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Alas, that's not what "hard" SF means these days (or even since the 1960s). Consider the "known space" stories and novels by Larry Niven, who is pretty firmly p

Alas, that's not what "hard" SF means these days (or even since the 1960s). Consider the "known space" stories and novels by Larry Niven, who is pretty firmly pigeon-holed as a hard SF author: they're full of magic wands, devices that break the known laws of physics -- to which he makes the sole concession of at least striving for internal consistency. "Hard SF" is a term I'm deeply suspicious of; it originated in the late 1950s/early 1960s in the US SF publishing field as a twitchy counterpoint to the "New Wave" then appearing, as previous social taboos began to crumble -- "hard" had connotations of two-fisted manly-man engineers with slide-rules clenched between their jaws, support for the Vietnam War, and the implicit technocrat agenda espoused by the racist and sexist John W. Campbell, editor of Analog (the de-facto house magazine of the hard SF tribe), who over a 30-40 year period used SF to promote a white supremacist and ultra-capitalist agenda (hint: Heinlein's "Fifth Column" was written to an outline provided by Campbell, and Heinlein apparently toned down the racism in it, so it's now merely a screamingly racist "yellow peril" yarn). There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers: http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/essay/starship-stormtroopers http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/essay/starship-stormtrooper... If you want constraints I'd recommend looking into Mundane SF, a much more recent (and much less visible, less successful) offshoot of the field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today. (PS: gratuitous appeal to authority: I'm a multiple Hugo-winning SF author, and I write SF novels for a living. If you don't recognize my name, go feed "Charles Stross" into wikipedia before you downvote.)

thrower123 7y ago
> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers: What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end. Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows. > It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
- cstross 7y ago
  I wasn't commenting on Heinlein, I was commenting on John W. Campbell, who was basically the go-to editor for hard SF (and had an Agenda, capital-A intentional). The Expanse is popular because -- surprise! -- even a niche market can be a large market when it's a niche in a billion person audience.
- danaris 7y ago
  Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy. It would be much more difficult for a hard sci-fi series to gain the kind of traction that Star Trek and Star Wars do, simply because the kinds of story it can tell are much more constrained...and it doesn’t allow for the same kind of wow factor.
  - krapp 7y ago
    > Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy. I kind of disagree. What people want out of their stories is something that resonates with them emotionally or that speaks to the human condition. The fantasy vs science dichotomy doesn't really apply, and it's mostly subjective anyway. Also, it helps to remember that Star Wars and Star Trek were pioneering in their respective media. Star Wars basically invented the motion picture blockbuster and "epic" sci-fi. Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen. But both are also far more about people than technology or even extrapolation. If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings - it's actually a fairly grounded universe - and there are many such settings that somehow allow for telepaths as well. It's entirely possible to have hard sci-fi that has a wow factor and human drama (Babylon 5 comes to mind as an attempt, maybe the Expanse,) it's just not something people want to do because science is difficult, whereas teching the tech is easy.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen. Star Trek (TOS, this changed a bit with TNG and DS9) didn't even make the society the main characters were part of an important focus, it was more focused on external-societies-of-the-week, and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models. > If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars ...wouldn't happen, because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
elorant 7y ago
Andy Weir's "The Martian" was hard sf. Aside from a couple of inconsistencies which were necessary for the plot to evolve, everything else was rock solid. A lot of people write hard sf. Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorites.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  Revelation space him!
taneq 7y ago
I think 'hard SF' is usually afforded a couple of 'gimmes' in the sense of rule breaking. I imagine most people would place Rendezvous With Rama, for instance, in this class despite (spoilers, hah) the reveal of Rama's voodoo propulsion mechanism. Niven's books, while fun, push this way beyond what I'd normally concede to be 'hard' but then maybe I'm out of touch. Also just wanted to say I really enjoyed Accelerando, and the Laundry Files series is amazing so far (although I don't know how far I'll get if it keeps getting darker!) Thanks for all your good work.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I mean, Rendezvous with Rama tries its best to place Rama's reactionless system in the context of currently known physics, using distortion of the fabric of space as its cause. But even including that, the important part is that the protagonists don't get access to the same technology; for example, the Endeavor didn't get to cheat its way out of its hyperbolic escape orbit (it had to be rescued by suicide tanker vessels). So while it's technically "soft" in this aspect it doesn't affect the plot.
shkkmo 7y ago
I'd love to see a list of what you consider your favorite works or authors in the mundane SF genre or that you might consider good examples of "diamond hard non-agitprop" SF. I've really enjoyed (and reread) your novels and I'm a longtime fan of the works of Kim Stanley Robinson. Even though James A. Corey only sort of qualifies as "mundane SF" given the super alien tech, I really enjoyed the parts of his books where stellar orbits, transit times and such are treated as important parts of the plot.
- jerf 7y ago
  I'm not cstross, but you could check out Greg Egan. He's got a number of stories set in universes that don't even have the same number of dimensions as ours (4 spatial dimensions, zero time dimensions, or 2 spatial dimensions, 2 time dimensions), where this deeply matters and directly impacts the plots, and all the mathematics is deeply worked out for these sorts of universes and also impacts the plot. See, for instance, https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html , and all the pages it links to. And that's just an example, there are some "lighter weight" ones that under normal circumstances would still be considered fairly "heavy", just not as heavy as literally working out how General Relativity works in different numbers of dimensions for the story. His politics I would estimate as reasonably similar to the HN gestalt.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    Thanks, I always appreciate having authors recommended. I read all kinds of SF regardless of politics and scientific accuracy. I often find authors whose politics I don't agree with give me the most insight into other ways of seeing and understanding the world. I just love the idea of orbital mechanics, coriolis effects and zero g environments as plot points. I also wish there were SF video games that utilized a mundane SF solar system as a setting.
    - jerf 7y ago
      I read widely without much regard for politics (as long as the story is not simply a disguised political polemic, which I've come to find boring even if I nominally agree with it), but I was just trying to answer the question as asked. Only perhaps a couple of his stories start to get into polemic territory, and even that, let me emphasize, "start"; none of them that I've read are outright political pamphlets. Mostly they're great sci-fi.

thrower123 7y ago

> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers: What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end. Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows. > It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.

cstross 7y ago
I wasn't commenting on Heinlein, I was commenting on John W. Campbell, who was basically the go-to editor for hard SF (and had an Agenda, capital-A intentional). The Expanse is popular because -- surprise! -- even a niche market can be a large market when it's a niche in a billion person audience.
danaris 7y ago
Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy. It would be much more difficult for a hard sci-fi series to gain the kind of traction that Star Trek and Star Wars do, simply because the kinds of story it can tell are much more constrained...and it doesn’t allow for the same kind of wow factor.
- krapp 7y ago
  > Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy. I kind of disagree. What people want out of their stories is something that resonates with them emotionally or that speaks to the human condition. The fantasy vs science dichotomy doesn't really apply, and it's mostly subjective anyway. Also, it helps to remember that Star Wars and Star Trek were pioneering in their respective media. Star Wars basically invented the motion picture blockbuster and "epic" sci-fi. Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen. But both are also far more about people than technology or even extrapolation. If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings - it's actually a fairly grounded universe - and there are many such settings that somehow allow for telepaths as well. It's entirely possible to have hard sci-fi that has a wow factor and human drama (Babylon 5 comes to mind as an attempt, maybe the Expanse,) it's just not something people want to do because science is difficult, whereas teching the tech is easy.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen. Star Trek (TOS, this changed a bit with TNG and DS9) didn't even make the society the main characters were part of an important focus, it was more focused on external-societies-of-the-week, and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models. > If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars ...wouldn't happen, because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.

elorant 7y ago

Andy Weir's "The Martian" was hard sf. Aside from a couple of inconsistencies which were necessary for the plot to evolve, everything else was rock solid. A lot of people write hard sf. Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorites.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
Revelation space him!

taneq 7y ago

I think 'hard SF' is usually afforded a couple of 'gimmes' in the sense of rule breaking. I imagine most people would place Rendezvous With Rama, for instance, in this class despite (spoilers, hah) the reveal of Rama's voodoo propulsion mechanism. Niven's books, while fun, push this way beyond what I'd normally concede to be 'hard' but then maybe I'm out of touch. Also just wanted to say I really enjoyed Accelerando, and the Laundry Files series is amazing so far (although I don't know how far I'll get if it keeps getting darker!) Thanks for all your good work.

saagarjha 7y ago
I mean, Rendezvous with Rama tries its best to place Rama's reactionless system in the context of currently known physics, using distortion of the fabric of space as its cause. But even including that, the important part is that the protagonists don't get access to the same technology; for example, the Endeavor didn't get to cheat its way out of its hyperbolic escape orbit (it had to be rescued by suicide tanker vessels). So while it's technically "soft" in this aspect it doesn't affect the plot.

shkkmo 7y ago

I'd love to see a list of what you consider your favorite works or authors in the mundane SF genre or that you might consider good examples of "diamond hard non-agitprop" SF. I've really enjoyed (and reread) your novels and I'm a longtime fan of the works of Kim Stanley Robinson. Even though James A. Corey only sort of qualifies as "mundane SF" given the super alien tech, I really enjoyed the parts of his books where stellar orbits, transit times and such are treated as important parts of the plot.

jerf 7y ago
I'm not cstross, but you could check out Greg Egan. He's got a number of stories set in universes that don't even have the same number of dimensions as ours (4 spatial dimensions, zero time dimensions, or 2 spatial dimensions, 2 time dimensions), where this deeply matters and directly impacts the plots, and all the mathematics is deeply worked out for these sorts of universes and also impacts the plot. See, for instance, https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html , and all the pages it links to. And that's just an example, there are some "lighter weight" ones that under normal circumstances would still be considered fairly "heavy", just not as heavy as literally working out how General Relativity works in different numbers of dimensions for the story. His politics I would estimate as reasonably similar to the HN gestalt.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  Thanks, I always appreciate having authors recommended. I read all kinds of SF regardless of politics and scientific accuracy. I often find authors whose politics I don't agree with give me the most insight into other ways of seeing and understanding the world. I just love the idea of orbital mechanics, coriolis effects and zero g environments as plot points. I also wish there were SF video games that utilized a mundane SF solar system as a setting.
  - jerf 7y ago
    I read widely without much regard for politics (as long as the story is not simply a disguised political polemic, which I've come to find boring even if I nominally agree with it), but I was just trying to answer the question as asked. Only perhaps a couple of his stories start to get into polemic territory, and even that, let me emphasize, "start"; none of them that I've read are outright political pamphlets. Mostly they're great sci-fi.