5 ms·

This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as oppo

This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely speculative science fiction. The author explains how these fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic. Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated

ZpJuUuNaQ5 1y ago
>extremely plausible science fiction >I thought it meant "very hard to understand" For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
- Scene_Cast2 1y ago
  Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself. I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
  - jkingsman 1y ago
    Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost. I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0]. [0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understanding_blindsight_spoilers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
    - throwanem 1y ago
      There are no spoilers for Blindsight at that link. All it does is describe the events of the plot.
  - ninalanyon 1y ago
    I found it hard to read because it seems to true and hence so frightening.
- Boogie_Man 1y ago
  I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize I was missing things. Hard to say.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    What did it leave you with on the subject of consciousness?
    - Boogie_Man 1y ago
      Spoilers: My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually. At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
      - throwanem 1y ago
        Okay gotcha gotcha. I don't know what a "Wonderlic" is but for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book. Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
        Boogie_Man 1y ago
        I'd have to be a real psycho to use AI to pretend to have read books. Reading is probably one the most important parts of my existence, and yet I don't do it nearly enough. I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed. So... Anyone ever actually read IJ?
- phrotoma 1y ago
  Hard SF doesn't _need_ to be difficult to understand. Peter Watts just happens to produce books that are both.
jkingsman 1y ago
Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic" or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there is an understandable system at work at some level.
- mordechai9000 1y ago
  To me, "hard science fiction" evokes the old school writers like Arthur C. Clarke who would explore ideas with a slide rule or a calculator when planning a story. Even if he had to use a little hand waving and some unobtainium to make Ringworld work.
  - crooked-v 1y ago
    Maybe the neatest part of that with Ringworld is when fans proved that the theoretical structure itself is orbitally unstable... which he then came up with explanations for and used as a major plot point in a follow-up book.
    - Loughla 1y ago
      Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.
    - riffraff 1y ago
      Also the mountains on ringworld Which recycle the sea bed are the outcome of some fans pointing out the problems with a static land mass, iirc.
Scarblac 1y ago
The way I see it is that hard science is about the new science and its effects on people, so it has to make the science believable somehow. Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.
ngangaga 1y ago
I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".
swayvil 1y ago
How about very comprehensible science fiction? Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things. Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.
throwanem 1y ago
"Hard" refers to scientific plausibility. The antipode of "hard science fiction" is "space opera." When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.
- lproven 1y ago
  > antipode Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer. But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF. It's at least a 2D area: hard <-> soft is at 90º to rigorous <-> totally without rigour Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules? Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett). I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    > Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer. No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error. To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense. It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause. Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.

ZpJuUuNaQ5 1y ago

>extremely plausible science fiction >I thought it meant "very hard to understand" For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.

Scene_Cast2 1y ago
Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself. I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
- jkingsman 1y ago
  Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost. I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0]. [0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understanding_blindsight_spoilers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
  - throwanem 1y ago
    There are no spoilers for Blindsight at that link. All it does is describe the events of the plot.
- ninalanyon 1y ago
  I found it hard to read because it seems to true and hence so frightening.
Boogie_Man 1y ago
I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize I was missing things. Hard to say.
- throwanem 1y ago
  What did it leave you with on the subject of consciousness?
  - Boogie_Man 1y ago
    Spoilers: My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually. At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
    - throwanem 1y ago
      Okay gotcha gotcha. I don't know what a "Wonderlic" is but for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book. Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
      - Boogie_Man 1y ago
        I'd have to be a real psycho to use AI to pretend to have read books. Reading is probably one the most important parts of my existence, and yet I don't do it nearly enough. I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed. So... Anyone ever actually read IJ?
phrotoma 1y ago
Hard SF doesn't _need_ to be difficult to understand. Peter Watts just happens to produce books that are both.

jkingsman 1y ago

Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic" or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there is an understandable system at work at some level.

mordechai9000 1y ago
To me, "hard science fiction" evokes the old school writers like Arthur C. Clarke who would explore ideas with a slide rule or a calculator when planning a story. Even if he had to use a little hand waving and some unobtainium to make Ringworld work.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  Maybe the neatest part of that with Ringworld is when fans proved that the theoretical structure itself is orbitally unstable... which he then came up with explanations for and used as a major plot point in a follow-up book.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.
  - riffraff 1y ago
    Also the mountains on ringworld Which recycle the sea bed are the outcome of some fans pointing out the problems with a static land mass, iirc.

Scarblac 1y ago

The way I see it is that hard science is about the new science and its effects on people, so it has to make the science believable somehow. Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.

ngangaga 1y ago

I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".

swayvil 1y ago

How about very comprehensible science fiction? Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things. Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.

throwanem 1y ago

"Hard" refers to scientific plausibility. The antipode of "hard science fiction" is "space opera." When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.

lproven 1y ago
> antipode Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer. But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF. It's at least a 2D area: hard <-> soft is at 90º to rigorous <-> totally without rigour Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules? Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett). I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
- throwanem 1y ago
  > Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer. No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error. To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense. It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause. Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.