(urth) Hard SF

[David Stockhoff]

I'm not sure if it's philosophical exactly, though the examples that 
come to mind are /Flatland/, which exists to make a didactic point, and 
the Mars trilogy by Spider Robinson (another damn Catholic!), which 
apparently exists to prove that science fiction can be deadly boring---I 
mean, that we can terraform Mars. Those examples certainly seem to 
reject magic and theism entirely.

Plausibility has a lot to do with style. We want to hear about monsters, 
but they go down better when the narrator is /real/: a grubby criminal, 
maybe, or a hard-boiled detective character we've been trained to accept 
just for the pleasure of it. (Once, we would have accepted a 
straight-laced scientist, but no more.) So many SF short stories involve 
the subversion of rules that ground the story in something we can 
recognize. Tolkien took the opposite approach, replacing the usual rules 
with his own, but maintaining a certain distance through the use of 
language; he never let you forget for long that you were experiencing 
something more "real" than history, but also just as large as history.

Wolfe is a stylist above all else, but also a moralist. He seems to see 
humans as half-truth-telling, /story-/telling beings in a universe of 
unplumbed moral and physical depth. Stories are what we are, and moral 
is what we want to be, so he retells old stories that test morality; I 
wouldn't say he's obsessed with the supernatural, but his awareness of 
it (and conviction in it) leads him to respect material reality while 
considering it secondary. If the story always comes first, the result 
can't ever be hard SF.

Another point I could make is that plausibility is in a sense a 
negative. That is, if I don't ever /say /that a pound of feathers weighs 
less than a pound of lead, I can't be caught being implausible. Wolfe's 
engineer side may nix some ideas produced by his mythographer side, but 
it rarely writes the stories.

On 11/28/2012 6:06 PM, Daniel Petersen wrote:
> So you take hard s.f. to be a philosophical position (committed to 
> some form of naturalism, if not physicalism)?  I've heard Michael 
> Flynn is a theistic hard s.f.er <http://s.f.er>, but I don't know if 
> his worldview affects the writing of his fiction at a sort of 
> methodological level.  I've not read any.  At any rate, I don't think 
> Wolfe's fiction reaches full 'hard' status for various reasons - 
> regardless of whether we say hard s.f. by definition must remain 
> mechanically non-theistic or non-magical or whatever.  But you 
> describe well the tensions Wolfe manfully holds together.  It's part 
> of what makes his work have a widespread, diverse audience.
>
> -DOJP
>