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The heck with neural nets - Javascript is the single most terrifying piece of technology out there right now.
Technology Limits in Hard Science Fiction
- Thread starter JohnLine
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The heck with neural nets - Javascript is the single most terrifying piece of technology out there right now.
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Could also be that people with multiple personality disorder are actually just suffering from signal bleed-over...
O.H.
Grading Science Fiction for Realism is a nice page on hard vs. soft science fiction, with the latter being the sort that approaches fantasy. Sociological SF is also called "soft SF", but it is a different sort of softness, one that's opposed to nuts-and-bolts hardness.
That page has a scale of hard-to-soft, so it's not just hard vs. soft.
* Present-Day Technology, though often with relatively small extrapolations, like technothriller secret weapons. Science fiction fades off into high-tech mundane fiction here. Lee Correy's "Shuttle Down" is a good example.
* Ultra Hard (Diamond Hard). Extrapolated present-day science and technology without being very speculative. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, interplanetary colonization, nanotechnology, ... The parts of "2001: A Space Odyssey" without the ET's, for instance.
* Very Hard. More speculative extrapolations, but still within well-tested theories. Relativistic spaceships, interstellar colonization, mind uploading, ...
* Plausibly Hard. Even more speculative stuff, but coexisting with well-established theories. Like faster-than-light travel with time travel, a consequence of relativity. The ET parts of "2001", for instance.
* Firm. Less plausible stuff, like FTL without time travel, but such stuff is kept to a minimum. Isaac Asimov's "Foundation", for instance.
* Medium. More such stuff, like abundant ET civilizations, ET biotas much like Earth ones, desert worlds with breathable atmospheres, ... "Dune", for instance.
* Soft. Very humanlike sentient ET's, ET cultures uniform, ... much of "Babylon 5", for instance.
* Very Soft. ET's having societies much like past and present human societies, patchy advancement of technology, technobabble, ... much of "Star Trek", for instance.
* Mushy Soft. Superhero powers, giant insects and similar monsters, energy weapons without any hint of their energy supply or energy dispersal, spaceships that battle like Earth vehicles, ...
At this end, science fiction fades off into fantasy, even if not swords-and-sorcery fantasy.
That page has a scale of hard-to-soft, so it's not just hard vs. soft.
* Present-Day Technology, though often with relatively small extrapolations, like technothriller secret weapons. Science fiction fades off into high-tech mundane fiction here. Lee Correy's "Shuttle Down" is a good example.
* Ultra Hard (Diamond Hard). Extrapolated present-day science and technology without being very speculative. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, interplanetary colonization, nanotechnology, ... The parts of "2001: A Space Odyssey" without the ET's, for instance.
* Very Hard. More speculative extrapolations, but still within well-tested theories. Relativistic spaceships, interstellar colonization, mind uploading, ...
* Plausibly Hard. Even more speculative stuff, but coexisting with well-established theories. Like faster-than-light travel with time travel, a consequence of relativity. The ET parts of "2001", for instance.
* Firm. Less plausible stuff, like FTL without time travel, but such stuff is kept to a minimum. Isaac Asimov's "Foundation", for instance.
* Medium. More such stuff, like abundant ET civilizations, ET biotas much like Earth ones, desert worlds with breathable atmospheres, ... "Dune", for instance.
* Soft. Very humanlike sentient ET's, ET cultures uniform, ... much of "Babylon 5", for instance.
* Very Soft. ET's having societies much like past and present human societies, patchy advancement of technology, technobabble, ... much of "Star Trek", for instance.
* Mushy Soft. Superhero powers, giant insects and similar monsters, energy weapons without any hint of their energy supply or energy dispersal, spaceships that battle like Earth vehicles, ...
At this end, science fiction fades off into fantasy, even if not swords-and-sorcery fantasy.
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Thanks Ipetric for the link. I guess my effort is a medium (FTL with no time travel). I don't think I have ever read a Mushy Soft Sci-fi novel, but I have seen a bunch of it on the idiot box and at the movies. On a rainy day a B&W filmed rubber suited monster crunching model cities with poorly dubbed sound tracks can sometimes be oddly satisfiying.
(Mind you I don't agree with all his taxonomy. Ferinstance, I'd put mind uploading in the soft category.)
Also, I kind of wonder whether the distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' SF is really just a matter of how realistic the technology is. Like ipetrich says, SF can be sociological. But even soft squishy stuff like that can take place in a diamond-hard milleu. And vice versa. Is a story with no focus on future technology at all, but written by an author who knows their science shit and can set it on a a background of hard sci fi verisimilitude, still hard?
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Any favorite examples? Even if favorite in a negative sense, like being the most annoying examples.
Lots of visual SF seems rather naive about space travel. Like Star Wars Star Destroyers and other such big warships -- lots of stuff on one side of the ship, but not the other, like a sea ship having lots of stuff above the waterline but bare hull below it. The Star Wars fighter spacecraft seemed to fight much like airplanes in World Wars I and II.
I remember Gene Roddenberry once being asked why no spaceships were shown upside down on Star Trek. He said that it was not to disorient Earth-based audiences. He explained that that was why explosions make sound in outer space in the series -- without sound, a lot of viewers would wonder what happened to their TV sound.
Two words: Space Bombers (hello The Last Jedi). Somewhere, a physicist, an aeronautical engineer, and a naval tactician are all crying.
This reaching out to Earthbound audiences is why the stars of "2001: A Space Odyssey" slowly moved past, even though the "Discovery One" was in the Solar System the whole time. The stars would look stationary, and while the Discovery One's motion would indeed induce parallax, it would only be visible over several months of travel, and that with a good telescope and for the nearest stars.
Also, as I noted, there are two hard-vs-soft axes in SF:
Also, as I noted, there are two hard-vs-soft axes in SF:
- Realism: mundane to fantasy -- what I'd posted on
- Focus: technology to sociology
It needs to be pointed out that 'science says bumble bees can't fly!' is just one of those stupid things that gets repeated on the internet, usually for stupid reasons, but it sure sounds pithy and smart. It's just a popular analogy when people are posting on facebook how vaccines are bad, their essential oils and healing crystals cure all ills, and what do those stupid doctors with their SCIENCE know anyway.
Hard sci-fi is about the technology presented in story having feasible grounding, to whatever degree the writer is striving for, and precludes hand-waving major things, like easy gravity wherever you need it, convenience energy shields, psychic powers, etc. FTL is kind of precluded by definition, because being able to effectively exceed your own light cone breaks... well pretty much everything. You can throw in a total game changer like that, but you need to keep under consideration how that effects _everything_ else. I like to cite Charles Stross' Missile Gap which is set on an artificial, literal flat Earth, and touches on some of the oddities and difficulties that something like this exhibits in order to adhere to actual physics.
If the science isn't hard, then it wouldn't be hard sci-fi, would it? Be it physical, or sociological. If one part of a manuscript is rock hard, but the other leaves a physicist/anthropologist hitting the bar in despair, then it would seem to fail to meet the definition of 'has a solid grounding in our understanding of X.' The issue is that writing a 'hard' science hard sci-fi story is easier, in as much "if a ship is accelerating at 2G in one direction, and then executes a maneuver accelerating it at 1G perpendicular to its previous course, the effect on the occupants inside is... ew." is fairly simple.
Meanwhile, writing a story that keeps the same sort of fidelity to 'soft' sciences is much harder because then you're primary variable is people, and the inclusion of people makes everything more complicated.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers where as soon as any of the orbiting spaceships took damage, they fell straight down to the planet below.
The categorization is really going to depend on the depiction. Putting on a helmet, a few boops and beeps later and you've got a digital copy ready to go would be soft. Something that goes through the effort of grounding how you analyze, record, and duplicate the ready state of a brain, possibly destructively, would be more on the hard side. What can already be analyzed, recorded, and interpreted going on in an active mind today is pretty astounding, so advancing that with another few XXity decades of development is not really pushing the bounds of the fantastic.
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I'm thinking not so much of stories that are inconsistent in their approach to scientific rigor, as of ones where it is there in the background, just not germane to the story at all. Like, what if the story is about future physicists getting drunk in a bar? Absolutely rock-hard science in the background, but it's a story about average schlubs just getting on? Is it hard? Soft? Does it matter?If the science isn't hard, then it wouldn't be hard sci-fi, would it? Be it physical, or sociological. If one part of a manuscript is rock hard, but the other leaves a physicist/anthropologist hitting the bar in despair, then it would seem to fail to meet the definition of 'has a solid grounding in our understanding of X.' The issue is that writing a 'hard' science hard sci-fi story is easier, in as much "if a ship is accelerating at 2G in one direction, and then executes a maneuver accelerating it at 1G perpendicular to its previous course, the effect on the occupants inside is... ew." is fairly simple.
Meanwhile, writing a story that keeps the same sort of fidelity to 'soft' sciences is much harder because then you're primary variable is people, and the inclusion of people makes everything more complicated.
Scenes like that take me right out of a movie. I blame Hollywood's boring fetishisation of WWII, except I'm fairly certain actual World War 2 had more advanced technology than the Star Wars universe (like f#%€ing ballistic missiles). And World War 2 battles made sense.Reminds me of Starship Troopers where as soon as any of the orbiting spaceships took damage, they fell straight down to the planet below.
It's the duplication bit that I find soft. That seems to be viewing consciousness as something that's happening on the brain as a computing medium, that could be duplicated in advanced-enough software. I don't think consciousness is really something akin to software at all. It's more just something that brains happen to do because they're brains. We've got no reason to believe even a model-to-the-molecule of a human brain within a computer (and that's not happening in a few decades) would be conscious.
It doesn't, and I'd say that someone trying to argue otherwise is getting too hung up on labeling. I could claim that my story of two guys arguing over soup in a bar is an exciting new entry in Tolkien's Lord of the Ring universe, because at some point, someone makes an aside about all that whackiness happening over in Gondor. But if that background is so trivial and completely irrelevant to the story, then what's the point of trying to claim it has any meaning?
Really, what it does is setup expectations for what the story is trying to accomplish. A reader is going to have very different expectations from a book about the efforts to save the Earth from imminent asteroid impact purports to be hard sci-fi, than one that uses the same premise to launch a swashbuckling space adventure.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers where as soon as any of the orbiting spaceships took damage, they fell straight down to the planet below.
The German V1 and V2. The V1 "buzz bomb" was a cruise missile with a pulsejet engine, and the V2 rocket was a ballistic missile.
Isaac Asimov in "Future? Tense!" ("From Earth to Heaven", 1965) imagined how one might write about cars in 1880.
That is, technobabble.
That's what a lot of visual-media SF spaceships and space action seem like, at least to me. Too much like Earth vehicles.
I'd read that. I think stories about average people living in extraordinary settings are fascinating. My WIP's set across a baroque AF space opera background, but it's really just the story of how a band breaks up.
One hazard of hard science fiction is that if the science takes the lead it can start reading like a technical manual. I think characters and story should take precedence. In hard science fiction most of the science should be plausible, with a few leaps as LaerCarrol mentioned, but these are the world and background not the entirety of the tale.
On the subject of working around FTL travel, in one of my side projects (admittedly medium hard sci-fi) they use what they call a manipulation drive. Manipulation drives are an entry-exit time machine, they take you back to the time they were turned on, paired up with a device that decompresses the flow of time inside the ship.
The ship actually travels thirty years, passengers perceive three weeks. The rating of the engines from 1 to 10 is based on how much time an outside observer notices, with 1 being months to years and 10 being hours.
The ship actually travels thirty years, passengers perceive three weeks. The rating of the engines from 1 to 10 is based on how much time an outside observer notices, with 1 being months to years and 10 being hours.
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I try to write my sci-fi as realistic yet at the same time no one would call it hard sci-fi. First, I try only to extrapolate from what current technology suggests will be coming down the road. But I write from the close point of view of the characters, so this technology is simply something they take for granted and there is little opportunity or need to describe why it works the way it does, because people rarely think about that which they take for granted.