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Hard science fiction
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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. 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. The complementary term soft science fiction (formed by analogy to "hard science fiction") 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.
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Encyclopedia
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. 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. The complementary term soft science fiction (formed by analogy to "hard science fiction") 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. Stories featuring engineering tend to be categorized as hard SF, although technically engineering is not a science. 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.
Scientific rigor
The 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. One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should be trying to be accurate and rigorous in its use of the scientific knowledge of its time, 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, 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. Some authors scrupulously avoid such implausibilities as faster-than-light travel, while others accept such notions (sometimes called "enabling devices", since they allow the story to take place) 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.
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.
Representative works
- James Blish, Surface Tension (1952), (Book 3 of The Seedling Stars [1957])
- Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity (1953)
- Tom Godwin, The Cold Equations (1954)
- Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)
- Poul Anderson, Kyrie (1968)
- Frederik Pohl, Day Million (1971)
- Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1971) and The Hole Man (1974)
- James P. Hogan, The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979)
- Robert L. Forward, Dragon's Egg (1980)
- Charles Sheffield, Between the Strokes of Night (1985)
- Geoffrey A. Landis, A Walk in the Sun (1991)
- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars trilogy (Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996))
- Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain (1993)
- Vernor Vinge, Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001)
Further reading
- , originally published in Science Fiction Studies #60 (July 1993).
- , Introduction to The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard Science Fiction, 1994, ISBN 0-312-85509-5
- , ed. Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James.* by Eric Raymond
- The Science in Science Fiction by Brian Stableford, David Langford, & Peter Nicholls (1982)
External links
- by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer. Story notes and introductions.
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