment, and extrapolates forward on what kind of life might survive and/or thrive in that world. And I swear, the first fifty pages are the most amateurish drivel I’ve slogged through in a so-called classic. The human characterizations are thin and clumsy, the narrative format is obvious, the prose is stilted and dry: I had to force myself forward, assuming it would eventually get better, or it wouldn’t be as highly regarded as it is. And indeed, eventually the remarkable conceptualizing does, in fact, begin to put the story over the top. By the end, I was whipping through it, and I closed the book with a palpable shiver of excitement, thinking, “Holy crap, that was an astonishing work of sheer imagination.” There still wasn’t much of a story, mind you, but the creativity of the idea and the way it was explained was skull-crackingly neat.

I wouldn’t start there, though. I’d go with somebody who treats the genre with respect, but who doesn’t feel the need to blow your mind on every page with some wild technical idea that comes from combining something in a letter published in Japanese High Energy Physics Quarterly with a bit of speculation drawn from hours of meditation over the specs of a cyclotron: Try, for example, Robert Sawyer or David Brin or Greg Benford. They’re “hard” in comparison to, say, Alan Dean Foster or Timothy Zahn, but not as hard as Forward or some of the other writers named by previous posters.

15

Others have described it well; I’ve always been partial to saying that most authors either do the Science part well or the Fiction part well, and you choose which you care about most. Note my username for my vote :).

But if you’re not generally fond of hard SF, I’d still recommend reading Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. He gets both the science and the fiction right, and makes both sides extremely interesting. The second and third books in the trilogy were not nearly as good, but the first is fantastic.

Daniel

16

Not Campbell, but H. L. Gold on the back cover of Galaxy Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1950, which is right in front of me. (Ooh, I love my collection.) The ad is titled “You’ll Never See it in Galaxy,” and has two columns, one starting “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere,” and the other “Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass…”

You get the picture.

One thing about hard sf is that the science has to be right. Harry Stubbs (Hal Clements real name) I think called this the game - hard sf writers finding bugs in stories. The Astounding/Analog letter pages used to have a lot of this. The reason Bradbury is not hard sf is not that he wrote about people, but that his Mars was nonsense even in the late '40s when he wrote many of the stories. For instance, his characters on Mars could see the nuclear war on Earth with their naked eyes. Lots of people don’t get this. In my writing group one woman thought it was boring that my life forms living at moderate temperatures were all oxygen breathers. When I started to explain the chemistry, she asked why I couldn’t make up a new element. Aarghh

17

Ok, I think I’ve got it now :slight_smile: I’m surprised to see that my guess more science than fiction wasn’t too far off the mark. I’ve even read one of the books mentioned: Dune. (although Herbert’s style is a lot like Anne Rice’s, they write really interesting-boring stories.)

So now I have a follow up question… are there books in which the science in question is biology? While I have a basic understanding of both physics and chemistry, they don’t really hold my interest as a subject for reading, while biology does; in Dune, for example the most interesting parts, imo, were how the sandworms created the spice and how Paul’s sister was affected by what their mother took during her pregnancy.

18

As much as I would hate to hijack the thread, I would like to point out that if anything is “ur-cyberpunk”, it’s Alfred Bester and his novel The Stars My Destination (1956). Further, if anything should be termed proto-cyberpunk, it’s The Shockwave Rider (1976) by John Brunner, which has many the elements of later cyberpunk works: a dystopic view of a society ruled by corporations and data, computer networks, identity theft, etc. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) may also be considered a strong influence on the cyberpunk genre.

elfkin477, Dune certainly is not hard science fiction, and I don’t think the poster who mentioned it was implying that. Dune is certainly fantasy literature in science-fiction trappings, much like, say, Star Wars; it’s about kings and queens, princes and princesses, about adventure, politics and intrigue – not about science.

As for biology, there’s a genre often called “medical thrillers”, ruled by the likes of Michael Crichton and Robin Cooke. Crichton is good; he is a former doctor who usually centers his usually exhaustively researched stories around contemporary scientific and moral issues. You already mentioned Jurassic Park, which relies on genetics theory as well as chaos theory. Other books include The Andromeda Strain – which is pretty much all about biology; it was made into a deliciously slow-moving, fascinating film; and so intent on factual correctness that it even purports to be based on a true story – and The Terminal Man. His latest, Prey, is about nanotechnology.

Another author who often deals with the science of biology is the British writer Michael Stewart. He was extremely popular a few years back, and his novel Monkey Shines about the telepathic link between a paralyzed man and a monkey (it’s less silly than it sounds) was made into a good film by George A. Romero, but he seems to not only have stopped writing novels, but also gone increasingly out of print. Still, I would heartily recommend his novels, which are intelligent page-turners if not much beyond that; of particular note are Blindsight (about a cure for blindness with unintended side-effects), Prodigy (about a biogenetics researcher who experiments on his own unborn child) and Grace (about the investigation of an apparent virgin pregnancy).

19

Thanks! The last two sound interesting, and knowing Prey is about nantechology makes it a bit more enticing than when I was under the impression it’s like the book Dust… it’d be interesting to read a more fact-based approach than By the Light of The Moon and X-Files: Antibodies each took, not that they weren’t entertaining.

20

Just out of curiousity, Exapno, do you actually read any of the 1940’s and ‘50’s sci-fi?
According to Isaac Asimov in The Early Asimov, it wasn’t so much that Campbell disliked stories about aliens as that he liked stories in which earthlings outwitted alien cultures, cultures that were often more powerful than Earth, because of some special human trait. Asimov wrote stories without aliens like The Foundation Trilogy because he did not want to take the chance of upsetting Campbell, but Astounding routinely published stories with aliens like Eric Frank Russell’s “Dear Devil,” “Legwork,” and the Jay Score series (a series in which a black doctor talks like an intelligent man and in which a robot and some Martians routinely save the humans’ asses), Asimov’s own “Homo Sol,” Anthony Boucher’s “QUR” and “Robotinc (spelling may be off),” and Murray Leinster’s “First Contact.” Those are just off the top of my head.
When you get out of the pages of Astounding, aliens are a staple in works by writers like Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, Poul Anderson and Arthur C. Clarke.
Furthermore, many of Heinlein’s novels from that period feature alien species and hardly present the future as “oh so American.” Space Cadet featured a world in which North America is the most politically powerful unit of a world government, but is clearly subordinate to the Patrol, whose members come from all lands, and in which the Martians do not think it important to talk to humans. A character in Between Planets remarks that a brutal human society cannot wipe out the Venusians and may not be able to wipe out the much weaker Martians. The America of this story is a police state, BTW. The Star Beast portrays a world in which the USA has become just one part of a world society, the major hero is an African diplomat, human explorers cause a great deal of trouble by kidnapping a baby extraterrestial through arrogant ignorance, and an alien species may be able to blow this planet to hell.
Any listing of the major works of the '50’s should include Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which not only do aliens dictate that humans shall not visit the stars, but in which humanity and the world end, and Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers.

As for optmistic stories, Astounding routinely ran stories about dystopias. Ever read Sherrard’s “E for Effort,” Heinlein’s “If This Goes On --” and “Logic of Empire,” and Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness! and Destiny Times Three. I needed about 45 seconds thought to come up with that list, and I could come up with many more stories if I could comb through the contents pages of the back issues.

As for works published in other venues, what about Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants and Gladiator at Law, Silverberg’s Invaders from Earth, Damon Knight’s “The Analogues,” and Anderson’s “Sam Hall?”

Furthermore, I don’t see that works like van Vogt’s Isher, Anderson’s Brain Wave, and Jack Vance’s future worlds, i.e. To Live Forever, are extrapolations of white, middle-class America; in fact, in these works America appears irrelevant to the future. Also, there were plenty of works mocking the politics and values of middle-class America of that time. Ever read Alfred Bester’s “Disappearing Act,” Leiber’s “Business as Usual,” or some of Robert Sheckley’s stories?

Also, Chad Oliver began to introduce themes involving anthropology well before the '60’s.