Define your terms, stupid mole.

[truepenny]

torrilin and pnh have taken me to task for, well, sloppy synechdoche and lousy genre theory.

It is the case that there is a corner of the vast and sprawling genre of science fiction that self-identifies as "hard sf" that does, in fact exhibit the characteristics I describe. It is not, however, the ONLY corner that self-identifies as "hard sf," nor (at this time) the most influential of those corners, nor should I have lumped them all cavalierly in together--nor implied that one of that constellation of characteristics inevitably and invariably brings the others along with it.

It is also the case that I, personally, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with hard sf--in the broad sense of science fiction which grounds itself in the hard sciences--due in part to my even more uneasy relationship with the hard sciences themselves. Personal unease and uncertainty lead (as ever) to overgeneralizations, and if I didn't want to unpack what I meant, I shouldn't have gotten in the ring.

("Illegitimate sf" is a piece of personal shorthand--invented here--and I shouldn't have used it without defining it, either.)

Sometimes nothing can save me from myself.

Comments

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find that any proported "Hard SF" story ends up falling short somewhere. Not always in characterization or plot though.
Forward's Dragon's Egg (I think that is the first of his Neutron Star books) Uses insanely accurate physics (that it turns out may happen to have the sole drawback of being wrong. Win some lose some) wonderful sociology and characterizations of alien intelligences, fairly boring human characters, and awful biology.

Niven gets the Biology and the Physics down (with the same caveat above holding. They may well be just wrong in places.) His sociology is so so, though he has a wonderful little "why anarchists should all be forced to live that way" story. And his characterizations are like eating ground glass.

Flynn and Poul Anderson both wrote Heinlein with a strong hard science undercurrent that reads like I remember Heinlein being instead of how he actually was. Actually, on that note, at least from my position as a literary theory unsophisticate, I'm not entirely sure that Michael Flynn missed any of the key things to aim for.

Nancy Kress (sp?) wrote Hard SF in her Beggars series that was strong on the chaaracterizations too. (Very good books if you've missed them. The science isn't at all intimidating.)

If you want Hard SF where the S part is mostly transparent, read the Flynn, the Kress and maybe Sister Alice by Robert Reed. (I am not sure if it is actually Hard SF or not, the tech is well in the appears like magic realm)

[pnh.livejournal.com]

"like I remember Heinlein being instead of how he actually was"

Indeed, it's interesting to go back to Heinlein and notice just how little of the stereotypical "rivets and wiring diagrams" are actually present in his prose.

The term "hard SF" really only came into use in the 1960s and 1970s, to distinguish one branch of SF from several others; some of its advocates have reached further back into the past to annex the work of Heinlein and others. In some cases (Hal Clement) it makes perfect sense to do so. In other cases, not so much.

Second the rec of Nancy Kress. I'm frequently struck by how often actual hard SF by women winds up being ignored, not just by the advocates of certain kinds of "hard SF" but by their critics as well. It almost tempts one to take the cynical view that "hard SF" doesn't actually exist and that 90% of what we call "hard SF" is actually deck-stacked libertarian fantasy full of, to cadge a term from TNH, "guys standing around talking tough about engineering." That cynicism aside, however, there really is honest SF in which plausible scientific and technological speculation plays a significantly foregrounded role. By any rational standard, novels like Beggars in Spain, or for that matter Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division, are every bit as much "hard SF" as anything by James P. Hogan. You shouldn't lose "hard" points just because you also include believable people described in sentences worth reading.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Maya Kathryn Bonhoff writes good hard SF. The only problem with *her* is finding the damn stuff... as far as I know, it's all printed in Analog. Grey Rollins, Amy Bechtel and W.R. Thompson are fun reads and have the same damn problem. When you grow up in a household where the Analog subscription might as well be lifetime, you end up loving a lot of really obscure SF authors.

For longer work, I've been reading a fair bit of Syne Mitchell too, mostly because I'd read a lot of her fantasy short stuff and liked it. Jeffery D. Kooistra is fun too.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

Ooh you must have missed them then. He falls into the same "turns out that his assumptions were wrong" trap that almost all hard SF falls into, but he was usually very focused on making what happened in his stories consistant with what theoretically could happen. Also, he considered psychology and sociology via linguistics as sciences too, so I'm not sure that a focus on sociology and psychology are enough to disqualify him.

Some of his post Stranger Work is among his best candidates for Hard SF. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the first half of The Cat who Walked Through Walls just drip with barely subsurface equations and blueprints.

(And as bad as the engineering in "The Roads Must Roll" he did predict the Segway scooter thingy in it.)

Ooh, Misfit (one of his earliest short stories) was literally all about the numbers involved in orbital mechanics. Forgot that one.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I wasn't as clear about my Heinlein comment as I could have been.

Only his earlier works really read as Hard SF (and by no means all of that) and when I was saying that Anderson and Flynn read like I remember him reading, I'm talking more about the characterizations and the sociology parts. (And in both cases, the science is much more with them than it usually was with Heinlein.)

Being a fairly big Heinlein fan myself, I was thrilled when I read about the recent development of visible spectrum radio antenna/transmitters (like the solar collecters in "Let there be Light")

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I was just rereading a big post on Electrolite that I first read before I had ever heard about Live Journal where you probably planted the seed that blossomed into my noting Nancy Kress as a writer hard sf. (It was a big thread about For Us the Living that I found either through Slashdot or Fark.com mentioning that it had a bunch of the luminaries of SF and several big name scientists on it.)

Task Taking

[jodi-davis.livejournal.com]

Can I take you to task for making me look up SYNECDOCHE. You damn dirty Ph.D show off!

;)

JD

Re: Task Taking

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

I had to look it up. Then I had the horrifying realization that I knew the word and had *forgotten* it.

Re: Task Taking

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I misspelled it. So any bonus points I might have gotten are deducted for the lousy dismount.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Sometimes nothing can save me from myself.

And sometimes I think ourselves are the only thing from which we cannot be saved.

MKK

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Sometimes we are our own unwilling passengers.