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Hard Facts and Fiction pulsemagazine.org | Lasers Are Really Here And Not Just From Some Science Fictions - Lasik... lasiksurgery101.com | jeromegroopman dot com | Science Fiction jeromegroopman.com | These Lasers aren?t from Science Fiction! optic-surgery.com |
Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both.[1][2] The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science Fiction.[3][4][5] The complementary term soft science fiction (formed by analogy to "hard science fiction"[6]) first appeared in the late 1970s as a way of describing science fiction in which science is not featured, or violates the scientific understanding at the time of writing. The term is formed by analogy to the popular distinction between the "hard" (natural) and "soft" (social) sciences. Neither term is part of a rigorous taxonomy — instead they are approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful. The categorization "hard SF" represents a position on a scale from "softer" to "harder", not a binary classification.
[edit] Scientific rigorThe heart of the "hard SF" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself.[7] One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should be trying to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically and/or theoretically possible, and later discoveries do not necessarily invalidate the label. For example, P. Schuyler Miller called Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust hard SF,[3] and the designation remains valid even though a crucial plot element, the existence of deep pockets of "moondust" in lunar craters, is now known to be incorrect. There is a degree of flexibility in how far from "real science" a story can stray before it leaves the realm of hard SF.[8] Some authors scrupulously avoid such implausibilities as faster-than-light travel, while others accept such notions (sometimes referred to as "enabling devices", since they allow the story to take place[9]) but focus on realistically depicting the worlds that such a technology might make possible. In this view, a story's scientific "hardness" is less a matter of the absolute accuracy of the science content than of the rigor and consistency with which the various ideas and possibilities are worked out.[8] Readers of "hard SF" often try to find inaccuracies in stories, a process which Gary Westfahl says writers call "the game". For example a group at MIT concluded that the planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity would have had a sharp edge at the equator, and a Florida high-school class calculated that in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld the topsoil would have slid into the seas in a few thousand years.[10] The same book famously featured a devastating inaccuracy: the eponymous Ringworld is not in a stable orbit and would crash into the sun without active stabilization. Niven was forced to fix this error by writing The Ringworld Engineers. [edit] Representative worksArranged chronologically by publication year. [edit] Short stories
[edit] Novels
[edit] See also[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
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