Re: Hard Sci-fi?

Remus Shepherd wrote:
>    The difference between science fiction and fantasy is in the choice
of
> tropes used to tell the story.  If the plausability hinges on something
> inexplicable, no matter how well described, that's magic and the story
> is fantasy.

IMO, the inclusion of tropes in the definition works well when you're
trying to assign things to marketing categories, but less well
when you're trying to have a literary discussion.

Suppose Captain Kirk stands on the bridge of the Enterprise, and the
Klingon bird of prey scores a hit, causing the ship to shake. Someone
who's scientifically illiterate will immediately decide that these are
SF tropes; that's why this story has to be *marketed* as SF. But to
someone who's scientifically knowledgeable, it's clear that the
analysis is more complicated. Why is Kirk standing upright on the 
bridge? Why is artificial gravity being provided by magitech? Why are
the weapons only as powerful as cannons, rather than having an energy
scale more appropriate to the relativistic scale at which the
technology operates? IMO, the reason is that these aren't really
SFnal tropes at all, they're tropes from a Horatio Hornblower novel.

Another problem with using tropes in the definitions is that insisting
on traditional tropes helps to make the field sterile and boring. The
reason a novel like Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom feels
fresh is that it doesn't have ray-guns and spaceships.