• he/him

trying my best


belarius
@belarius

The vast majority of high-concept science fiction has very little to do with science, and much more to do with an audience that (a) would like for magic to exist and (b) wants to be taken seriously as members of a modern society who future improves over its past.

This insecurity is most profound in people who insist that they like science fiction but dislike "fantasy."


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

This ties into my least favorite kind of "hard sci fi" writing:

Instead of grabbing a science or technology concept and extrapolating from there to explore how the world would adapt to it, what the consequences of the thing would be, etc... the author just really wants FTL travel so they do cartwheels to try to justify in the text how it can realistically happen, which ends up being a shit ton of info dumping that adds nothing.

Hard sci fi is at its best when the author lets their research guide them, when the limitations of technology result in interesting consequences. Unfortunately a lot of writers only want "hard" scifi that validates them as "serious" writers, but have no interest in what the genre does well. So they work backwards from their handwavy technobabble to shoehorn their story into a "hard" setting, which ends up being "soft scifi, but worse"


ingrid
@ingrid

My take is: more people should read Connie Willis.


Great-Joe
@Great-Joe

Cyberpunk is what happened when the science you're harding is social studies.


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in reply to @jinglebellrockstar's post:

in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

one of the things i really enjoyed about ann leckie's imperial radch series is the technology is just... there. people act as if the technology is normal and doesn't require explanation because that's how people actually interact with technology. nobody infodumps the tech they're using, they just use it! you don't have to explain the inventor of the smartphone and talk about how exciting the inventor was and explain the cool tech that went into making it possible and wax rhapsodic about how they finally broke into the mainstream market in 2008 in order to actually use the phone, you can just take it out of your pocket and snap a picture of your cat.

in reply to @ingrid's post:

In a way I think the dichotomy is flawed because what really matters is how well they can convey characters, plots and cultures through this universe, regardless of how anchored in science it is. is legend of the galatic heroes good because it's hard sci-fi? no it's good because of how you get a feel of the characters and ideologies, the spaceship battles may as well just be 19th century naval battles, they're there to advance the plot

It's all either marketing or an attempt to force things into a false binary, usually so you can be superior over the other. Like, I think 'hard' science fiction is probably a useful term for some people in the sense of 'this grew out of noodling at genuine scientific theories' but also? I haven't studied science since first year uni and it's probably presumptuous of me and also A LOT OF OTHER SCI-FI READERS to say 'this is real science' and 'this isn't real science'. Am I making sense?

You're making sense to me, I guess I'm just frustrated by years of encountering "hard" sci-fi where the "real science" is always the astrophysics or computer science aspect and any social or even scientific ramifications of those things are just pleasantly hand-waved away unless they happen to be incidental to the plot. Maybe it's because biology and medicine are scientific fields that change at a breakneck pace, but you'll rarely find stuff in old sci-fi that holds up even slightly in that aspect but maybe it just wasn't something that really interested sci-fi authors back in the day