Re: Hard Sci-fi?

On Apr 19, 9:46=A0am, Ben Crowell
<crowel...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> 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.

Maybe this should branch off into another topic, but: do stories based
entirely on the non-"hard" sciences (such as psychology, or sociology,
or history, or biology, or ecology) count as sci-fi?  If so, that
raises the rather absurd notion (at least to me) that "Watership Down"
and the works of Jane Austen are in the same genre as "Tau Zero" and
"I, Robot".