Thorne is right to be proud of Interstellar. It is, as I said, about as hard as it’s possible to get while still having FTL (which, by any relevant definition, it unambiguously does). The thing is, there’s a reason why FTL has traditionally gotten a free pass in science fiction stories: Ultimately, it’s all about the stories you’re telling, and there are a lot of stories you just can’t tell without FTL. Some stories you can, in fact, tell without it, and so you do, but if you restricted yourselves to just those stories, the genre would be much poorer for it. So if you’ve established that you absolutely must have FTL for a particular story, then the question just becomes how you implement the FTL, and Thorne and his team did a very good job there.
Perhaps he means that it will only seem like 18 months to them?
Century City was one example I thought of as well. Particularly because the whole premise was trying to find plausible effects of plausible near-future technologies. And some of those plots are even starting to come true!
There was one episode that dealt with genetic selection of embryos, in which a doctor had noticed that very few parents would choose an embryo that had a genetic tendency towards homosexuality, which is pretty much what’s happening now with Down’s Syndrome. Essentially, what happens when people are given new information, and then make what some people consider to be the “wrong” choice based on that information? Do we ban the technologies that provide the information, do we ban that choice, or do we just live with it?
There was another one that I’d bet large sums of money will come true within a few years, in which a married couple was caught having sex in their self-driving car while on the highway.
And we have built an orbiting hoop that not only has enough mass to generate earthlike gravity on the inner side, but also holds in atmosphere ! (the ships that come to land on the inner surface never pass through any barrier)
LV-426 is in the Zeta Reticuli system which is 39 light years away from Earth. From the film Alien: “Found it. Just short of Zeta II Reticuli. We haven’t even reached the outer rim yet”
I missed the previous question about the Sulaco specs being “official” and it’s always hard to say with this stuff. The Technical Manual with the specs was authorized by 20th Century Fox and supposedly had some studio input but when you’re dealing with large studios owning the right to a franchise someone else developed, where do you decide that something is in the original designer’s intent or canonical?
In any event, given the distance between Zeta Reticuli and Earth and the (relatively) short time Ripley spent lost before being recovered and finding herself in Earth’s orbit, some sort of FTL travel is the only realistic option.
A Paperclip Maximizer told to “protect humanity” could easily end up there.
And I could imagine that most people got into the goop pods of their own volition before the war.
Did that happen in the first movie? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. If not, I’m willing to accept that the sequels don’t count as “hard”. I’m willing to ignore them altogether.
That’s close enough!
Not exactly what you asked, but something like this happens in Capricorn One. NASA is ready to launch the first manned mission to Mars, but just before liftoff the astronauts are spirited away and secreted somewhere. Turns out there was a problem with the spacecraft, so a small group of conspirators have decided to fake the mission from a soundstage, and the crew reluctantly participates. During a broadcast from the soundstage, that’s supposed to be from Mars, technicians slow the footage down to simulate Martian gravity.
And by the criteria in this thread, Capricorn One probably counts as hard science fiction.
I trust you don’t consider Verne hard science fiction. However, they were weightless, and he knew enough not to have them land on the moon, so it wasn’t totally mundane.
Flowers for Algernon is the kind of science fiction which those not particularly versed in science can write, and which is more accessible than hard sf. Flowers for Algernon would have worked just as well if a fairy made Charley smarter, and the temporary nature was later discovered. It’s a great story, but is hard sf any sf where the author doesn’t get the science wrong by not having much science? Seems a stretch.
I agree on the technological aspect. It’s on the social science end of things that *Elysium *gets way too much stuff super wrong IMO.
That last point is a definite problem. But a spinning hoop just needs the right rotational speed to create artificial gravity, not any particular amount of mass.
Yup, agreed. I remember seeing that movie many years ago on TV. Pretty enjoyable. Wasn’t OJ one of the astronauts?
Fair enough!
Again: I’m not arguing hard sci-fi should be the only kind. Some of my all-time favorites (those first 25 episodes of nu-BSG being a prime example) fail to qualify. But I think it’s legit to define it as a sub-genre, and to give it a little extra appreciation when it’s done properly since, as you note, it’s more difficult to do so. Now, in the case of Interstellar, I also happen to not think it’s an especially good movie (more precisely, it’s got really cool parts and really groan-inducingly awful parts).
Scientific American said:
Then later they had Thorne on the site to defend himself and the movie (and pimp his book). Even in that capacity, he admitted:
Then, when asked why he had a wormhole be the mode of transit if it’s probably impossible:
That’s fine, but I don’t believe that is hard sci-fi.
I would say, BTW, that although I adored Carl Sagan as a person, really liked the book Contact (which he wrote with Ann Druyan), and mildly enjoyed the movie adaptation (minus the McConaghey parts), I would not consider either the book or the movie to be hard sci-fi. Which is a little surprising given the source!
I agree with Chronos. Why are you taking FTL travel off? FTL travel was a staple of Hard cord SF from the very beginning of the genre. Also rules of Asimov, much of Heinlein, Clarke, etc
You dont want hard SF, you want realistic SF.
But others listed here are not SF at all:
Lord of the Flies- where is the SF?
Fahrenheit 451: kinda sorta set in a alt future, but nothing esle SF about it. In fact this story has ruined so many High Schoolers idea of what good SF is.
Here are a few that qualify by your rather outré quals:
Marooned - (1969)
Destination Moon (1950)
Silent Running
Moon (2009 )
Yes, he was (the other two were James Brolin and Sam Waterston).
It’s another example, I think, of the hypothesis that came up early in this thread: the further in the future that a sci-fi film or TV series is set, the less likely it is to be purely “hard” sci-fi.
I see them as the same. That you don’t is hardly shocking to me. After all, the first sentence of my OP reads:
You seem to see it as the same as “*hardcore *SF”, which is not something I had ever even considered. I don’t know if that factors into the origin of the term. But your own cite defines it as “characterized by an emphasis on scientific accuracy”, and I would agree with that. Scientific accuracy precludes FTL travel.
But maybe I need to state for the umpteenth time that for me to say something is not hard SF is not to say that it is “not really SF at all” or even that it is not as good. Some of my favorites are not hard, although if a story is meticulously hard it is likely to have a “floor” of legitimacy that keeps it from being one of my least favorites.
ETA:
Indeed. And on that point, I’ll once again flack for Passengers: unlike The Martian or Gravity, it has to be set at least a thousand years from now, if not more. So I think it might be sui generis in being so hard that far in the future–at least for a major motion picture.
Nope, I mean Hard SF, as per that wiki link:
*Scientific rigor[edit]
The heart of the “hard SF” designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the “hardness” or rigor of the science itself.[8] One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically and/or theoretically possible. For example, the development of concrete proposals for spaceships, space stations, space missions, and a US space program in the 1950s and 1960s influenced a widespread proliferation of “hard” space stories.[9] Later discoveries do not necessarily invalidate the label of hard SF, as evidenced by P. Schuyler Miller, who called Arthur C. Clarke’s 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust hard SF,[3] and the designation remains valid even though a crucial plot element, the existence of deep pockets of “moondust” in lunar craters, is now known to be incorrect.
There is a degree of flexibility in how far from “real science” a story can stray before it leaves the realm of hard SF.[10] Some authors scrupulously avoid such technology as faster-than-light travel, while others accept such notions (sometimes referred to as “enabling devices”, since they allow the story to take place)[11] but focus on realistically depicting the worlds that such a technology might make possible. In this view, a story’s scientific “hardness” is less a matter of the absolute accuracy of the science content than of the rigor and consistency with which the various ideas and possibilities are worked out.[10]*
Now sure, you can say that you want to hardest of hard SF, those that avoid FTL, and that’s fair. But FTL is indeed *Hard SF. *
Or, at least, as per that Wiki description of the genre, “use of FTL doesn’t necessarily preclude a work from being Hard SF.”
Sure.
From your excerpt of the Wiki article (emphasis mine):
“In this view”. A very important caveat, which if it were not already there, I would edit in. IOW, we are back to what I said from the beginning: there is no universal agreement on what counts as “hard”. You can’t jump from what amounts to “Wikipedia says some people believe FTL should not in and of itself be a disqualification” to “Wikipedia says FTL is okay in hard SF”. Not the same thing.
I think that the point is that hardness of science fiction, like so many other things in life, is a relative, not absolute, thing. There are science fiction stories which are harder than Interstellar by virtue of not having FTL, but there are also stories without FTL which are a lot less hard than it for other reasons.
That said, Interstellar does “try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically and/or theoretically possible.”, even as concerns the wormhole. Kip Thorne is the foremost scientific expert in the world today on the subject of wormholes, he’s done calculations, solved equations, and published papers about wormholes, and the wormhole in Interstellar is consistent with everything that he knows about them. That’s a lot harder than just saying “The ship can go FTL because, um, warp bubbles and antimatter, and something called dilithium, whatever that is, oh, and those long tube thingies on the side of the ship have something to do with it too”. And I say that in spite of the fact that someone did eventually come up with equations and so on for something that can reasonably be called a “warp bubble”.
Then why did he say:
Note the “very probably”, there. He’s not certain, and if they do exist, they (again, probably) look like the one in Interstellar.
Scientists spend a lot of time on exploring the question “But what if I’m wrong?”.
Again, with “very probably” and the Arthur C. Clarke “magic” quote, you can do all kinds of stuff any time you portray alien civilizations, or our own far enough in the future. And more power to you! You might make something I will like, or even love. But I’m not going to classify it as “hard” SF. *Contact *is a great example to point to: the machine they make instantly whisks her away to some far-off planet. No one knows how: even though they were just barely able to follow the blueprints, they don’t actually understand what it does. Fine–neat idea. But “sufficiently advanced” though those aliens are, that makes the story simply science fiction, not “hard” science fiction.
Here’s another way to think about it:
A hard science fiction writer (and I say “writer” because movies and TV shows also begin with writers) is likely, I think, to begin with “Scientific principle or technology X [which already exists and is proven accurate] is interesting, and might plausibly lead to Y. Let’s explore in a story how Y would impact human society and/or individual relationships.”
A non-hard science fiction writer is, I think, more likely to start at the opposite end: “Wow, it would be cool if the human race, or individual people, found themselves in Scenario Y. Let’s invent Handwavium X, perhaps based on some very speculative scientific musings, to justify their getting into that scenario.”