(urth) Hard SF

[Jeff Wilson]

On Thu, November 29, 2012 10:36, nate jarvis wrote:
> Most of the Charles Stross stuff I've read centers around a heist
> (Halting State) or a chase (Iron Sunrise, Saturn's Children) or
> something similar, but I'd still call his stuff hard SF. The
> "hardness" is in the details, and on virtually every page there's a
> line that makes me wanna run to google and see if there's a white
> paper on whatever he's talking about. Stross might not meet the
> definition Antonio proposes, though.

Charlie intentionally writes to different levels of plausibility. Halting
State and Rule 34 are more like slightly futuristic technothrillers, he
complained in his blog that the news kept swiping his plot devices.

Saturn's Children is an example of mundane SF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction
, though the posthuman millieu gives him a bit more wiggle room to have a
Heinlein pastiche and some silent movie melodrama.

Iron Sunrise is a totally whacked implausible setting with time travel,
FTL, space nazis, nova bombs, etc being dealt with by a couple of people
of more modest ability to defy the laws of physics.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >