(urth) Hard SF

[Andrew Mason]

Antonio Pedro Marquez wrote:
>
> I think I've said this a number of times but, for me, 'hard sf' is that where the workings of science itself are a major driver of the plot. Little to do with being science-'realistic', except as an almost necessary implication. In that regard, Wolfe's work is not hard sf.


I think 'hard SF' is an essentially ambiguous term. It can mean what
Antonio says - I think Asimov defined it that way, for instance - or
it can mean SF which is scientifically accurate. It is widely used in
the latter sense as well.

Obviously the two ideas to some extent go together, in that if you are
exploring the implications of a scientific hypothesis you have to work
them out consistently; it would not be very scientific, for instance,
to hypothesise that if there were faster-than-light travel there would
be unicorns. But in some cases I think the two concepts of hard SF
actually pull against one another. Those works of SF which focus most
on science are often ones where it is not real-world science - ones
exploring the consequences of some imagined scientific development
which isn't really possible; conversely, a work of speculative fiction
in which science is not important, which deals with a future or
another world whose distinctive features are social rather than
scientific, can easily confine itself to the scientifically possible.