With The Martian a big-screen success and Star Wars: The Force Awakens blowing box office doors off their hinges, articles like this one from NPR have begun appearing all over, encouraging SF authors and readers to “Get Real.” Meanwhile, debates about whether one movie or another is scientific enough are cropping up in various corners of the internet. (This, in my view, feels like an odd ranking system—if one movie has a sarlacc pit as an ancestor, and another might be seen as channeling Ghost [1990, the one with Demi Moore] as a way to explain cross-universe communication via physics… it’s pretty cool, yes? It’s fun to let imaginations wander about? Yes. I’ll be seeing you in the comments, yes. Onwards.)
So is a deeper, harder line being drawn in the sand about “hard” science fiction than usual? Or are we discovering that perhaps there’s a whole lot more sand available with regards to how imaginative and future-looking fiction can develop, and even entertaining the possibility that these developments could become blueprints for future-fact?
I asked ten science fiction authors about their definitions of “hard” and “soft” science fiction, and how they see science fiction (hard, soft, and otherwise) in today’s terms. They returned with ten fascinating—and not surprisingly, entirely different—answers.
Have a read and then maybe jump in the comments to discuss!
Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress’s latest work is The Best of Nancy Kress (Subterranean Press, 2015).
“Hard SF” and “soft SF” are really both misnomers (although useful in their way). Hard SF has several varieties, starting with really hard, which does not deviate in any way from known scientific principles in inventing the future; this is also called by some “mundane SF.” However, even the hardest SF involves some speculation or else it would not be science fiction.
High-viscosity SF takes some guesses about where current science might go IF certain discoveries are made (such as, for instance, identifying exactly which genes control things like intelligence, plus the ability to manipulate them). Or, alternately, it starts with one implausibility but develops everything else realistically from there (as in Andy Weir’s The Martian, with its huge-velocity windstorm on Mars). From there you go along a continuum toward things that, with our current level of knowledge, do not seem possible, such as faster-than-light travel. At some point along that continuum, high-viscosity SF becomes science fantasy, and then fantasy, when magic is involved. But the critical point is that it IS a continuum, and where a given innovation belongs on it is always a matter of dispute. This is good, because otherwise half the panels at SF cons would have nothing to argue about.
I would define “soft SF” as stories in which SF tropes are used as metaphors rather than literals. For example, aliens that don’t differ from us much in what they can breathe, drink, eat, or how their tech functions. They have no delineated alien planet in the story, because they are meant to represent “the other,” not a specific scientifically plausible creature from an exosolar environment. This seems to me a perfectly valid form of science fiction (see my story “People Like Us”), but it is definitely not “hard SF,” no matter how much fanciful handwaving the author does. Nor are clones who are telepathic or evil just because they’re clones (it’s delayed twinning, is all) or nanotech that can create magical effects (as in the dreadful movie Transcendence).
Tade Thompson
Tade Thompson’s Sci-fi novel Rosewater, from Apex Books, will be released in September 2016.
First, a working definition of SF: fiction that has, at its core, at least one science and/or extrapolation of same to what could be possible.
Second, a (messy) working definition of a science: a field of knowledge that has at its core the scientific method, meaning systematic analyses of observed phenomena including objective observations, hypothesis/null hypothesis, statistical analysis, experimentation, peer review with duplication of findings. I am aware that this definition is a mess.
Defining ‘Hard’ SF is a bit difficult. If we use the Millerian definition (scientific or technical accuracy and detail), it won’t hold water. The reason is not all sciences are equal in SF. In my experience, fictional works that focus on physics, astronomy, mathematics, engineering and (to a lesser extent) chemistry tend to be filed as ‘Hard,’ especially if there is an exploratory or militaristic aspect. The further the extrapolation of the science from what is known, the more likely the story will be classed as ‘soft.’ On the other hand, those that Jeff VanderMeer jokingly refers to as ‘squishy’ sciences like botany, mycology, zoology, etc. tend to be classed as soft SF along with the social sciences like anthropology, psychology, etc. Medicine can fall either way, depending on the actual narrative.
That the definitions are problematic becomes obvious immediately. I find the terms intellectually uninteresting because they assume that social sciences use less rigor, which I know to be untrue. My background is in medicine and anthropology, and I have seen both sides.
There may be other elements to the definitions. There may be a pejorative flavor to being designated ‘soft’. There may be some gender bias, although I have seen this in discussions, and not in print. Take a lot of the work of Ursula Le Guin. Many would not class her SF as ‘Hard’ despite her clear understanding of anthropology and psychology. The exploration of cultures should not take a back seat to the exploration of the solar system. Take Frankenstein, which is often regarded as the first science fiction novel. Few would regard it as Hard SF, yet it used contemporary scientific beliefs. At the time the novel was set, galvanism was a big thing. Reanimation was not thought to be impossible. The Royal Humane Society in England started with reanimation of the dead at its core, and its motto is a small spark may perhaps lie hid.
At the root of the Hard-Soft divide is a kind of “I scienced more than you” attitude, which is unnecessary. There are fans of all flavours of SF and the last thing we need is to focus on divisions that were introduced in the late 1950s.
Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear’s most recent novel is Karen Memory (Tor 2015). You can find her on Twitter.
I feel like the purported hard/soft SF divide is one of those false dichotomies that humans love so much—like white/black, male/female, and so forth. The thing is, it’s really arbitrary. I write everything from fairy tales to fairly crunchy sciency SF, and I think the habit of shoving all of this stuff into increasingly tiny boxes that really amount to marketing categories is kind of a waste of time. There’s no intrinsic moral element that makes a rigorously extrapolated near-future cascading disaster story (like The Martian) “better” than an equally critically hailed and popular sociological extrapolation. Is anybody going to argue, for example, that 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale aren’t worthy books because they are about societies in crisis rather than technology?
I love hard—or rigorously extrapolated physical—science fiction, for what it’s worth. My list of favorite books includes Peter Watts, Tricia Sullivan, and Robert L. Forward. But it’s not new, and it’s not dying out. It’s always been a percentage of the field (though Analog still has the biggest readership of any English-language SF magazine, I believe) and it’s still a vibrant presence in our midst, given writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and James L. Cambias, for example. It’s hard to write, and hard to write well, mind, and Andy Weir kind of knocked it out of the park.
My own pocket definition of SF is that it’s the literature of testing concepts to destruction: space travel, societies, ideologies. At its best, that’s what science fiction does that most other literary forms do not. (Most of them—the ones with a literary bent, at least–are about testing people (in the form of people-shaped objects called “characters”) to destruction. Science fiction does it on a scale up to and including entire galaxies, which is kind of cool. Drawing little boxes around one bit of it and saying, “This is the real thing here,” is both basically pointless and basically a kind of classism. It’s the Apollonian/Dionysian divide again, just like the obsession of certain aspects of SF with separating the mind from the meat.
(Spoiler: you can’t: you are your mind, and your mind is a bunch of physical and chemical and electrical processes in some meat. You might be able to SIMULATE some of those processes elsewhere, but it seems to me entirely unlikely that anybody will ever “upload a person,” excepting the unlikely proposition that we somehow find an actual soul somewhere and figure out how to stick it in a soul bottle for later use.)
Anyway, I kind of think it’s a boring and contrived argument, is what I’m saying here.
Max Gladstone
Max Gladstone’s latest novel is Last First Snow (Tor, 2015). Find him on Twitter.
Hard SF is, in theory, SF where the math works. Of course, our knowledge of the universe is limited, so hard SF ends up being “SF where the math works, according to our current understanding of math,” or even “according to the author’s understanding of math,” and often ends up feeling weirdly dated over time. In very early SF you see a lot of “sub-ether” devices, from back when we still thought there might be a luminiferous ether; more recent SF that depends on a “Big Crunch” singularity collapse end of the universe seems very unlikely these days, since observations suggest the universe’s expansion is accelerating. Often you find stories in which the orbital dynamics are exactly right, but everyone’s using computers the size of a house, because of course 33rd century computers will still be made with vacuum tubes, or stories that have decent rocketry but a lousy understanding of genetics, or stories that get both rocketry and genetics right, but don’t have a clue how human societies or beings function.
I don’t think there’s a dichotomy, really. “Hardness” is a graph where the X axis starts at zero, and that’s, say, Star Wars—SF that doesn’t even mention math or orbital dynamics, but is still recognizably SF—and proceeds to, say, Apollo 13, which is so hard it’s not even fiction. On the y axis you have “quality.” You can place every SF text somewhere within that space, but no curve exists. Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is SF so hard that it borders on a technothriller, but that hardness doesn’t determine its quality when set against, say, The Left Hand of Darkness (where the plot hinges on FTL comms), or Childhood’s End (force fields, psychic storm omega point gestalts, etc.).
But if we really want something to pose against “hard,” how about “sharp SF”? Sharp SF acknowledges that our understanding of the universe is a moving target, and believes the point of SF is to show how human beings, relationships, and societies transform or endure under different conditions. Sharp SF takes math, physics, sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, psychology, etc. into account when posing its hypothetical worlds—but cares more about the human consequences of those hypotheticals than it cares about the hypothetical’s underlying architecture. I’d include 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Parable of the Sower, Nova, Dune, and Lord of Light as canonical examples of good sharp SF.
Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard’s latest novel, The House of Shattered Wings, was published by Roc (US)/Gollancz (RoW) in August 2015.
I think they’re labels, and as labels they’re useful because they tell you what kind of story you’re going to get, and what it’s going to focus on (in the case of hard SF, hard sciences such as maths, physics, computer science, and an emphasis on the nitty-gritty of science and engineering as core to the plot. Soft SF is going to focus more on sociology, societies and the interaction between characters). The issue with labels is twofold: first, they can be used dismissively, i.e., “it’s not real SF if it’s not hard SF,” or “hard SF is the best kind of SF and everything else is of little worth,” which is unfortunately something I see happening all too often. And it’s doubly problematic, because this dismissal is disproportionately used to single out women/POCs/marginalised people as not writing “proper SF.” (I should add that I’ve got nothing whatsoever against hard SF and will quite happily enjoy an Alastair Reynolds or a Hannu Rajaniemi when I’m in the mood for it).
The second issue is that like any labels, they can be restrictive: they can create an impression in the author’s mind that “real SF” should have such and such; and particularly the emphasis on the nitty-gritty of science makes a lot of people feel like they shouldn’t be writing hard SF, that you should have several PhDs and degrees and everyday practice of physics, etc., to even consider writing something. It’s not that it doesn’t help (as someone with a degree in science, I can certainly attest that it helps make things go down more smoothly with only minimal amounts of research), but I worry that it raises a barrier to entry that doesn’t really have a reason to be there. My personal testimony is that I held off from writing SF because I didn’t think I had the chops for it (and that’s in spite of the actual maths/computer science degree…); and also that it took me a long time to write what I actually wanted to write because I was afraid that taking bits and pieces from every subgenre I liked was somehow an unspeakable crime…
Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams’ novella Impersonations will appear from Tor.com Publishing in September 2016.
I’d define Hard SF as a subdivision of Geek Fiction. I’m currently at work on a General Theory of Geek Fiction, and while my ideas are still in flux, I can define Geek Fiction as that fiction in which the greatest emphasis is given to process. The story becomes not one of plot or character or setting—although ideally those are present as well—but a story in which the action is broken down into a series of technical problems to be solved.
Thus The Martian is a book about all the technical problems that need to be surmounted in order to survive on Mars. C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books are about the technical issues involved in commanding square-rigged sailing ships in wartime. Police procedurals are about the process of police procedure. These sorts of books can be about other things as well, but if the emphasis isn’t on process, it’s not Geek Fiction.
As for Soft SF, it’s better to define it by what it is instead of by what it isn’t. After all, Soft SF includes space opera, science fantasy, dystopia, near-future works, alternative history, time travel stories, satirical and comic SF, and great big unclassifiable tours-de-force like Dhalgren. Just call the thing what it is.
Ellen Klages
Ellen Klages (and her co-author Andy Duncan) won the 2014 World Fantasy Award for the novella, “Wakulla Springs,” originally published at Tor.com.
Attempting to differentiate hard and soft science fiction implies that “science” has gradations on some sort of undefined, Mohs-like scale. Talc science vs. diamond science. But that seems to me a misunderstanding of what science is. Science is not an established body of knowledge as much as it is an attempt to explain things that we don’t yet know, and to organize what we do know in a systematic way. It is the manual that the world ought to have come with, but was somehow left out of the box.
Things We Don’t Know is a rather large category to begin with, and is also quite fluid, because everything we do know is continually shifting and changing—our understanding of reality is a work in progress. When most people say “this is hard science fiction” they mean the plot depends on demonstrable, provable, known facts about the physical world. Hard, like concrete, not fluid and mutable like water.
I sometimes think they also mean it in the same sense as when Mac users were looked down on by PC users 30 years ago: if you didn’t know how to program your computer, you didn’t really know how to use one. If it’s not hard (as in difficult to do or to understand), it has less value.
Historically, hard science fiction has been more about how inanimate objects work than how human beings live. More about plot than about character. Go figure. Humans—or at the very least, biological beings—are part of any world, and there’s so, so much we don’t know about them. So studying what makes humans tick—the sciences of sociology, economics, linguistics, psychology, etc.—must surely be as much part of that missing world manual as physics and chemistry. A person is more complex than any machine I can think of, and when we start aggregating into groups and societies and nations, that complexity grows exponentially.
I prefer my science fiction to be well-rounded, exploring and explaining the people as well as the furniture and the landscape.
Maurice Broaddus
Maurice Broaddus’ latest story, “Super Duper Fly” appeared in Apex Magazine.
The thing is, my background is as a hard science guy. I have a B.S. in biology and I can still remember the grumbling during our graduation when those who received degrees in psychology were introduced as fellow graduates of the School of Science. Ironically, even after a 20-year career in environmental toxicology, the science of my SF writing tends to lean to the “soft” side of things.
There is an imagined line in the sand that doesn’t need to be there. In fact, hard and soft SF go hand-in-hand. Much of the SF I’m drawn to turns on the soft science of sociology. The impact of technology in a culture’s development, how people organize, and how people interact with the technology and each other because of it. (Think of how prescient 1984 seems now.) And for all of the hard science of The Martian, it would all be science porn if we also didn’t have the soft science of psychology in play also. A story is ultimately driven by the psychology of its characters.
Linda Nagata
Linda Nagata’s novel The Red: First Light was a Publishers Weekly best book of 2015.
My definition of hard SF is pretty simple and inclusive. It’s science fiction that extrapolates future technologies while trying to adhere to rules of known or plausible science. “Plausible,” of course, being a squishy term and subject to opinion. For me, the science and technology, while interesting in itself, is the background. The story comes from the way that technology affects the lives of the characters.
I don’t use the term “soft science fiction.” It’s one of those words whose meaning is hard to pin down, and likely to change with circumstances. Instead I think about science fiction as a continuum between hard science fiction and space fantasy, with no clear dividing line—although when you’ve wandered well into one or the other, you know it. And besides, just because we’ve split out the hard stuff, that doesn’t mean that everything that’s left can be dumped into the same “not hard” category. So there is science fiction, and within it there is hard science fiction, planetary stories, retro science fiction, space opera, military science fiction, and a lot more—but I don’t have an all-encompassing term for the non-hard stuff.
Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick’s latest novel is Chasing the Phoenix (Tor, 2015). He’s won many awards.
I go with what Algis Budrys said, that hard science fiction is not a subgenre but a flavor, and that that flavor is toughness. It doesn’t matter how good your science is, if you don’t understand this you’ll never get street cred for your hard SF story. You not only have to have a problem, but your main character must strive to solve it in the right way—with determination, a touch of stoicism, and the consciousness that the universe is not on his or her side. You can throw in a little speech about the universe wanting to kill your protagonist, if you like, but only Larry Niven has been able to pull that off and make the reader like it.
Fran Wilde’s work includes the novels Updraft (Tor, 2015) and Cloudbound (Tor, 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, and Nature. Her novella “The Jewel and Her Lapidary,” will be published by Tor.com publishing in May 2016. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, SFSignal, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on twitter @fran_wilde, and at franwilde.net.
I know it’s a spectacularly useless definition, but my own private definition of hard SF is that it doesn’t contain major elements that I, personally, can immediately call out as bull%!@@@@@%. I can get behind things like new speculative scientific advances or FTL (as long as it’s treated in a consistent way), but it can’t have, say, somebody being injected with tiger DNA suddenly growing teeth and claws, or sound in space, or, for that matter (and I know plenty might disagree with this one in particular) things like ghosts or telepathic powers (at least, not unless they do a lot of work explaining that this thing that looks like telepathy and functions like it in-story, is actually something different that’s science based, not just “psi powers are totally science you guys”). I can forgive the occasional honest mistake or fudge in the name of cool or greater drama (like with the Martian’s opening storm) if there’s a general spirit of trying to play by these rules. My rule of thumb with forgiveness is that I want to have the sense that the author is at least a little torn up about either making the mistake or having to make the ‘fudge’: “Ugh, I KNOW this isn’t exactly how it works but it’s the ONLY way I could think of to get out of this corner I’ve written myself into.” vs “So what, it’s just a story, who cares if it’s accurate!”
Softer SF isn’t worse in general, any more than outright fantasy is, but I tend to like it less.
The best way to describe the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction is that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Every author has a limited number of pages to do their job, and they have to make difficult choices about how to use their words. They can invest in meaningful characters with an engaging plot, and emphasize the mechanics that are impressive and entertaining. Or they can spend immense amounts of time and effort building a realistic scientific system and watch everything else suffer as a result.
“Soft” science fiction can still have a consistent and interesting system; look at Brandon Sanderson for an example. But that system has to be something the characters use, rather than serving as the focus of the work. Every author has to decide what’s most important to them, and “hard” science fiction leans towards the universe and the technology instead of the people who live in it. If there’s one reason why fantasy has been more successful than science fiction in breaking into the mainstream, it’s because fantasy authors don’t have the same pressure to prioritize realistic systems over meaningful characters doing interesting things.
A good way to define “Hard” SF is to go online and see if someone is using liking it as a way to sneer at people they consider less intelligent than them for not liking it. If they are, then chances are it is hard-SF.
The difference between hard and soft science fiction has become blurred because of the discoveries in science and advances in technology. We can do more than we used to with science – driverless cars and genetic manipulation are but two examples. What was once seen as soft science fiction can now find itself in the hard science fiction category.
The question now becomes what of hard science fiction written today? Might I suggest that a lot of so-called hard science fiction writers do not have the imagination to extrapolate the science and technology far enough, which is why it feels as if it is becoming a niche category.
Whilst a lot of people consider me a hard science fiction writer, I prefer the term progressive science fiction writer. It’s to reflect that I’m pushing the boundaries (in various different ways) of science beyond what I’ve seen in science fiction to date. I also happen to like happy endings where the human race makes useful progress using that science and technology.
First, my personal definition of science fiction in general: SF is of a kind of literature of the ideas, where you make one or more assumptions about things that are currently not true, and try to see where they lead the story, exploring their consequences in abstract and/or to the protagonists.
If you use your ideas in a fluid, simbolic ways, not respecting the ideas, or if you could take away all the future setting and have exactly the same story for example in the an historical on contemporary setting, then it’s not SF for me, it does simply use some of SF tropes (that does not means that may not be good literature, simply it’s something other).
Said that, for me ‘hard’ SF is one that takes those assumptions expecially seriously, either by making sure that it does not contradict the best known science of the period, or by taking special efforts in focusing the attention on the consequences of these assumptions. Or both.
If the author is good enough to still write interesting characters and a good story with these constraints that’s good, but the main focus is on the ideas.
‘Soft’ is the SF that while still interested in the ideas, put characters and story first, being willing to compromise on the coherent assumptions to deliver what the author think it’s an interesting story, a character study, or maybe some moral/political/ideological message.
Obviously totally IMHO.
I don’t think that any of these definitions have anything to say about the quality of the final product, or that one can be inherently superior to another.
It’s simply a matter of taste preferring one of these approach to another…
Hard SF must restrict its tech tree to extrapolated theoretical physics.
It shows when writers cooperate with physicists and astronomers.
The revelation space novels get close. NO FTL.
Have a look at this article. An idea about a novel about this going awkward the hard way popped up in an instant. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/04/killer_warp_drive/
“They’re all dead, Jim.”
\\//
Personally, I’ve never much cared if SF is “hard” or “soft”, so long as it tells a good story, about engaging characters. Everything else is just set dressing after that.
When I was introduced to SF in junior high school english it was introduced as speculative fiction in which sci-fi was a subgenre that authors explored the use of and reaction to technology of various sorts, another subgenre space opera or what some refer to now as soft sci-fi in which the authors story was taking place in a location that had various technologies in it
@rosie (4) that’s a really lovely way to put it.
@ghostly1 & @dptullos, interesting!
@ian where do you class Vernor Vinge, with a particular eye to Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky?
One thing that stands out from the author comments is that many of them seem to feel a need to defend the value of ‘Soft’ SF. I find this quite bizarre, since so many of the greatest works of science-fiction fall into that category: Le Guin, Delaney, Vance, etc., etc.
Hard SF is not ‘better’ or ‘true’ SF. Indeed, some of the most telling criticisms of SF as a literary genre have been levelled at those works whose narrow focus on mechanical process labels them as Hard, but ignore the messy business of the human condition. Hard SF is more difficult to write well, since the author is denying themself the easy option of doing an end-run around the incovenient truths of physical law. But authors have the right to decide which constraints they wish to impose on themselves, and it’s the end result that matters.
Truly ‘Hard’ SF is actually very rare, but there’s a lot of space opera that pretends to be Hard. Faster-than-light travel is the simplest criterion: anyone who thinks they can rip up the nature of causality is fundamentally uninterested in physical law, no matter how much attention they pay to relatively trivial engineering details. The Hard/Soft dichotomy is actually false, as the majority of engineering-focussed space-opera should be called ‘Pseudo-Hard’ at best (though ‘Techno-Pron’ might be a better term), but it’s clearly different from Soft SF whose concerns are completely different. Tade Thompson’s remarks are amusing in this light. Though I quite agree that many share the perception he describes, it’s founded on a notion of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences that’s 50 years out of date. I suspect the reason we don’t see more SF novels based on, say, molecular biology is that it’s far more complex and hard to explain than rocket science.
Ultimately these terms are obsolete. Neuromancer is just as much Hard SF as The Martian, but they clearly belong to very different sections of the genre. We have better descriptive terms that are far more useful.
I’m pretty much with #5 fizz on this one. It seems like everyone else is trying to define Hard vs Soft relative to the *science*, and not relative to the *fiction* – they’re saying it’s fiction based on hard science or on soft science, and the debate is over what makes that science soft. This seems the wrong direction to me – the real difference is in how the science is presented by the author.
I think it helps to look at this as part of the same question as to how fantasy and sci-fi can be differentiated. Paradoxically, a story with spaceships can be fantasy, and a story with putative magic can be hard sci-fi.
This broader division is determined (in my mind, at least), by who is the master. In science fiction, people (be they human or whatever) are the masters of the technology; in fantasy, the people have no understanding of the technology, they are merely users. In other words, fantasy has artisans (e.g., wizards) making use of a poorly-understood phenomenon; sci-fi has scientists learning how the world works, and devising technology to take advantage of it.
In this context, some things that look like sci-fi are really fantasy. Star Wars episodes 1-3 are like this: their focus on midi-chlorians is no different from a wizard with magic dust. Frederic Pohl’s Gateway novels are similar: the blind use of alien artifacts is no different from Bilbo Baggins finding that the ring makes him invisible. This is why the setting for so many fantasy stories is a decaying, once-great society: in ages past the people understood their creation, but the knowledge has been lost.
Anyway, hard sci-fi is necessarily science fiction, which means that there’s a systematic, scientific understanding of technology evinced in the story. But the theme or setting isn’t what makes it hard or soft.
In soft sci-fi, the technological aspects are simply a backdrop, something that the story takes for granted without delving into. The space opera sub-genre is almost always soft sci-fi, because the story is all about the action. The ray guns, spaceships, and the like simply exist. There’s no textual support for the actual science involved.
By contrast, in hard sci-fi, the science is an important aspect of the text. The author actively considers the science behind the technological aspects. For example, Vinge’s treatment of the ubiquitous networking in A Deepness in the Sky is clearly hard.
I’m inclined to label Sanderson’s Mistborn as hard sci-fi, because of the way he fleshes out the abilities of allomancers. This might seem odd, because the author really makes it look like magic. But the way they invoke their power, the limitations on its usage and strict adherence to the framework of physical laws that we the readers are already familiar with, strike me as less magical, and more of an empirically-discovered science, and thus some form of sci-fi rather than fantasy. And the fact that it’s a big part of the story (through Vin learning about her powers) makes it, more specifically, hard sci-fi.
So, to sum up a long-winded answer:
Hard sci-fi is science fiction in which the scientific aspects are explicitly addressed as part of the story.
Soft sci-fi just has a high-tech background without giving us any understanding of how or why it works.
In fantasy there is little or no understanding of the “magic”, even by those inside the story (let alone us readers).
It might be, but if said movie is heavily promoted with materials about SCIENCE ACCURACY then it’s somewhat less cool.
@Fran, that’s Hard Fiction ;-)
I have always gone back to the old Analog magazine definition of SF. I think it came from John Campbell when he was editor. Where the science is an integral part of the story to the point that, if the scientific element is removed, the story collapses. If you can substitute spaceships for horses, ray guns for six shooters, and aliens for native Americans, you don’t have SF, you have a western that has turned into space opera.
I remember, back in those days, Campbell printed a series of stories by Randall Garrett about a character named Lord Darcy, a Holmsian type detective who lived in a world where magic worked. But the magic was so well defined, and rigorous in its rules, that it felt more like SF than fantasy.
Without going into it overmuch, I think the actual key difference between “hard SF” and science fiction that is not considered to be “hard SF” is tone. Fiction that is immediately identified as hard SF has a number of other characteristics, including an affiliation with the sciences, but I think that having a somewhat cold, distant tone is key. Hard SF is fiction that opts for the intellectual over the emotional. One of the commenters here suggests that hard SF aligns with theoretical physics. I don’t believe that is accurate. It may do so, but fiction that’s based on any of the other sciences is just as hard as one that is based on theoretical physics.
Sadly, one of the regrettable characteristics of some hard SF is a willingness to distort stories to follow a pattern where breaking the laws of physics is fatal or damaging to protagonists. This is almost always an affectation, as has been shown with Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, rather than a legitimate outcome to the story.
I am beginning to think what matters is whether or not the story, and probably the author, has a “Scientific ATTITUDE” has more of an effect than whether or not the science in the story is truly accurate. Lois Bujold’s novel “Komarr” is centered around the phenomenon of wormholes. They have been used to provide effective FTL in the Vorkosigan series.
As far as I know there is no evidence of wormholes in reality and I would not understand the mathematics involved if I saw it. So for all practical purposes they do not exist. But she writes about them in a very scientific manner as though they are real phenomenon within her universe and the antagonists in the story develop technology to manipulate a wormhole for political/military purposes. But Ms. Bujold uses the plot to portray an idea similar to Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. Reality does not care what humans think, it can kill us if we get it wrong.
But for SF in general any intelligent aliens will have to deal with the same Laws of Physics that we do so their technology may not be as different as some think. Hi-fi equipment from Bang & Olufsen have different styles from Sony, but the transistors work the same way.
Sometimes I think authors who don’t, or can’t, think scientifically are playing the sour grapes game. But some readers don’t care for the scientific perspective and so regard it as unimportant. But you can bet they want the jet engines to work when they go for an airline flight.
Oh man, time to step back and take a breather! 10 authors’ viewpoints and 17 comments just as long. Almost TL:DR. My head is spinning, Gah! What do I even believe anymore?!
But ok, reigning it in, and just because I feel like being controversial, I’m gonna piiiiick @15 AlanBrown. I agree with what you say about substituting non-futuristic objects and turning SF into something other than SF. Which is why I’ve always felt Star Wars is really more fantasy set in space than anything else (maybe not a new idea, but one evangelises when one can). And of course this isn’t taking anything away from a thoroughly enjoyable story, but it just doesn’t do the crucial exploration and extrapolation of the human condition thing. There’s none of that SF tone, as some have mentioned. I guess no one’s ever going to call movies like Star Wars fantasy (though I appreciate Max Gladstone for putting it at the zero of his x-axis), because in the eye of the majority of any audience the line between SF and fantasy will always be far more strongly coded in their respective imagery sets than in their actual subject matter and tone. Simply put, it’s secondary to enjoyment.
As for the line (or spectrum, rather) between hard and soft SF, with little to delineate between imagery, it does fall to tone and such, which is usually nebulous and thus relegated (perhaps happily) to discussions between more discerning audiences.
“Star Wars is really more fantasy set in space than anything else”
Techno-fantasy
Like @12, I think the relevant difference is not between hard and soft SF, but in how coherent the world is. You can have a world that have all the staples of fantasy, and have its working so thoroughly thought out that it feels like hard SF, despite everything being scientifically impossible in our universe.
It is annoying when you immediately realise that the technology/magic introduced by the author could be used in much more interesting ways, but that somehow nobody in that world has thought about it yet. Conversely, it feels great when you can see the world expand behind what is presented in the story, as it allows you to experience not only the story you’re reading, but also to easily imagine the story of the other characters, or what would happen if the characters made another choice: the world seems to exist independently of the story.
Part of the appeal of the dislike for bad science for people with an interest in that field is well explained here: seeing something that you know to be blatantly impossible being introduced for no reason can throw you out of the plot.
> Ultimately these terms are obsolete. Neuromancer is just as much Hard SF as The Martian, but they clearly belong to very different sections of the genre. We have better descriptive terms that are far more useful.
@@@@@charleski – well put.
> It might be, but if said movie is heavily promoted with materials about SCIENCE ACCURACYthen it’s somewhat less cool.
@@@@@Spriggana – Coffee + keyboard. hah.
@@@@@psalle – Ha!
> But the magic was so well defined, and rigorous in its rules, that it felt more like SF than fantasy.
@@@@@Alan – ok, interesting – so does that work within Campbell’s definition?
> Hard SF is fiction that opts for the intellectual over the emotional.
@Jonathan Still with emotions existing tied to characters, yes? What do you think of Charleski’s Neuromancer point?
> Techno-fantasy
@psikeyhackr – it’s so interesting, the balance in Star Wars especially (I am avoiding eps 1-3 because reasons). I had a conversation with Tom Purdom recently about the fact that light sabers — lasers, essentially — work like steel swords (fantasy) rather than lasers (sci-tech)… but that they would have been much more effective *as lasers* – even if the choreography would have been different.
> Part of the appeal of the dislike for bad science for people with an interest in that field is well explained here: seeing something that you know to be blatantly impossible being introduced for no reason can throw you out of the plot.
@Athreeren (20) – this is true, though factoring in what-we-know-now vs. what-they-thought-then sometimes does that with stories formerly thought very accurate hard SF – thus the speculative element. Thinking primarily of comets, and what we know now.
That said, I am very much this way about lots of tech that I know well, networks stuff, and especially boats.
(One of my earlier replies got sent to mod – what looks like a jump is merely cache)
@15 I remember reading that when John Campbell started UNKNOWN magazine in 1939 as the fantasy-fiction “companion” to ASTOUNDING, his guidelines to writers included that any magic in stories would have have as rigorously consistent and thought-out “rules” as if it were science. Probably the quintessential stories of this type were the de Camp/Pratt “Harold Shea” stories, in which the heroes visited various fantasy worlds where they need to figure out the magical “systems” in order to survive: significantly, one of the stories is even titled “The Mathematics of Magic.” It’s also noted in these stories that technological artifacts from our world, such as matches, gunpowder, etc. don’t “work” since they’re not part of the “natural laws” of those worlds.
That’s the framework I use when I’m reading SF that has “impossible science” such as FTL drive, time-travel, etc.: that it’s set in an alternate universe just like ours, except the laws of nature and physics allow for those things to exist. I’m not that concerned about how on STAR TREK warp-drive or impulse power work, or what a “dilithium crystal” is; what I’m interested in is how the ability to travel safely and quickly over interstellar distances affects how people interact and how society develops because of it.
One of the constantly annoying things, like SF’s bias towards white men, is SF’s bias towards science meaning physics.
Biology is soft? Really? How many times has physics laid you out with a head cold, cramps, or a pregnancy?
It really gets insulting, because people who have little or no science background assume that science means physics, that biology is “squishy,” and radiate their tropes accordingly. They follow the Christian literalist line that attacks biology as inconsistent with Genesis 1, while ignoring the first five verses of that chapter, which are totally inconsistent with modern physics, cosmology, and cell phone use.
Here’s one thing to consider: right now, the two fundamental theories of physics (general relativity and quantum mechanics) are irreconcilable on their handling of gravity and time, and the best the Large Hadron Collider seems to have come up with is that we live in a multiverse where all those incredibly expensive particles have values assigned randomly. Theory may end there.
Contrast that with biology, where evolution has no such conflicts, and it was put on a quantitative basis with cladistics over the last 30 years. The only reason you don’t think about it so much is that everyday evolution shows up as new diseases, pests evolving resistance to pesticides, and so forth (there are 20-odd euphemisms for evolution out there used to avoid offending those literalists, and the result is most people don’t think about how ubiquitous stories about evolution in action truly are).
So basically, you’re saying that the best understood science out there is soft, while the one that’s been increasingly navel gazing for years and sending its PhDs to Wall Street instead of rocket factories is hard, with no hint of irony or understanding of the absurdity of this idea.
Oh well, I know, it’s cultural, so I’ll stop now.
The best Science Fiction is very close to Horror… it’s rare for anyone to write anything that is truly scary but of course fear is not exactly embraced… and usually comes out of nowhere…
ANALOG has been outsold by other sf magazines a number of times over the years…it often had an advantage in being published by Street and Smith and Conde Nast for a long stretch of its run, publishers rather more affluent than other that of other sf magazines. I believe it is the current bestseller among the newsstand sf magazines (possibly aside from the TECHNOLOGY REVIEW annuals special fiction issues), but not by much, and less when the digital subscriptions are mixed in.
And, of course, the magazines which and editors who helped promulgate the notion of “hard” sf, Hugo Gernsback in the original AMAZING STORIES issues (1926-1929) and his later magazines, and John W. Campbell, Jr. in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION (later and still titled ANALOG)–though neither actually used that term as much as others have–also loved fantasy of the most utter sort, and would publish it among the diagrammed and 18 decimal places stories and articles when it suited them. Campbell also loved playing with “fringe” science notions, sadly including Dianetics for a while but also “psi” powers, searching for water using dowsing rods, perpetual motion machines and such. While such proponents of “sociological” sf as Thomas Disch at times enjoyed noting how much closer to consensus reality and scientific caution much of the more straightforward “soft” sf was and remains…Isaac Asimov, on several occasions, publicly thanked Philip Jose Farmer for an answer to a question in a joint interview…a woman was asking them questions about sf generally for her newspaper, and asked Farmer first, How do you keep up with scientific advancements? Farmer replied, well, for one, I subscribe to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN…which gave Asimov pause, since as a working scientist, he hadn’t bothered keeping up outside his own discipline, and was impressed that a “soft” sf writer like Farmer was taking the task more seriously. Asimov got his own subscription to SA, and started reading issues of SCIENCE and NATURE and other sources for general coverage, and credited the bulk of his own writing career–more devoted to popular science writing than anything else, including sf–to the nudge that Farmer’s answer gave him. (Asimov also suspected that the reporter was starting to ask Farmer questions first because Asimov and Randall Garrett, also being interviewed by the reporter, were larding their responses with jokes, while Farmer was answering rather soberly…Garrett, a chemist by training, wrote a fantasy series for ANALOG, the fine Lord D’Arcy stories…and Asimov also half-suspected she didn’t mind turning to Farmer first as he was rather better-looking than the other two…)
I got what I think is a good yardstick for the SF/Science fantasy argument from Barry Longyear.
The test is: can the story be told, and be fundamentally the same story, without a particular scientific or technical element to it? The story, you see, has to be rooted in the extrapolation from the one unique scientific or technical idea. For example, if your story can substitute a six-gun revolver for a laser pistol, a Native American for the Alien or Robot, and a horse and wagon for the spaceship… and the story still can functionally work, then you didn’t really write a hard Speculative Fiction story. You wrote a fantasy story with some superficial scientific or technological elements pasted on top of it.
A movie that meets this test for Hard SF ideas and their implications is “The Spotless Mind”, with Jim Carrey. There, you don’t have a movie or a story, without the fictional extrapolation of the actual brain and memory-reading technology. Star Wars by this test is mostly fantasy. But so is a lot of Star Trek, except for a few great exceptions. Roddenberry himself described Trek as “a version of the tv western “Wagon Train”, but to the stars, and also as “Horatio Hornblower – but in space”. There are plenty of Trek episodes that could be re-set in the Age of Sail and still make their point.
I made Barry a little mad, I guess, when I pointed out that using his own rule, his book and movie: “Enemy Mine”, could have been staged as a WW-2 story of a crashed American and Japanese pilot marooned and surviving together on a deserted island… but for the fact one of the pilots is pregnant.
Interesting views. For me:
Soft SF: stories where science is secondary and the story could happen in another environment non scientific without loosing any strength (Red Mars, Dunes, Star Wars, 1984, The speed of Dark) ; characters are more important than the science used. I would add here fantasy books.
Hard SF: stories based on extrapolation of real science theories (2001 Space Odyssey, The Martian, Contact, Tau Zero); characters are secondary (when you finish the book you remember more the science idea or theory than the characters).
Voilà!
Whether it is fantasy or SF, what I like to see in stories is rigor and consistency. Once you decide to tweak biology, social conventions, physical laws, systems of magic or whatever, you have to spin things out to their logical conclusion.
And if you do throw in a fact, make sure you research it. For example, in the new comic book relaunch of Captain Marvel, she is put in charge of an Earth defense space station in geostationary orbit. Which is fine. But then they went on to state the height of orbit as 250 KM. And instead of reinforcing the story, they kicked me right out of it. A quick google search (which I just did) would have given a height above mean sea level for such an orbit as 35,786 KM.
Bottom line, do your homework and think things through.
To me there is no hard or soft sci fi there is only sci fi that follows three primary things to varying levels: 1) imaginative, 2) describes processes, 3) hints at how processes exist. Any sci fi can take these three things and use more or less of each.
Usually sci fi that is higher on the #1 scale is less on the #2 scale. Sci fi that is high on the #1 and #3 scale can definitely include some #2. As #2 rises, #1 decreases and it gets further away from sci fi..
I like all sci fi, but I tend to like sci fi that is #1 and #3 the most. We are writers, not scientists, so our goal shouldn’t be to explain every detail of every technological thing in our created worlds. We should come up with things we foresee or can imagine in the future and use them in the story then come up with a simple, non-technical, explanations that will make sense to the world, characters, and reader.
When I read sci fi or write sci fi I’m thinking about the people and places most. The things are ultimately not interesting, even if you describe them in detail or theorize how they will work in the future correctly, it’s just not interesting, or at least not interesting to the point of being enduring.
Think of something like Neuromancer. By a lot of these authors definitions above that would be considered soft sci fi because it invents things that didn’t exist at that time and really describes almost no science. It doesn’t describe it in detail, just enough detail to get the reader to buy in, like it fits in that world. Now today we are so networked, and virtual reality is due out this year (has a long way to go, but still). The book is extremely #1 and extremely #3, and very little #2 yet it is one of the most well known sci fi books ever.
You’ve no doubt heard the bias in my voice by now. Regardless of how you want to classify sci fi I think great sci fi (not good) will always be the sci fi that pushes boundaries with imagination and if you intend to do that you have to step out of the reality of today.
The terms Hard and Soft SF, while sometimes useful, carry their own baggage that can sometimes put off potential readers. Whether unfairly or not, Hard SF carries an association with clunky writing; two-dimensional characters and wooden dialogue. Soft SF can connote, to the undiscerning reader, a kind of childish, comic booky literature wherein the sharp-eyed reader, calculator (or, better yet, slide rule) in hand, can easily compute the correct escape velocity from the orbit of planet Z’bliyrt’szao III and point out the author’s sloppy homework (and overuse of apostrophes in proper nouns). The former implies nerdy writers and readers with no feel for the human condition; the latter’s airy-fairy producers and consumers will allow for practically any damn thing in their created universes.
I find the terms Science Fiction and Sci-Fi to be a little less provocative (although Harlan Ellison would probably disagree). This is especially so in film and television SF, in which Science Fiction can be hard to convincingly pull off, at least without losing a lot of viewers. Sci-Fi can give us the star-flung adventures we crave, and at least give some lip service – or technobabble, as it were – to the scientific principles and technologies required to move the plot along. Star Trek is a good example; the writers at least try to make warp drive plausible and keep the technology consistent – and even occasionally deal with its unintended consequences. Star Trek also offers multitudinous alien races that can breathe the same air as humans, so there you go.
Using examples from another genre, Science Fiction is to John le Carre what Sci-Fi is to Ian Fleming. Perhaps a useful example – Sci-Fi tells stories that could be placed into almost any other genre. “Avatar” is a Western; “Alien” is a haunted house picture; “Independence Day” is a war movie; “Dune” is a political thriller by way of Shakespeare. “2001,” “Blade Runner,” “Ex Machina,” and “Minority Report” – Science Fiction movies, all of ’em – could not be told outside of a genre concerned with science and technology. “Sunshine” and “Prometheus” start out as Science Fiction, but morph into Sci-Fi by their endings. I love all of these films, and think some form one camp are better than their brethren in the other, but find it easier to keep them straight this way.
Space Opera, FTL travel and galactic empires, alien invasion, time travel, galactic war, and interplanetary romance versus high-stakes technical problems that have to be solved with technical solutions… I much prefer Science Fiction and Sci-Fi to Hard SF and Soft SF.
I hate how “hard/soft” are used as clubs to criticize and stereo type fiction. If i were to try to split it it would split something like this.First off. All stories are on a continum one canpossibly say harder or softer , or more scuentifuc or more fantastic. Good fiction exists everywhere on this spectrum, its just a handy short cut to say Starwars or LOTR as fairly soft, and the Lord Darcy, or Harry Dresden, or most of Isaac Asimov’s work as fairly hard
Hard fictionin my book is puzzle driven – its about figuring out the whos and hows in a constrained system, and solve a problem( find the killer/ figure out why something happeded/ deduce the fix ) be that fantasy, mundane or otherwise. Soft is about the experience, or the drama, or characters involved . Both are good, and both are present in any quality work of fiction as a story without a puzzling component will not surprise or chaslenge the reader, and a story with cardboard cutout people solving a puzzle lacks emotional engagement. All hard and soft are is a short way of saying that.
At least thatsmy take. Your milage mayvary. :)
I like the definition of SF from Theodore Sturgeon’s: “A good science fiction story is a story about human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content.”
The last element is what make a SF story SF. A scientific content, situation, event. The fact that Sturgeon says ‘science content,’ rather than ‘exotic’, ‘fantastic’, ‘futuristic’ is not to be undervalue or underestimated.
If the science content is weak, or used only as a pseudo-science background and technobabble it turns the story into a fraud. The science content can also be extrapolated, but today we see many adulteration into fantasy and magic. No wonder the new term “Science Fantasy” has been coined already. Although the acronym is the same, Science Fantasy is not SF.
I can’t believe no one has yet raised the quintessential definition from Tv Tropes.
I give you Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness.
At the end of the day, Hard SF embraces the world as we know it *at the time* and Soft SF includes handwavium, often lots of it.
The idea of Hard vs Soft is as usual a way of separating the in-crowd from the out in our society, and the smaller the society, the more bitter the divisions between factions. Humans insist in discrimination, even if not needed. A work of “hard” SF that embraces reality as much as possible is not inherently better or worse than a work of “soft” SF that has blasters and spaceships and FTL travel. Personal preference may lead someone to desire one over the other, but denigrating someone else for liking the other is just arrogance.
Read what you find pleasure in.
Massimo Marino nailed it in #34!
It is just so sad that these days the so called SF fans get the simple science wrong when the book gets it right. I ran across a discussion of Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky where they said gravity was at the center of the ship. And then there is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0wk4qG2mIg
Facepalm!
Fascinating how nobody has noticed yet that the introductory text mixes up “The Martian” with “Interstellar”… That whole part about channeling Demi Moore in a “cross-universe communication via physics” doesn’t exist in Scott’s film.
Moral of the day: If you want to be snarky (“see you in the comments”) make sure you don’t slip in the very beginning. That doesn’t bode too well for the whole piece.
Otherwise, I like what some of the authors are saying, as well as the comments…
Sure is a lot of anger towards “Hard SF.” Kind of reminds me of genre pushback against literary. At some point, it becomes a tribalistic thing and the arguments become convincing only to the already convinced.
There is a special feeling when you’re reading something and the science closely adheres to what is currently known. Part of this experience is only open to those with some knowledge of science. For me, it helps a lot with the suspension of disbelief and my immersion in the fictional world. It’s also impressive and challenging to write.
“Playing tennis with the net up.”
It doesn’t matter much to me if I’m reading something now that will probably be superseded in thirty years. So what? I’m reading it now.