On Apr 17, 2:45 am, Daniel <Krous...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Consider "Starship Troopers" by Robert Heinlein. It has FTL and
> artificial gravity, which would under most conventions define it as
> soft sci-fi. But Starship Troopers is not written about the marvels of
> space travel. Starship Troopers is about military life and life in a
> limited franchise republic. The ramifications of restricting the right
> to vote to those who have served will have nothing to do with physics.
> But it will affect economics, political science, and human behavior,
> which is what the book explores. Or "Blindsight" by Peter Watts which
> features vampires and teleportation but uses evolution, biology, and
> game theory to discuss consciousness. On television we have the new
> Battlestar Galactic which examines the response a society would have
> in a near extinction scenario. The morality of throwing enemy
> personnel out the airlock cannot be calculated, yet it still examines
> the idea of it and its logical repercussions on everyone else in
> accordance with behavioral science.
>
> So should a book, movie, comic, etc that violates physics but does so
> to examine an unrelated idea still fall under hard sci-fi so long as
> it rigidly adheres to the scientific principles relevant to the idea
> being examined?
Do those books or TV shows NEED to violate physics to examine those
topics? My take on the subject is that they violate physics to tell
the story that they want to tell while exploring those topics. For
example _Starship troopers_ COULD have been told substantively the
same without FTL and especially without artificial gravity. Certainly
the stories could be substantively different for the other examples,
but the topics can be explored just fine without violating physics.
I think if you NEED to violate physics to explore some topic, then you
might have to examine if the topic is as "hard" as you think it is.
Hard SF is about adhering to a strict set of rules (the rules of the
universe) while telling a story. "Soft" SF is about telling a story
while using the trappings of SF to do so, and discarding anything that
gets in the way of telling that story.
Your characters need to have a kung-fu battle on a space ship in orbit
over Jupiter? Well you'll need artificial gravity for that (though I
think the description of a space-fu battle (kung-fu re-engineered for
use in micro-gravity) would be much cooler, but much harder to write).
You'll also need to ignore or explain away how your ship is hanging
out in all that radiation around Jupiter without killing the crew.
Don't want to spend a couple thousand words explaining how the
radiation shielding works without violating physics? Well, just ignore
physics and say it just works.
Traditionally the "Hardness" or "Softness" of SF is a representation
of how well the story sticks to physics, but that's only because
that's the kind of science traditionally used in SF. If you are
writing about biotechnology in your story then the "hardness" or
"softness" of that story would also depend on how well you stick to
biological science when you do it. Vampires could be explained in a
biotechnical story-space without violating what I think biotechnology
could do. But even biology at the most basic level is governed by
chemistry, which is governed by physics, which is governed by quantum
physics, and then whatever we name the stuff beyond QP.
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