Re: Hard Sci-fi?

Damien Valentine wrote:
> On Apr 19, 9:46 am, 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".

Huh? Watership Down has talking rabbits, so it's inconsistent with
what we know about science. Jane Austen isn't speculative fiction.