Peter Knutsen wrote:
> 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.
>
[...]
> 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*!
Hmm...so would you say that half of Robert Heinlein's fiction (the part
without FTL) is science fiction, and the other half is speculative
fiction that isn't science fiction? One thing that seems a little
awkward to me about this is that "speculative fiction that isn't science
fiction" is an awfully awkward term. I guess you could make up an
acronym, like SFTISF. Or you could call something like Star Wars a
"fantasy," and I think that's perfectly valid, but very few people
would understand what you meant. Some people use the term "scifi,"
pronounced "skiffy," to refer to this sort of thing, but that's not
a universally understood definition. AFAIK, "hard SF" and "soft SF" are
the only terms in current use that people actually understand.
I also don't really believe in a perfectly sharp boundary between
hard and soft SF. Ignorance about science causes some of the fuzziness,
but even if you assume that the people using the terms are well versed
in science, there's still some fuzziness that remains. For instance,
a lot of Larry Niven's fiction includes "psi" stuff. Back in the 60's
and 70's, when he was first building the Known Space universe, there
was actually a reasonable amount of careful scientific research done
by competent scientists that seemed to show that ESP, telekinesis, etc.
existed. Of course even back then there were a lot of doubts about that
evidence. There were no plausible physical mechanisms by which it could
work, it was hard to reproduce, and the statistical quality of the data
was often poor. But, hey, the people doing the research were mostly
psychologists, and psychology just isn't a hard science -- by their
standards, it wasn't at all unusual for experiments to be hard to
reproduce, to be impossible to connect to underlying physical phenomena,
and to be statistically messy. In the last 30-40 years, it's become
a lot more clear that the original science was completely wrong (as
I'm sure most physicists, chemists, and biologists expected all along).
I think in the year 1970 it would have been reasonable to put Larry
Niven's psi stuff nearer to the hard SF side of the fuzzy boundary,
whereas now it would be clearly on the soft SF side, although perhaps
grandfathered in because it was more consistent with known science
at the time when it was written.
When it comes to FTL, I think there's also a lot of fuzziness involved.
FTL is not entirely forbidden by relativity. However, there are certain
flavors of FTL that smell more clearly bogus to a physicist than others.
The FTL in Sagan's "Contact" smells relatively non-bogus to me, whereas
the FTL in Star Wars smells completely bogus. One of my bogosity
criteria is that the structure of relativity dictates that any mechanism
for FTL should also be a mechanism for time travel. Another is that,
because of the way general relativity is put together, any mechanism for
FTL should require control over godlike amounts of mass and energy.
"Contact" passes both of these tests, and Star Wars passes neither.
But it's not at all difficult to find other SFnal treatments of FTL
that interpolate between these extremes. For instance, Heinlein's
Time Enough For Love sort of passes the FTL==time travel test, although
time travel is depicted as newer and more experimental.
I do agree that an awful lot of soft SF is written by people
who are ignorant of science, don't realize the extent of their own
ignorance, don't care, and simply want to translate Horatio Hornblower
into the interstellar milieu, appropriating SFnal tropes in an
ignorant and careless way.
|
