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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Science Memes
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Is hard Sci fi different from Sci fi? What's makes it hard?
No one really gave examples, but hard sci fi works within our understanding of physics. It's realistic, e.g. when people go to space they put on a space suit, climb into a rocket, and launch like how they would in real life.
Soft sci fi can ignore physics. Think of star trek or star wars, where the ship gently lifts off the ground and flies up into space, no gforce issues and no trouble just chilling in the sky without falling to earth. Their ship has gravity in space, they can turn sharply and no one feels it, and if they want go go somewhere far away they just warp there. Ships often run on magic crystals. None of that is realistic based on our current physics knowledge, so it's soft sci fi not hard sci fi.
I dunno. Most things billed as “hard sci-if” (including Three Body) end up having fantastical tech loosely based on, but not actually explained by, scientific theory, to the point of may as well be magic. Hard sci-fi is more a marketing bullet point than a reality, like when they say a new movie has no CGI.
Oh for sure. There's a massive grey area in the middle.
I guess Three Body builds on our physics knowledge, with assumptions about new things being discovered, where as Star Wars ignores it.
Some stuff that happens later in the series (the books) does seem to be pretty much fantasy, but it doesn't have people warp across the galaxy with no time relativity issues so it's probably closer to hard sci fi than soft.
Between Star Trek and Star Wars, I'd classify Wars as feather pillow level soft. Star Trek at least makes an attempt to explain things with make-believe science.
Star Wars has princesses, heroes, evil empires, and forgotten magical powers; it's heroic fantasy but in space instead of a pseudo-mediaeval setting. I guess that's why people call it "Space Opera" rather than sci-fi!
Star Wars is a space opera fantasy western.
It is decidedly and deliberately NOT sci-fi
Hard sci-fi is when writers take time to understand current science and understanding how things would work, and then apply it to the future. Arthur C. Clarke is the default example of hard sci-fi.
Basically, "hard" sci-fi uses real world science to figure out how something would work in a future setting. And hard sci-fi really tries to figure out if something is practical outside of a set piece. "Soft" sci-fi is more about social problems of the real world and beyond, like Star Trek. But there isn't an exact formal definition for where hard starts and soft begins, and vice versa.
And I think 95% of scifi fans would agree that neither is better or worse, it just fits the story as its needed. Personally I love hard scifi as a concept, but my favorite scifi stories are all soft, like Star Trek.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction
Glad to see The Expanse on the TV show list. First couple episodes a dude loses his head and the blood coalesced into a blob, I knew right then and there it was going to be a good show
I'd say the classic example of hard sci-fi is The Martian. There's only one scientifically inaccurate scene in the whole book, and that's when a martian sandstorm strands Watney. Weir did all the math, and indeed was so insightful about NASA's internal politics they demanded to know his source.
"Hard" science fiction usually means that the futuristic concepts and fancy technology are based on (and limited) by our current understanding of the physical universe - if you had enough engineering ability, you could actually do the things presented in the story. This is in contrast to things like Star Wars and Star Trek, where the things they're able to do are basically fantasy dressed up with a technological skin.
in hard sci-fi the science isn't fictional.
It's when they make the aliens strangely sexy in a way only you can appreciate.