“Anna, if you tell me to bend like a willow I’m gonna throw up.”
An excellent show, especially considering the limited budget they must have had for such ambitious special effects. And while there were only nine episodes, I think two (at least) had crimes that were committed by a scientist looking to prove some controversial theory. I think in “Conversations with the Dead” the crew’s only chance of survival was to use some experimental suspended animation pods that they were carrying. Turned out the ship was sent off course deliberately by the people who developed the pods, but couldn’t get approval to test them on humans. It was a hard science-fiction show, but not with a terribly positive view of scientists.
Yes, but everyone I’ve found who remembers it seems to hate it.
While looking up Star Cops I found a couple pages at TV Tropes that might be of interest to the OP; Mundane Dogmatic and Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, both of which set limits on the amount of impossible or speculative elements that can be included in a work of science fiction.
I’ve recently been binge-watching Person of Interest which I think qualifies as hard SF. It begins as not much more than a cop show with sciency elements - the protagonists are attempting to help victims of crime which have been identified Minority Report-style via a wide-scale AI surveillance device - and ends up as a deep exploration of the possible consequences of powerful independent AIs.
Not always realistic (one dude working by himself is supposed to have written the first superpowerful AI…) but no actually scientiffically impossible elements.
I watched that pilot and was basically “meh”; but come to think of it, I actually have heard that it takes some interesting directions later in its run. Intriguing!
Does the James Cameron Avatar universe have FTL? I can’t remember how the trip there was portrayed. It’s supposed to be, per Wiki, in the Alpha Centauri system, only a little over 4 light years away. A little Googling tells me that if you kissed your spouse and newborn baby goodbye and went on a trip to Alpha Centauri at 1g up to just under light speed, and then reversed the process as you approached, you could stay there a few weeks and make the return voyage in time to see your kid’s eleventh birthday–although to you, depending on how close you got to light speed, it might only seem like a year or two had gone by.
That doesn’t seem too out of line with what we saw in that movie, does it? Or is the communication the problem? I’m not sure they had an eight year lag in sending a message to Earth and getting a reply.
Thank you–of great interest indeed! That site is so awesome, yet I never just go there on my own (it’s always following someone else’s link). I tend to disappear down a rabbit hole when I do, so that’s probably for the best.
It definitely does in terms of the paradoxical aspects. It doesn’t at all in terms of how the time travel would actually be possible, although it does present a veneer of realism by having it result by accident from seemingly mundane research, as well as requiring travel to occur at real-time speed (sitting in a box for twelve hours to go back in time twelve hours).
Ohhh…interesting. It’s been a little while since I saw the pilot, but I don’t recall any aliens. I wonder if they started off with one idea in mind and then pivoted.
Some scifi stories do this with quantum entanglement - would that still invalidate them from being “hard” scifi? Not sure if any movies/TV shows use that explanation though.
Although physicists say this wouldn’t work, it sure is hard from my interested layperson perspective to understand why not–and if a show or movie explicitly noted this as their mechanism, it would sure bring them a lot higher up the scale. (When I posted the OP, I was thinking more along a binary, but I like the rating scale someone posted linked at TV Tropes.) Bonus points if it ironically required sort of going backward to telegraph-style messages (that have to be very carefully rationed) rather than HD Skyping.
Well, I don’t want to give too much away–but no. It follows the books reasonably closely and there’s a clear story arc from the beginning.
To be clear, we aren’t talking about rubber-mask aliens that speak English. Or even space robots. This is more like a child finding a gun. The gun does things that the child doesn’t understand. The child doesn’t understand how it was built, or why, and certainly couldn’t reproduce it. The gun is effectively alien technology as far as the child is concerned and it’s unlikely the discovery will turn out well for anyone.
It depends. Just a vague “it’s quantum entanglement, innit” is pretty weak. I think good hard sci fi doesn’t just throw out buzzwords at the level of Doctor Who or Deepak Chopra to “explain” things.
You can add another, then, coz I never liked it either.
No, it’s just that we don’t find out that the maguffin from Episode 1 has an alien origin till the second season. I believe they’re following the books tolerably closely.
Regarding your list: personally, I’m inclined to allow instantaneous communication as dramatic license, provided it doesn’t otherwise affect the plot, and other elements seem real-worldly enough.
What do you mean by “allow”? I hinted at this in passing in my OP, but to really spell it out: there are movies and TV shows that violate all kinds of rules here that I like or even love: the original Star Wars and some of the sequels; the original Star Trek and many of the later shows (which could be said to include The Orville); and especially the first season and a half of the BSG reboot, which is about as good a 25 episode stretch of TV as I can think of. But I still don’t think any of those fully qualify as “hard” SF.
So are you saying you’re okay with instantaneous communication on an otherwise enjoyable show? If so, I agree 100%. If you’re saying you think it should fully qualify as hard SF, I’m going to take some convincing (especially if it’s not my telegraph-style quantum entanglement device or something similar).
There’s a great scene in *Passengers *(again, I really think it is so underrated) when (pretty mild spoiler here from early in the movie) our protagonist Jim makes a very expensive “phone call” (recording a video message for the people in charge back on Earth) and for a moment is relieved that he has found a way to send a message and someone to send it to, damn the cost. Then the computer shows him how long it will take, and there’s a great graphic showing the time the message will take to get back to Earth and the then greater amount of time it will take for a reply to get to him (since the ship, travelling at half of light speed, will have moved a fair distance in the interim) and his shoulders just sink. So well handled.
The delay in The Martian was much shorter (20 minutes or so) but still made for an interesting wrinkle in the proceedings. But apparently (checking Google just now) maintaining that delay was one of the hardest thing for the studio bigwigs to accept! So no wonder we hardly ever see it.
The main characters become increasingly well-drawn as the series progresses, too It’s an excellent series. There’s also that rarest of things: a canine sidekick that actually adds to the show.
Ahem!! :rolleyes: You claim that Interstellar is not “hard science”? Interstellar, the film that recruited one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists as consultant and executive producer precisely to create a strong scientific grounding? Which physicist, in fact, actually wrote a book called The Science of Interstellar that explains the real and/or at least plausible science in the film, and had this to say about it:
Kip Thorne, the Caltech theoretical physicist who is the author of The Science of Interstellar, served as the science advisor for the movie and was involved in it from the very beginning, when a friend of his, producer Lynda Obst, discussed with him the concept for a science fiction film she was considering. He signed on, thrilled to help shape what could become a major movie. “But most important to me,” he writes, “was our vision for a blockbuster movie grounded from the outset in real science.” http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2718/1
Now granted, a couple of the science ideas are pretty speculative, and the sappy stuff at the end is best granted a few dollops of artistic license, but by and large I’d cite this movie overall as a prime example of one that works hard to base the plot ideas on plausible real science. There’s certainly no FTL or warp drives in it; in fact, Christopher Nolan wanted such a plot point, and Thorne flatly refused, resulting in a lengthy impasse before Nolan finally relented. The only way Interstellar could be regarded as not hard science fiction is if you defined the criteria so narrowly that you strictly limited yourself to known present-day science that has a broad consensus of support, but that would not be so much a science fiction movie as an engineering project proposal.
I’d make similar comments about 2001, particularly since Arthur C. Clarke was known for his many hard-science writings. There’s lots of real science throughout. The monoliths are not “woo”, they are emblematic of how highly advanced technologies might appear to us, inexplicable and foreboding, capturing the spirit of Clarke’s own words: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Indeed that’s just what a primitive savage would see when looking at a modern processor microchip: a miniature black monolith that can be induced to work magic.
Just for contrast, a good example of NOT hard science fiction is Star Trek, which really just a space soap opera using spaceship settings for all kinds of silly plots, and which has a kind of cheerful careless disregard for real science.
The movie Contagion. It’s about as realistic a portrayal of a mass plague as you will get. Doesn’t fall into any of the melodramatic Hollywood traps most disaster movies do and treats the subject seriously but is still very entertaining. It came and went from theaters and is basically forgotten now but I really really like it.
Sorry, wolfpup: I think that “sufficiently advanced science…magic” quote from Clarke is too easily used to handwave what are essentially wizards, or mysterious spirits. And the sappy stuff at the end of Interstellar isn’t just a minor problem: it’s the culmination of the film. The tesseract, the Morse code, the causality paradox: all pretty “woo” IMO.
Which is not to say there isn’t some cool hard sci-fi elsewhere in the film. In particular, the visit to the water planet near a black hole event horizon that leaves a crewman waiting on the ship for years and years was neat.
But even earlier in the film: I had a very hard time buying the idea that a civilization capable of creating interstellar spacecraft was unable to make food, somehow, someway. Even if I accept that they couldn’t use agrotech to save outdoor farming from the “blight”, what about greenhouses or hydroponic vegetable growing done in sealed, sterile environments using nuclear power? Or even purely synthetic calories? I have faith that humans, back to the wall with that level of technological capability, would come up with something other than “move everyone to a faraway planet”. Furthermore, how to explain that the public school teacher (a government employee) is hostile to science and technology, and seems to represent an official line; while presumably trillions is being spent by another branch of the government on the interstellar travel program? You can’t, other than “it will be cool for plot purposes”.
You’ve convinced me! I’m going to start with the third season episode “Lethe”.
ETA:
That is a *great *movie. It’s set in the present day, without introducing any new technology or anything; so I’m hesitant to even call it science fiction. But I can see how that argument can be made. If it is science fiction at all, it’s definitely 100% hard and just an excellent film overall.
I wouldn’t recommend jumping into the middle, to be honest. The show starts of as “number of the week” but increasingly less so as it progresses. This is a pretty good spoiler-free essential episode guide for the first 4 seasons:
I’d start earlier; a good point would be the 16th episode of Season 2, “Relevance”, which is the first appearance of eventual regular cast member Sarah Sahi.
…with the glaring exception, sadly, of the putative lead, who is still brooding and glowering in Season 5 in exactly the same way that he brooded and glowered in the first episode. Everyone else gets waaay more interesting though. And - yeah, I’m not much of a dog person myself but Bear *is *certifiably adorable
Hardcore fans of TV shows are always horrified by my selective curation (based on reviews, numerical ratings, lists of best episodes, etc.) of ballyhooed TV shows. You’ve got to see it all! they always insist. But there’s just not enough time. There are after all over a hundred episodes of this show! To even contemplate watching half that many (if it hooks me enough) is pretty major. But I am really interested in the subject (AI).
Bottom line is I’m not going to get to everything before I croak, not even close. I’d rather get through the best halves of two shows than all of one show and none of the other. Completists will obviously disagree…completists gonna complete.
