# What exactly is " Hard Science Fiction" and would I like any of it? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 18, 2004, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053 "2004-01-18T04:00:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/21 "2004-01-21T03:28:10Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > knowing Prey is about nantechology makes it a bit more enticing… If you want a mix of biological speculation and nanotech, look at Greg Bear’s _Blood Music._ It’s harder than average, but still takes off on a wild flight of fancy. It’s also got what might be considered a downer ending (depending on your perspective). ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Rieux](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Dr.Rieux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Rieux)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/22 "2004-01-21T04:31:34Z")
To me, **The Dune Chronicles** are about politics and religion and ecology and history and the potential of the human race–the “kings and queens” (actually, emperors, dukes, and counts) are part of the trappings. The sciences involved are psychology, sociology, poitical science, biology–not to mention metaphysics and parapsychology. And before you go saying “those aren’t _real_ sciences,” remember what Heinlein said about his novel, **Job** : it was science fiction, the science in this instance being Fundamentalist Christian Theology. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![gentle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/eb8c5e/32.png) [@gentle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gentle)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/23 "2004-01-21T05:17:28Z")
> [@Dr. Rieux](#): > > To me, **The Dune Chronicles** are about politics and religion and ecology and history and the potential of the human race–the “kings and queens” (actually, emperors, dukes, and counts) are part of the trappings. The sciences involved are psychology, sociology, poitical science, biology–not to mention metaphysics and parapsychology. Saying _Dune_ is about science because it touches on subjects such as psychology and sociology is like saying _Catcher in the Rye_ is about science because it touches on those subjects. _Dune_’s plot is not driven by, say, psychology as a _science_, it is driven by psychology as applied to characters and situations – it’s just another tool in the author’s bag of tricks that is used to suspend disbelief, create interesting characters, etc. Compare this to a novel such as Vonnegut’s _Galapagos_, which is about evolution. Vonnegut is not being very scientific about it, but it’s the entire basis for the plot (or the lack thereof). > [@](#): > > And before you go saying “those aren’t _real_ sciences,” I wasn’t going to. I was going to say that, except for biology, those are _soft_ sciences – see OP’s subject. A science-fiction novel that concerns itself with sociology is still “soft” science fiction. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/24 "2004-01-21T06:03:16Z")
It’s almost midnight here and I’ve got to get to bed very shortly, so just a few brief remarks now and if those don’t satisfy, I’ll try to answer further objections tomorrow. First, **gentle**. I champion _Babel-17_ because it deals with outsiders and rebels who are not merely lowlifes and mavericks but those with a close relationship to the technology spreading across several class lines, just a cyberpunk would feature. And because it started the fashion - still in vogue - of people jacking themselves in to their machines, a prime cyber trope. Dick never had the relationship with technology down correctly in any of his books. The vastly underappreciated John Brunner was on a much higher and more aware level, from the aforementioned _Stand on Zanzibar_ to the follow-up _The Sheep Look Up_ and beyond. But cyberpunk was a thoroughly American invention and few Brits got into it until the very end, when it was already transforming. You could also throw in the little remembered _The Missing Man_ by Katherine Maclean. But this came almost completely after the fact, after _Neuromancer_ appeared to come out of absolute nowhere and people were casting backwards for antecedents. We can agree to see a different listing of them. I don’t know offhand what Gibson has said on the subject. As for Michael Crichton; there is a phrase of disparagement in the field that something is Michael Crichton science - i.e. phony and impossible extrapolation presented as currently possible. **Peyote Cowboy** , you’re trying to make the 40s and 50s out to be something other than they were. Certainly they were more diverse than merely Heinlein and Asimov; certainly the authors who mainly wrote for Horace Gold at _Galaxy_ or for Anthony Boucher at _F&SF_ tended to see and write a different world than those who were in the _Astounding_. But they were also less likely to be pulling off hard science stories. And Campbell did ride herd on what was acceptable and many writers left him because of it. And the aliens that appeared in many, many of the stories were not societies with rich cultures with a thing or two to show earthmen. They were silly or befuddled or primitive or easily defeated in war, or commerce, or swindled out of their lands and money. A prime example of this came in the many all-too-identical stories that comprised Blish’s Cities in Flight series. (The Boucher stories you mention, BTW, are about robots not aliens.) The best story in the field for the entire decade that was about blacks was Ray Bradbury’s “Way Up in the Middle of the Air,” one of the stories in the Martian Chronicles. It is set in 2003, and shows the blacks leaving the south in their rocket ship after another half century of confinement to the total astonishment of their employers and “owners.” It is a sharp and devastating story and virtually unique for its time. I know this era of sf has its defenders and I cannot fathom why. The exceptions were mild exceptions - Heinlein’s adult novels in the 50s are mostly utterly appalling when one tries to find human beings and recognizable human societies in them; Asimov’s feeble flailing attempts to write epics about empires when he could not write a single three-dimension character are merely pathetic - and the everyday average story was lesser yet. The stories that live and are readable today are rarely those of hard science, but from the mavericks like Bester and Sturgeon and Walter M. Miller. Bradbury struts miles above the Astounding crew and the Vonnegut of the 50s was the only one who actually had something meaningful to say about the future. And even they wrote about futures which would be American. Heinlein got his work into the slick magazines like the _Saturday Evening Post_ and every one of them was an exemplar of the Consensus Future. That was the image that anyone other than the most dedicated fan took from the field. _The Jetsons_ creators didn’t invent all those cliches: they were so ripe for the plucking that they fell into their laps. But none of this really undermines my original point, which is that the hard science fiction novel has markedly changed in execution and in intent over the decades and that anyone interested in learning about them needs to knows that there’s a little more to them than aliens and rocket ships. ---
**Author:** ![Hunter\_Hawk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/50afbb/32.png) [@Hunter\_Hawk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hunter_Hawk)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 9:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/25 "2004-01-21T09:20:12Z")
> [@gentle](#): > > Further, if anything should be termed proto-cyberpunk, it’s _The Shockwave Rider_ (1976) by John Brunner. Erm…I think you misspelled “_Dr. Adder_ (1972) by K. W. Jeter”. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/26 "2004-01-21T17:06:56Z")
> [@Hunter Hawk](#): > > Erm…I think you misspelled “_Dr. Adder_ (1972) by K. W. Jeter”. Er, I think you typoed the year “1984” in that sentence. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5f8ce5/32.png) [@The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Peyote_Coyote)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/27 "2004-01-21T19:47:25Z")
> [@](#): > > And the aliens that appeared in many, many of the stories were not societies with rich cultures with a thing or two to show earthmen. They were silly or befuddled or primitive or easily defeated in war, or commerce, or swindled out of their lands and money. A prime example of this came in the many all-too-identical stories that comprised Blish’s Cities in Flight series. (The Boucher stories you mention, BTW, are about robots not aliens.) I never said every story was good; I’m a firm believer in Sturgeon’s Law. I merely refuted the notion that few stories that appeared in **Astounding** mentioned aliens. In Eric Frank Russell’s stories, the aliens are often befuddled or loopy because he is clearly using caricatures to mock the stultifying effects of bureaucracies and Big Government. Incidentally, the Boucher stories I mentioned featured a background containing a world government headed by a black man and Venusians and Martians. “QUR” contains a conversation in which one human asks others why humans treat Venusians like antebellum blacks, but respect Martians, and another man replies that humans beat the shit out of the Venusians, but the Martians damn near committed genocide against Earthlings during an interstellar war. If you read sci-fi from the '40’s and '50’s this indifferently, then it is no wonder you get little out of it. > [@](#): > > I know this era of sf has its defenders and I cannot fathom why. Some of us enjoy the play of ideas when authors try to create new cultures as Heinlein did in “Universe;” others like to play the game of What If; others like rattling good adventures like Eric Frank Russell’s _Sinister Barriers_. You won’t find any rich human characters in that one, but I personally find it loads of fun to see how the humans end up overcoming the Vitons, and enjoy the way Russell tries to make an utterly fantastic idea somewhat believable. Others like the capability sci-fi has for satire – the way an author can take one facet of a society and extrapolate it to extremes to satirize that society. _The Space Merchants_ is a prime example of this, and, when you look at certain elements of modern America, it appears Pohl and Kornbluth were spot on in their criticism. I would note that you praised Joanna Russ, but in her criticism for **The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction** , Dr. Russ once offered high praise to Clarke and Heinlein (as well as Lovecraft – NOW there’s a man who created alien societies). Harlan Ellison admired Asimov greatly, and Silverberg got his start under Campbell in the 1950’s. I find it curious that several authors you admire find much more in the Golden Age than you do. Exapno, I recommend you read the first chapter of Philip Jose Farmer’s _Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life_. Farmer examines why authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs continue to be read by millions while authors like Henry James are read by relatively few people. His explanation of this is rather instructive. > [@](#): > > Heinlein’s adult novels in the 50s are mostly utterly appalling when one tries to find human beings and recognizable human societies in them I’ve met many young men like Juan Rico and have known a couple like Jean Dubois. There is more to the species than _Homo academia_, Exapno. I would note that the main point of _Starship Troopers_ is to explore what it means to be a good citizen, and _Double Star_ is a spy romp. Incidentally, Lorenzo’s character undergoes quite a bit of growth in the latter. Also, if I recall correctly, only a couple of Heinlein’s minor stories appeared in Saturday Evening Post. I think is grossly unfair to say these are entirely representative of his work in the 1940’s; they are certainly not as well-known as “The Green Hills of Earth” and “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” Furthermore, I find it richly ironic that you accuse every single sci-fi author of these decades of writing American futures, and then gripe about a couple of Heinlein’s works, one of which shows, admittedly in brief, a world civilization built on the ruins of the USA, the UK, the USSR et. al, and the other of which shows a solar system-wide empire in which the USA is merely an important province. Maybe Heinlein could have done a better job, but I would submit he wrote several novels in the '50’s and '60’s which offered non-American futures. Poul Anderson did a much better job of it in his books, and I notice you don’t address any of Anderson’s works; I suspect it’s because you know his body of work refutes every single contention you have made. Neither do you acknowledge that Vance was creating some of the wildest societies imaginable in the '50’s. I also suspect that we here today will not be able to recognize societies of 2234 and 4516 were a time machine to take us there, just as I suspect modern-day America would be alien to Jefferson, Washington, and Adams, and modern-day Italy would baffle a Roman legionnaire. > [@](#): > > Asimov’s feeble flailing attempts to write epics about empires when he could not write a single three-dimension character are merely pathetic - and the everyday average story was lesser yet. And yet the Good Doctor continues to be read. Amazing, isn’t it? I would suggest, Exapno, that when one tries to write epics about empires in the limited confines the magazines and book publishers of that day provided, one tends to get to the point rather quickly. I would also submit that the Foundation Trilogy continues to be read because its second and third books are excellent Golden Age mysteries. > [@](#): > > The stories that live and are readable today are rarely those of hard science This is bullshit and you know it. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, van Vogt, and others are still widely read today. I.e., I would say the majority, if not the overwhelming majority, of Dopers are familiar with the works of all four. > [@](#): > > , but from the mavericks like Bester and Sturgeon and Walter M. Miller. Bester and Sturgeon began as Campbell writers, and ol’ Alf wrote at least one story, “Oddy and Id,” for Campbell after **Galaxy** had become his main magazine. Furthermore, both understood science quite well; it shows in stories like Bester’s “Adam and No Eve” and Sturgeon’s early work. Everything I’ve read by Miller indicates that he was quite conversant with modern science and technology. In fact, in one of his stories – I’m sorry that I can’t remember the title, but it was reprinted in Silverberg’s Alpha series – one character lectures a woman he has saved that civilization has suffered an apocalypse precisely because too many of its denizens do not understand the scientific and technological underpinnings of their world. > [@](#): > > Bradbury struts miles above the Astounding crew Agreed, but Bradbury is one of the major talents of 20th Century American literature, and the only sci-fi author likely to be read 100 years from now. > [@](#): > > But none of this really undermines my original point, which is that the hard science fiction novel has markedly changed in execution and in intent over the decades and that anyone interested in learning about them needs to knows that there’s a little more to them than aliens and rocket ships. Agreed again. In fact, I would say hard sci-fi is better than ever because writers like Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sheffield, Pournelle and the **Analog** stable pay much stricter attention to the facts than the Golden Age writers did. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/28 "2004-01-21T20:37:26Z")
I think I know a concise way to define hard science fiction: A book is hard SF if the author needed to do calculations to write it (with the assumption, of course, that the author did the calculations remotely close to correctly, so Star Trek calculations of travel times don’t count). ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/29 "2004-01-21T21:00:53Z")
**elfkin** you should take a look at Stephen Baxter’s book _Evolution_ – its coming out in paperback in March or the Hardcover is probably available in your local library. It’s pretty much all about… well, evolution, and it projects into the far future of Earth. Another vote for _Red Mars_ which is a novel about actually inhabiting Mars that draws on the latest planetary research – lots of biology as well as every other science. KSR also lived in Antartica for a time and modeled his theories on how/what humans would do socially in such a confined space on his observations. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2004, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/30 "2004-01-21T22:09:07Z")
> [@](#): > > _Originally posted by **The Peyote Coyote** _: > Also, if I recall correctly, only a couple of Heinlein’s minor stories appeared in Saturday Evening Post. I think is grossly unfair to say these are entirely representative of his work in the 1940’s; they are certainly not as well-known as “The Green Hills of Earth” and “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” “The Green Hills of Earth” first appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_ on Feb 8, 1947. I’ve read every word published by Asimov and Henlein in the 40s and 50s. And when I was 19 I thought _Stranger in a Strange Land_ was the best sf book ever published. But I no longer thought that when I was 20. And I’m a long way from 20 today. If you want to read older science fiction, that’s fine. There’s much of it I still like and authors I admire. (And all of us, even Russ and Ellison, have soft spots for favorite writers of our youth no matter what our critical facilities may otherwise argue.) But as I said earlier, all science fiction is about the present, and the science fiction of the 40s and 50s was strongly representative of that present. If you want to delude yourself into thinking that a background mention of a Martian in a story that is entirely set in a middle-class American future is a meaningful representation I won’t even try to stop you. (The follow-up to “QUR” is “Robinc,” BTW. I wrote the Boucher entry in an encyclopedia of science fiction. I’ve read every word of his 40s and 50s sf and his 40s and 50s mysteries as well.) I haven’t tried to do a full-scale analysis of the sf of that age for the simple reason that doing so is almost entirely irrelevant to the point of the OP, which concerned hard science fiction novels in the SF Book Club. I’ll bet you that they aren’t offering much of Eric Frank Russell. I’m glad you think that today’s hard sf is better. I have to agree. In fact, I think we’re in a small renaissance of hard sf. But you better enjoy it while you can because the hard truth is that it doesn’t sell all that well, and only a handful of writers can do it at all. Our standards for portraying the future are many times more complex than they were in the 40s and 50s and the need to make today’s characters equally complex is a daunting challenge even to the best hard sf writers. Inside the field people are going so far as to call this a crisis. I tend to agree on this as well. Fantasy is far less complex to write and can convey character much better. It’s an odd fate that an ever-more-scientifically advanced future might destroy sf. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2004, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/31 "2004-01-22T00:23:00Z")
Heinlein’s Sat. Eve. Post stories were selected to be more mainstream and less science fictiony than the bulk of his work (either by what he sent or what they rejected.) I agree that hard sf is a small part of the market - but was it ever that big a part of the market? I wouldn’t consider the Foundation series hard science fiction particularly - psychohistory is no more science than all those rays from '30s sf. Mission of Gravity was hard sf, but it certainly didn’t make Harry Stubbs rich. There is always going to be more of a market for books in which the science looks real, but isn’t real or central. I agree that all sf is about the present, but then all writing is about the present. Even biographies view a person according to what is important at a particular time. Still, I’d say Baxter’s Origin books are a lot less about the present than, say, Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merrill was. With respect to the treatment of science, how about this classification: Those who care and get t mostly right: People like Hal Clement, Baxter, Clarke, Anderson,… Those who aggressively don’t care: many New Wavers, Barry Malzberg, etc. Those who care but screw it up: Early Bradbury, for example. Those who don’t have a clue: Probably most. Doesn’t mean that they are bad writers, in fact many of the best writers fall into this category, like Sturgeon and Henry Kuttner. To complicate matters, many who do well in one aspect of science mess up others. Lots of people who write well about physics get the ecology of their worlds all screwed up. ---
**Author:** ![Hunter\_Hawk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/50afbb/32.png) [@Hunter\_Hawk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hunter_Hawk)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2004, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053/32 "2004-01-22T05:08:58Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > Er, I think you typoed the year “1984” in that sentence. According to the afterword in my copy, it was written in 1972, though not accepted for publication till later. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-hard-science-fiction-and-would-i-like-any-of-it/225053.md?page=1)