Hard Science Fiction: Toward a Definition
Embarking on initial research for an essay entitled “The Hard Science Fiction Manifesto” of course I immediately found a web site that covered it well enough to save me the work. The quote below is from Rocket Punk’s fine sci-fi glossary. The original page has anchorlinks to other terms in the glossary (”TECHLEVEL”) which I won’t reproduce here:
HARD SF. Written SF that adheres, or tries to adhere, to plausible science and technology. Therefore it generally implies a fairly modest TECHLEVEL; the most anal Hard SF may even preclude FTL. For obvious reasons, plausible is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. It is also a moving target. In fact, you can usually date Hard SF particularly well by its technology, which will lean heavily on whatever technical or scientific speculation was fashionable about five years before a book’s publication date. If this did not pan out (and mostly it hasn’t), the resulting Hard SF will sound very dated within a decade or so.
I would adopt this whole but for some quibbles: one, about the five-years-ahead tech level requirement, and two, especially, about the anality of precluding FTL (faster-than-light travel.) Some futurism can lean toward the hard, and assumption of non-proven concepts like FTL might be acceptable, just as the assumption of meeting non-terran-originating life forms (aliens!) may be as well, as long as they are treated in an internally consistent manner, and are subject to some “hard” limitations and constraints.
For instance, (and to put it into terms with which a non-sci-fi fan who has gotten this far may be familiar) why is the Transporter of the original Star Trek series generally fan-respected, while the Holodeck of the Next Generation the object of derision in some quarters? Well, first off the Transporter has a built-in limitation. It’s in the Transporter Room. Just a room, not a whole deck. Along with other mentioned limitations (atmospheric, electromagnetic) there are multiple episodes where the Transporter has trouble, and indeed breaks down, Although there was a Next Generation episode where the captain was trapped in the Holodeck, in general the tech served much more often as a go-anywhere, we’re-out-of-plots-crutch. This type of cop-out in the original series required that the Enterprise, the whole damned star-cruiser, find itself orbiting a planet where the population was in an Earth-like phase in its history: Chicago gangsters, Nazis, Planet of the Apes- ripped-off post-apocalyptic US Constitution-worshipping barbarians, etc.
Holodeck is internally implausible on its face. Was it all an elaborate hologram generated by computer? If so how could you touch things? How could things touch you? Was it generating matter on the fly? Where would this matter go when the fake images instantly vanished? It’s more than just Trek-geek nitpicking. At times you find yourself thinking these questions while watching (Well, I do anyway. Maybe that’s because I’m not a true Trekkie. I’m not. I swear.)
So in comparing these two fantastic technologies, the original series is harder than its sequel. “Proof” of relative hardness might also lie in the multiple recent breakthroughs that bring transporter tech closer to reality than holograms that can touch you.
Hardness is a scale in sci-fi, with a big H for hard on one end and a big F on the other, marking the border with the fantasy genre of magic and wizards. Every work has a place on this scale. Vampires and zombies are off-scale, beyond the F. At that far end there are paralleling and branching-off scales for most of what fits in the horror genre but that’s a whole other discussion. Frankenstein is sci-fi, and pretty hard at that, considering the time it was written. Dracula is fantasy. Alien is both sci-fi and horror; it’s a sci-fi work well down on the hard end of the scale near the Big H. The journeys take a loooong time, requiring suspended animation. The alien biology is elaborately outlined. The androids have “blood,” and “veins” to carry it. So even though the film is jump-out scary monster-in-the-house story, it’s superimposed on a hard sci-fi world.
Many works labeled sci-fi these days are on that Big F side. Thank George Lucas for that, since he misdefined his magnus opus for the hordes of non-sci-fi fans—and publishers and producers. Space ships, whether they make noise in a vacuum or not, does not a sci-fi story make, whether you’ve accumulated more money than God or not. Stars Wars is fantasy. The Jedi ability to render blasters useless with their fancy flashlight sabers alone puts the saga solidly over the border. Lucas’ attempt to harden it all in the fourth movie (I’ll never think of it as “Episode One”) with this whole ” high midi-clorian count” business in young the Darth’s bloodstream did not pan out, and he either abandoned it or forgot about it in the subsequent two highly forgettable movies. This is more evidence that George may not have watched his old movies from one project to the next. Another instance of this is the strong hint of Leia’s force abilities at the end of The Empire Strike Back. What the heck happened, George? I think he forgot. Or he decided to bag it and hoped no one would notice. An interesting hard sci-fi story might take place in the Empire’s R&D department: about a technician who’s given an assignment: figure out how to make a better Jedi-killing blaster. (But this treads into the scary “fan fiction” realm, a psychosis-induced danger zone in which you will never find this writer. Hopefully. And yea, I fear already having ventured too far into the Star Wars morass, but then, in for a penny in for a credit…)
Lucas was also much over-credited by dazzled non-sci-fi critics for adding all those easy details, like the trash compactor and how the fleet treated its trash… well, now that you mention it, a lot of it had to do with trash. Might be a topic for Lucas’s analyst. Somewhere a masters candidate fan-boy has probably written a thesis on it. (But we all have about 8 trillion things that take priority over tracking that down, don’t we?) This addition of the mundane aspect of his long-ago-far away land did much to create an illusion of hard in this really really expensive swords-and-sorcery serial, but we’re not fooled.
Simply put, hard sci-fi may include technology that could be more than five years away, but it must behave like technology as we know it. Making the one FTL concession is enough to get you out there. what happens once you’re out there is the question. The drawback to this is that if your scientists have made FTL safe, what the hell all else have they improved? FTL is the entry drug. Once you taste it you’re drawn tractor-beam-like ever more toward the non-hard, and the Big F.
For all of the knocking about of definitions, though, wherever you place your story in these genres and on the scale within them, your story will still have to be about people, or else, phhht, you can shoot all your technology out the airlock.
Why does it matter? Because hard is much more interesting, and fantasy magic is easy, not only for the writer, but for the reader as well.
What say you?
Tags: Hard Science Fiction
Alien, Science Fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, Storytelling | bshears October 12, 2009
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By Rita de Heer, February 4, 2010 @ 12:08 am
Yes, this is good. I should of course have read this before I commented on Beyond Infinity.
Your final judgment is of course a red flag. “Because hard is much more interesting, and fantasy magic is easy, not only for the writer, but for the reader as well.” Have you read Kim Falconer, The Spell of Rosette? Fantasy, kind of, plus an input of quantum science. Nothing easy about reading it. To be any good, fantasy needs rules and physics and worldbuilding of the same quality as hard sf.
Though I write sf and read it, I find hard sf often too difficult to read. I think because the science is foregrounded so that it becomes the story, rather than the characters living their lives, going through their dramas, affected by the science in a more natural way.
By bshears, February 4, 2010 @ 9:27 pm
No, I have not read Kim Falconer, and I won’t say I avoid fantasy but my track record in finishing some that I’ve tried over the years is not good, and with so much else to read it’s easy to skip. But then there have been some recent so-called sci-fis that suffered the same fate. I may be rooted in the near-future as a sub-genre. The further out in time you get the more fantastic the fictional environment is required to be. If they say you should know your genre, then it must also be important to eventually face up to your own territory within it.
And so a long stretch of good writing between Tolkien and Pratchett has, to my detriment, passed me by. Pratchett by the way may not be taken seriously, but he has more insight into the absurdities of life than any 100 products of your basic writing masters programs. Besides that his fantasy is somewhat mechanistic. Reality on the Disc has only a thin shell, and magic can be measured on “thaumaturgy” meters.
Maybe I just haven’t had any good recommendations and yours sounds like one. I will pick up a Kim Falconer and report back.
By All_Day_SCIfi, February 17, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
There is another possible aspect to this.
EDUCATION
Hard science fiction is something that a young, or not so young, reader can use to learn things about REAL SCIENCE and REAL TECHNOLOGY. It is not just a matter of how anal the reader chooses to be.
Not long ago I asked a man in his late twenties how electricity was produced. He had no idea. The Hoover Dam was completed in 1936 and it is still producing electricity. So a science fiction novel from the 1930s that happened to mention some correct information about wire coils in magnetic fields could teach things that aren’t being explained in schools today.
I found this really shocking and it is from the 1980s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0wk4qG2mIg
My grade school was so bad that I thought my high school was great. A nun told my sister that science and religion did not mix. Those nuns could not teach fractions worth a damn. There were science books sitting on a shelf that were never used. Most of what I learned about science before 10th grade was the result of reading science fiction books which got me hooked in 4th grade. Just knowing the correct terminology told me what ot look up in the encyclopedia. I was reading about nuclear fusion and the evolution of stars in 6th grade. No teacher ever told me that stars cold EXPLODE!
The SF books actually made science more interesting than the science teachers I eventually got exposed to. Let’s face facts. A man with a masters degree in chemistry is going to get pretty board teaching high school sophomore chemistry 4 times per day year after year. It turns into boring rote work for him.
So good SF actually provides a broader and more interdependent perspective than school.
Charles Sheffield’s COLD AS ICE uses the term von Neumann machine. I did not encounter that in the years I worked for IBM even though John von Neumann worked as a consultant to IBM in the early 50s. They didn’t tell us that either.