(urth) Hard SF

[Marc Aramini]

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 28, 2012, at 5:02 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

> 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 
>> 
>> -DOJP
> 
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