Re: Hard Sci-fi?

CharlesRCaplan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> Do those books or TV shows NEED to violate physics to examine those

Now, that is a very, very good question. Ideally one that the people who 
produce such shows should be forced to answer, at gunpoint (bad sci-fi 
movies, and bad sci-fi televsion shows, do a lot of damage to the image 
of written science fiction).

> 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.

I disagree with your "need analysis". In very many cases, FTL *is* 
needed, because the character needs to get from somewhere to somewhere
else.

It is *only* the artificial gravity (of the non-rotiational kind) which 
is a true sign of the author being lazy (and/or rampantly 
science-iliterate).

> Hard SF is about adhering to a strict set of rules (the rules of the

More generally, good speculative fiction *by* *definition* adheres to a 
set of rules that the reader can *know*. The subgenre of good science 
fiction, as opposed to other good speculative fiction, differs only in 
that the rules are not made up by the author (and subsequently relayed 
to the reader via the text, in a more or less subtle fashion), but 
instead exist before he even starts writing the story.

> 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.
[...]

I don't acknowledge the existence of "soft science fiction".

There is hard science fiction, which adheres by science as it was known 
at the time the story was written

And then there's non-hard science fiction (which is never soft) which 
violates  science some of the time (or all of the time) but where the 
author *knows* it - *every* time - when he's being a bad boy.

Soft science fiction is lame propaganda, a term coined by writers who 
desperately want to go "But I wrote science fiction too!". Hey dude! No 
you do *not*!

-- 
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org