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[james_davis_nicoll]

Hard Takes Soft, Still

Comments

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Needs a tag, or an unobscured link (that is a URL shortener, right?). I don't know whether to be afraid or eager or what about clicking.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2011/03/hard-sf-and-soft-or-girls-v-boys.html

With noscript, I'm less afraid of blind links. Unfortunately, with noscript Hootsuite links are damned annoying as they won't show the page until you click to allow javascript (uh, no) or click the X at the top right to "close" their useless bar by going to the actual page.

[hopdavid.livejournal.com]

I don't buy it.

For me hard sf is credible sf. That is, makes an effort to comply with known laws of physics.

Ursula Le Guin has built some of the most well developed interstellar settings sans FTL. So she ranks high in my pantheon of hard sf writers. In my view, this counter example blows Griffith's rant out of the water.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Sans FTL travel, sure; but she has a magic conservation-of-energy-defying NAFAL drive and magic FTL communication, so I'm not sure how she qualifies as "hard SF" by the definition "makes an effort to comply with known laws of physics."

[avram]

I don't recall anywhere in Griffith's piece where she specifies that she's talking about your "pantheon". She's talking about reviews, in general. Do reviewers, in general, tend to talk about Le Guin's SF works as hard SF?

[hopdavid.livejournal.com]

It discusses what's categorized as hard or soft SF: "Even a hint of body-to-body sex can be enough to earn an sf novel an Approach With Caution warning—that is, categorization as soft SF. "

In my opinion body-to-body sex has nothing to do with whether SF is hard or soft.

If an SF story includes explicit lesbian sex but still complies with laws of physics, it's hard.

If all the characters were sexless Dilberts, but the story has faster than light travel, it is soft.

[gohover.livejournal.com]

I greatly prefer hardish-SF, and the Dispossessed is one of my favorite SF novels. I wonder how well this applies to other people: I appreciate the Dispossessed (and many of the other Hain stories) as hard-SF because the subject matter involves various social sciences. I enjoy the STL setting very much, but I don't think it is the primary reason the stories are hard-SF.

Oh I just thought of an exception: special relativity plays a more central role in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. But, again, the discussion of the alternative marriage system (from an anthropological perspective) contributes almost as much to making the story Hard-SF.

And now I've thought of a better exception: Winter's King is a really fun special relativity story.
Hmph. Maybe I should't be too quick to discount the STL setting in the Hain stories!

[cmattg.livejournal.com]

.....when was the last time you read an SF book that had food pills?

[seawasp]

I don't really get it. Hard SF, at least the way *I* have understood the definition, has always been the kicked-around child. Oh, lots of people have respect for it in a sort of intellectual sense, but it's not bought much, it doesn't sell much, and since maybe the 1960s it hasn't been particularly dominant over the soft in terms of awards, critical notice, etc.

Given that Hard SF as I understand the term makes up a tiny fraction of the total SF published, it's hard to imagine it COULD dominate.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

"Guess which kind of SF, hard or soft, is privileged critically."

It seems to me that this is an evasion of responsibility. "Is privileged" by whom? The observer should name the donkeys she is trying to pin this tail on.

If the "is" goes back to the 1940s, okay, maybe. But that was a long time ago to be covered by the present tense. Practically from the time there has been science fiction literary criticism worth reading, hard sf, however you define it, has not been particularly privileged. There may be lingering notions that if it's by a girl it must be sticky, wet and moist rather than hard, stern and protuberant. But are people who think like that worth paying attention to? Are they really in a position to determine what is privileged in the genre? I doubt that very much.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

"Guess which kind of SF, hard or soft, is privileged critically."

The kind that *doesn't* describe the story the author just got rejected from $majorpublisher?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Do you remember how known critic Adam Roberts didn't think technical accuracy was important to hard science fiction? He just couldn't understand why people here on James's LJ were getting upset about sucking atmosphere into space through giant straws.

On the other hand, he was very proud about getting the surface sheen of hard SF right. He thought that was important.

I think that "hard science fiction" has had little to do with technical or scientific accuracy for decades. There are authors who aim for that sort of accuracy, but it's like getting the geography in a mystery novel right: nitpickers like me will complain, but it's not the important part to most authors or to most readers. Hard SF seems to be about an attitude. And I would say that Griffith's novel lacks that hard SF attitude -- though not because of its sexual content per se.

Of course, hard SF in terms of scientific accuracy *or* in terms of style has been on a downward spiral for some time. It's part of the break between SF derived from the magazine era, and SF derived from other media or authors unfamiliar with the magazine tradition. In the earlier tradition, hard SF was central. In the later tradition, hard SF is a curiosity.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to agree, but I think the change starts even earlier: think of Bradbury, Bester, Cordwainer Smith, Le Guin. From the fifties onward hard sf writers were prized as much for their rarity as for anything else.

Even when the Old Guard was young, I think science was more of a flavoring or a candy-coating than people were willing to admit. Who's more old among the Old Guard than Simak or Williamson? But how hard is their sf even intended to be?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I think there might be some selection bias. Those are the names from the era we remember, but are they really who was being published?

Looking at Astounding for, hm, October 1957, it's Murray Leinster, Christopher Anvil, Randall Garrett, Heinlein, and a science essay by Asimov. Okay, all known names, only one we think of as hard SF -- Asimov was well into his nonfiction phase, I think. Also, as a preeminent science popularizer and skeptic of his time, Asimov maybe has more hard SF cred than his fiction probably merits. (I keep on meeting economists who were inspired by his Foundation stories.)

Looking at Analog for, mmm, November 1963, it's John J. McGuire, Richard Thieme, Frank A. Javor, Walt Richmond and Leigh Richmond, and Christopher Anvil again. I recognized only Anvil's name offhand without Google.

On the one hand, I am sure these stories are very Campbellian. On the other hand, Campbell was a big old crank. Who knows how much actual science versus Campbellian science attitude there was in these things.

On the third hand, the magazines also ran essays on science and technology. (Granted, some of them were Campbell's.) I used to love those collections of Asimov essays from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It might be that the "hard" veneer rubbed off by simple proximity.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Historically, writers and readers seem to prefer their characters to pop nutrition pills rather than delight in a gourmet meal, dwell 24/7 in sterile environments rather than wander through a wood, and jack into virtual sex rather than touch another human being.

Aaaand that's where I pretty much stopped reading, given that gourmandizing, outdoors-y, romantic (or perhaps lecherous is the better adjective here) heroes were a dime a dozen in "Golden Age" SF (Flandry and van Rijn leap to mind) and are scarcely lacking in modern SF (the Vorkosigans, anyone?) in my experience.

-- Steve may be missing genuine insights by being so preemptory, but somehow doubts it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It does describe Greg Egan pretty well, though, and some of the other transhuman/post-Singularity stuff.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

That was the first name that came to mind while reading Griffith's essay.

Anderson famously went out of his way to use multiple senses in his descriptions. He tried to hit at least three out of five. I seem to recall he based it on something he read about Flaubert? But I would say he's the exception, not the rule.

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Possibly not including the very latest stuff, Greg Egan's included body-to-body sex in his writing, and non-hetero sex as well. There's pretty weird sex in Schild's Ladder, one of his hardest far-future sf novels.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

True, though his attitude toward it varies. Often it's either sort of abstract virtual-entity sex, or it's described with either detachment or revulsion (Permutation City was an extreme example of this).

"Oceanic", which is not that recent, is an arguable exception; the people involved are post-post-humans who are definitely embodied, and the bodies and the sex are somewhat unusual by our standards but they seem to be enjoying it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...but for the aliens in Incandescence, sex is an annoyance that causes them no end of trouble; sexual urges are crippling for the males.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Yes, my reaction was also "WTF??"

She is a science fiction writer? What on Earth does she read besides Isaac Asimov?

[kowh.livejournal.com]

People complaining about not enough sex (of any type) in SF should be careful what they wish for, the extant sex scenes are almost universally awful.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's not just about sex, though, it's whether the characters enjoy being in their bodies and experiencing the sensory world, or mostly want to get rid of them and be rarified mind-entities swimming in seas of thought.

I think these are both legitimate attitudes. It's easier to like being embodied when you're young, and especially if you're physically adroit and attractive. Most of the people I've known who really wanted to be disembodied minds or cyber-beings had perfectly understandable reasons for it, such as untreatable chronic pain.

But there are subgenres and subcultures that are skewed one way or another.