Yup, social scientists in particular. Postmodern social theorists are always asking themselves, “What if those middle-aged cis-hetero white men who said we can’t go FTL were right all along?”.
You missed a middle ground: what if scientific principle X is false? Explore how this impacts society, etc.
Greg Egan writes stuff that I think anyone would call hard sci-fi, but much of his work is not just scientifically implausible, but downright counterfactual–like “what if the mathematics of the integers was inconsistent?”. Not to mention things like “what if the universe didn’t follow the Minkowski metric of (-, +, +, +), but instead (+, +, +, +)?”
Science isn’t abandoned just to move the plot forward; the point is to explore the consequences, just as with other hard sci-fi that posits nanotechnology or other, more plausible technology.
ETA:
That sounds interesting, but like it should probably be considered its own sub-genre. I don’t think it’s a very big one, however–especially on TV and in movies.
Re Greg Egan - I know the Minkowski (++++) novels (Clockwork Rocket series), but what’s the one about “what if the mathematics of the integers was inconsistent?”
It’s a short story from the collection Luminous.
I am familiar with this story, but it was not also written by Egan under another name, or was it?
On second thought, I do remember that “Luminous” story, and it pre-dates the other one. Sorry. Neither is hard science-fiction in any sense, naturally.
True, but the Elysium still wasn’t anywhere near large enough to be able in an atmosphere without some kind of roof for the ring part.
I’d say the original is close, traveling at high speeds with time dilation.
The reboot had some sort of alternate reality storm thingy or something that didn’t seem too sciencey.
Both may have experienced brief bouts of artificial gravity.
Isn’t this the movie where exposure to sunlight causes immediate dementia, and whose basic premise is that the sun is going out but popping a nuke in it will relight it?
Sure, and plenty of authors do that. But most don’t have the equations to back it up when they do.
Personally, if I have to draw a line somewhere between what is hard and what it’s soft, I ask “Did the author have to do any calculations in order to write this work?”. Thorne not only did so, but they were quite advanced calculations.
This sounds like Gernsbackian scientifiction.
Or they could work out a justification for the new idea, one that does not contradict existing knowledge but which has not yet been demonstrated.
An example might be a story which is based on the premise that string theory is correct. Definitely not proved yet, but also definitely not contradicting known science.
By your principle, a story about relativity written in 1910 would not be hard science fiction, even if it got everything right. That is, after Einstein’s paper got published, and before relativity was confirmed by the eclipse expedition.
Agreed. I suppose that was intended to be some kind of force field. Which is something you see in a lot of SF, but no one has mentioned it here. My first impulse is to dismiss it as not a plausible technology. OTOH, magnetism works as a force field of sorts protecting us here on Earth (that’s what we see in the aurora borealis), and I remember being fascinated as a kid by magnets that repel each other. So maybe I’m too pessimistic there?
BTW, I may as well mention my fundamental problem with that movie: the economics. I get that they are trying to make a parallel with inequities in access to health care in our own time. But what they portrayed would be the equivalent of, in 2017, the one percent each having their own private doctor and even their own private hospital, which is idle the vast majority of the time, while the rest of us have no health care at all. Even as wealth inequality grows, that’s never going to happen. Up on Elysium, each person has a medical pod in their house, like a jacuzzi or something. But a big metro area like Los Angeles back on Earth can’t afford to have a couple of those pods at the county hospital, and set up a queue for poorer people to shuffle through? Or how about, at the very least, a middle manager type like the supervisor at the robot factory? Why isn’t it a job perq for him that he and his family get to use a pod reserved for the company’s management, even if it’s just once a year or something?
If they had portrayed it as being something even Elysium only had one or two of, and it was like a nuclear power plant with a huge control room of technicians and engineers running it, that would have made the story work a little better. But having one in each wealthy person’s living room blew the whole thing for me.
The dementia thing you are talking about (although it’s not immediate) is from the latter half of the movie, where it becomes really, really bad. Almost every critic has called this movie a tale of two halves. (And BTW, I think I got the movie’s name wrong: it is called Sunshine.)
The “popping a nuke” thing is certainly questionable, although it’s supposed to be all the fissile material on Earth, and per Brian Cox (the movie’s science advisor, who happens to be married to someone who was part of my teenage social group) it’s not that the sun is “going out” (which would be impossible to fix) but that:
Now, it’s certainly an open question as to whether this is plausible enough to count as “hard”. But what I find really impressive is the first part of the movie where that is only briefly mentioned as their plan (with no idea if it’s really going to work), and the crazy guy is nowhere in sight. It’s the design of the ship that takes them to the Sun, and a pitfall they run into along the way (accidentally turning at an angle that takes part of the ship out of the “shadow” for a moment) and how they solve it, spacewalking in reflective, insulated suits that still have to stay away from the full glare of the sun at all times, that I consider a really nice little mini-feature. This YouTube video appears to show all the exterior shots of the ship, which is called Icarus II.
ETA:
That’s fair. But it’s also a “know it when I see it” thing, and by my eyeball test it just didn’t fly. Obviously MMV.
While the movie might qualify as hard SF under the definitions given the TV program does not. One episode involved time travel, two involved aliens and implied FTL travel, and one involved ghosts. Most episodes would be OK but those 4 disqualify the series as a whole.
I sure as hell do consider Verne hard science. He researched his stuff meticulously and extrapolated from existing trends. He is the very model of the “Hard” SF writer. I consider his allowing his heroes to be shot out of a cannon and not get blasted into jelly as a necessary exception to get the story in motion, just like modern Hard SF writers allow Time Travel or FTL TRavel into their stories, but keep the science straight after that point (as in, say, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.)
as for Charly, I’d normally class that as “soft” SF, since it doesn’t rely on technical details of the relevant science. But it qualifies as “hard sf” by the terms of the OP, which is what I’m going for.
My dismissal of your statement is because saying that it’s basically a normal , soap-opera-ish drama ignores the fact that nothing in the story would have happened , and the relevant crises and dilemma would not have arisen if it weren’t for the unusual science at the core. Science Fiction literature, and movies, are about how people respond to such unusual situations and stimuli. Your abrupt dismissal of the story because it contains such human elements is simply absurd. That’s what a story IS.
My favorite - Silent Running
While it’s possible to build ships like that, and it does take place inside to solar system. I hesitate to call it “hard” SF.
1.) They seem to have artificial gravity. If they don’t, you have to explain to me how it is that they aren’t all floating. (and the “bio-hemi-spheres” are tilted at different angles relative to each other, yet you can stand upright in each. They clearly aren’t using centrifugal gravity or acceleration gravity)
2.) The engineering seems wonky. I’d think you would need insulation and/or heating to keep the sides and domes facing away from the sun livable
3.) the end solution (“They’re dying because they don’t have any sun!”) seemed incredibly obvious to me long before the hero came up with it. And, again, what’s the source powering those light bulbs in the dome? There doesn’t seem to be anything BUT dome. The plants (and the remaining “drone”) should’ve been floating in the dark and the cold at the end.
Ghosts, you say? Good grief! :smack:
I like that movie a lot too, but I think CalMeacham makes good points.
One of the things that struck me as sadly realistic when I first saw it is how the other workers were perfectly happy to nuke the trees and get home. And they were totally content with their synthetic food and looked at his bespoke, naturally-grown food skeptically. But I have to say, since then it does seem like consumers are moving away from that attitude and more toward an appreciation of “whole foods”, locally grown, etc. So maybe the screenwriter and I were too pessimistic about that social trend.
I’d disagree a bit with Logan’s Run as well. During the carousel ceremony at the beginning of the movie, the participants float up toward the ceiling and then explode for no explained reason. When Logan selects Jessica on the circuit, she just materialized in his room. Both of those are pretty tangential to the plot, though. There’s also the computer that sends Logan on his mission to find Sanctuary, and interrogates him after he returns; what is it, and how did it wind up running things?
I’d actually argue that how hard a work of science fiction is and how soft it is are two orthogonal axes. A work is hard if it’s based on calculations and established science and extrapolations thereof. It’s soft if it focuses on the characters and their interactions and in general has people acting like real people. But the best science fiction manages to do both of those things, while the worst does neither.
On the one hand, consider what I consider the best SF short story ever, Niven’s “Inconstant Moon”: The science is based on something happening which we really don’t expect to happen, but it’s at least as plausible as many other things we never expected to happen but which then really did. The main characters figure out what’s happening, and the consequences of it, based on a sound understanding of real scientific principles, including some calculations. And the focus of the story is entirely on these two people, and the people around them, and how they react to what may or may not be the end of the world. That meets the criteria both for good hard SF and for good soft SF, which is a large part of why I consider it the best SF short story.
On the other hand, take a look at Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth (or better yet, don’t take a look at it, and just take my word on it). In the entire massive tome, the only two points of science he managed to get right are that herb tea can help a stomachache, and that horses aren’t based on teleporter technology. Literally everything else in the book is wrong. And it’s full of characters who behave like absurd caricatures of people, and don’t react to any of the events before or during the book in anything resembling a realistic way. It’s an utter failure both as hard and as soft SF.