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?
Avatar, District 9, Oscars, movies | bshears February 2, 2010 | 
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