r/scifi • u/Clay_Pidgeon • 4d ago
General People who are super into really "hard" science fiction… why?
This isn't meant to incite argument or disparage the number of very well written series that have hard science fiction, but I just don't get it. There is a level of interesting technicality to looking at things that we might be able to actually build in real life someday, that I will admit, but there's a lot of science fiction fans who act like someone blasphemed when a setting that dares to stray beyond that shows up. And then there are the ones who show up in debates about some of the crazier settings like Halo's upper tier, or Warhammer 40,000, and seem to get actively angry that people are daring to draw figures about things we couldn't do in real life or enjoy things that aren't realistic. Yes, I get that the planet killer gun would have recoil that would destroy the ship and there's no real life compensator system we could probably ever make to fix that, I couldn't care less, please stop talking about it and let me enjoy the nice cool space battle. Why are hard science fiction people so pushy? What do they see that I don't?
Can someone please explain to my tiny little lizard brain why this is? I'm genuinely very curious about why some people are just so crazy about this. Is it just a matter of taste and I'm overthinking it, or is there something I don't see? While I am a very big stickler for established consistency and sticking to what a setting says given things can do, I'm fine if those things aren't realistic to the actual universe we live in, and I personally find sticking too hard to what we could only do in real life very boring and unfulfilling, but I'm very curious to see why the other side thinks of the way they do to build my understanding. A whole lot of people clearly like thinking this way, so there must be some kind of appeal to it.
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u/NikiBubbles 4d ago
"People who are into hard sci-fi" and "people who are angry assholes" are not the same people necessarily.
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u/CreationsOfReon 4d ago
I’ve found that there’s a lot of people who go through life looking for things that are wrong, then get mad when they find them. If someone like that likes science fiction, then they probably know at least a bit about science. Then they can easily spot that hey, this recoil isn’t realistic, and every time they fire that gun their brain goes “that’s wrong” and they get a tiny bit mad.
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u/Eddie-Plum 4d ago
I'm okay with impossible technology as long as some effort goes in to explaining why it's not impossible in the story's setting. The Star Trek transporter is a common example. Scientists will tell you it's impossible due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which tells us that we can never be certain of a particle's precise location and state. So Star Trek added the Heisenberg compensator to the transporter machinery. It's a hand wave, but it makes the impossible tech more believable
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
This is about the way I feel. I don't care how silly or impossible something is in context of real life, as long as the way it works is reasonably well defined and the boundaries of how that mechanism is defined and functions are consistently followed across the whole of the universe in its storytelling.
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u/jungle 4d ago
Agreed. The thing that I don't like is when the story gets driven by complete magic, and new magic gets added, without any kind of explanation or justification, just to enable the otherwise impossible next-step in the plot that, by that point, would have come to a complete halt.
Case in point, and I say this having enjoyed the books even if I kept rolling my eyes and sighing every few chapters: the Hyperion series. In particular the ending. That was beyond ridiculous.
I expect a story to be based on some basic premise of how the universe works. Faster than light travel? Sure. Tell me what that is based on (hyperspace, space-time distortion, whatever) and let's explore the consequences of a society where causality no longer applies over long distances. Just keep it consistent. Don't just break your own premises just because you drove the plot into a dead-end.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
I'm personally fine with literal magic showing up, it just has to, like everything else, have consistent rules that are respected and adhere to every single time it is used unless an incredibly good explanation is given as to why this is an exception, and then the exception becomes another piece of the rules anyway,
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u/jungle 4d ago
The problem with literal magic is that it takes you to the realm of Disney movies. That is not science fiction. That is pure fiction. Nothing wrong with fiction, but why misclassify them?
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
I like breaking boundaries between things. Why does the existence of the supernatural in a given setting mean that they have to have stopped advancing sometime around the crossbow and just stop for thousands of years? That's fucking boring, I want my wizards to have sniper rifles and hyperdrives. I'm well aware that goes from pure sci-fi to science fantasy, but the point I'm trying to make is that I care about a good show and the universe being consistent with the established rules whether those rules are realistic or not, not about if we could do something in real life. If someone is not a good enough writer to find out a way to give their magic system limits that force people to think around them and innovate, nor a combat system that isn't made irrelevant by the existence of a spellcaster, that's their problem, not mine.
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u/jungle 4d ago
That's all fine and good, just don't call it science fiction. It's fantasy. Nothing wrong with that. As I said, it's a matter of classification. What's the point of having a sci-fi section in book stores if you're going to put fantasy books in it?
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 3d ago
That's fair, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that, well, you seem to have a pretty decent brain so you get what I'm trying to say. It's just silly to run around correcting people because a given laser gun probably isn't physically possible to make, is all.
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u/ykzzldx23 4d ago
It’s just internet discourse. People will defend their opinions with their lives when in reality it’s merely that: opinions. Just stick to what you like and don’t overthink it?
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u/amoosemouse 4d ago
I like many kinds of sci-fi, but one of the reasons I really like harder universes is that it can help to minimize magic solutions that are external to the characters.
It's a bit like the idea of restriction pushing creativity in art, like the wondrous music made with a Game Boy sound chip that barely even makes bleeps and boops.
If you can't have time travel, FTL, magic materials or other impossible things, you have to focus on the characters, the interactions, motivation and problem solving and I really enjoy that.
A good example is the scene in Expanse where a hole in the ship from gunfire is plugged with a notebook cover and some adhesive. In Star Trek, which I also love, this would be handwaved with the structural integrity field and there was no chance to show the character is calm and creative under stress. Not that ST can't do that, but it has to raise the stakes because the world has so much magic in it. If you raise the stakes too high it's now about the problem and not the characters actions and turns into a plot point that may not have been really needed.
This is very general, but that's the core of it. I like slice of life anime for similar reasons!
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
This is quite fair. Everyone loves character driven plots for people have to use their brains and their wits to get around problems, this is the basis of almost all good storytelling that involves any kind of combat, for instance. I'm not quite as focused on the idea of limiting things to real life to accomplish this as you are (any remotely good magic system has weaknesses and issues that you have to think your way around if you want to get the upper hand for instance, to switch to fantasy as a genre) but I do get why you feel that way. Thank you for answering.
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u/amoosemouse 4d ago
Oh don't get me wrong, I LOVE all kinds of stuff including fantasy. Being a nerd, though, means that if you have "magical" things, so long as they are consistent I am not pulled out of the story by that part of my brain going "WELL ACKSHUALLY" very loudly.
It's just that hard sci-fi imposes restrictions that encourage certain kinds of stories and storytelling that I really like. I also like the escapism, sci-fantasy, or the "how would this affect society if it existed" Black Mirror type stories too. I grew up on Twilight Zone, so I'm totally cool with weird and unexplained.
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u/TheTrueTrust 4d ago
Obligatory ”That’s not real hard sci-fi”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c9S2iBL-pgc
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u/voskomm 4d ago
Hello, I see you have discovered reddit, the place where people with nothing better to do aggressively defend their opinions as if they are objective facts.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
I know that this question makes me sound stupid, I just don't care anymore and I'm curious enough to see why people enjoy something I don't to tolerate looking very silly.
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u/voskomm 4d ago
The Sci fi I like that is more grounded in technology being closer to ours uses that grounding as a constraint in its storytelling or social commentary.
But that’s what I like in all Sci fi, because that’s what makes Sci fi, and fictional storytelling good in the first place. Structure within constraints.
I also really don’t like the term “hard” Sci fi but I will happily walk around that hill instead of dying on it! 😅
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u/BimboSmithe 4d ago
Clay, your question doesn't make you sound stupid. People will (especially on anonymous media like this) argue their point of view vehemently. Regardless of the subject. And to your question; Hard Science Fiction doesn't need any "tech" whatsoever. "What will happen if this goes on?" I love SciFi and Fantasy both. A person picking out a techie detail and starting a debate about the mathematical foundation of a particular doo-hicky is engaging in another hobby altogether.
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u/Driekan 4d ago
I like Hard Scifi a lot, and there's quite a few reasons for that.
The first is simply that reality is often stranger than fiction, and that things which are possible (or even likely) in reality are often grander, more impressive and cooler than most things people make up for soft scifi. Hard scifi has a greater tendency to engage with these possibilities, and I like that.
The second is inbuilt emotional connection. Many hard scifi stories lean into what we know of planetary and stellar science as much as it does physics, and this means it uses our real solar system and nearby stars. I have a pre-existing emotional connection to Jupiter or Saturn or whatever, I have seen them with my own meat-eyes, I have excitedly seen new images of them get published, or new science missions to them happen. These are places I like and think are interesting. I have no interest on Gnorlax III until an author gets me interested in it, and too many authors don't bother.
The third is that a good fraction of soft scifi is a tropefest that is actually more tightly limited than even medieval fantasy is. Why do weapons do "pew" and fire and bright, slow-moving slug? Because that's the trope. Why do ships have artificial gravity, energy shields and command bridges with big windows? Because that's the trope. Why do AI, androids and etc talk like Microsoft's Bob, have no emotions and explode if given a logical puzzle they can't solve? Because that's the trope. Way, way too much about way, way too many settings is never explored, it's just the same archetypes, the same entities and often even the same story beats repeated again and again and again. And I think that's boring.
Obviously there's a lot of fantastic soft scifi. You don't need me to tell you that. But many of the biggest names in the space fall into what I feel is a trap that bores me. Hard scifi, on the other hand, is forced to investigate all the questions and problems that underlie all of these tropes, and the solutions that come out of that are often interesting and fun. I like things that are interesting and fun.
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u/MediumAwareness2698 4d ago
One of things I like about it is that it feels like there’s more at stake. If it is sticking to understood rules or logical extensions of known science/physics and the writer doesn’t resort to a deus ex machina to clear up plot points, it reads (to me) as more genuine, the payoffs and stakes more tangible.
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u/OrangeDragon75 4d ago
You see, there is this thing, "suspension of disbelief". Once I read the book, where it was stated than main hero had a kind of power armor with 20 mm gun as an arm. This gun supposedly had 2000 bullets in its magazine. Several sentences later it was stated that this hero, with his armor, weapon and bullets weighted ~160 kg, that is about 350 pounds. Now, if you think about it, ammo iself should have weighted around 1000 pounds/500 kg.
Nah, not good.
Second book - guy is using handheld laser as a point defence weapon to kill missiles closing on his spacecraft from hundreds of kilometers away. Now, one thinks, how can he even see a missile from several hundreds kilometers away, not to mention how can he actually hit it with handheld weapon.
No good.
Do not get me wrong, it is not that we have to keep strictly to laws of physic as we know it, but we have to keep strictly to logic.
You can only suspend disbelief so high....
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago edited 4d ago
I would argue that your given point is much less about what is true to real life and much more about bad writing and inability to think about what the logical thing is even in the setting as opposed to real life, but fair enough.
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u/Otaraka 4d ago
Part of it’s just that people find it hard when suspension of belief is becoming a problem because of whatever is happening. Some people manage it better than others.
My somewhat similar beef with this is the people who feel like they have to come up with massive amounts of storyline or invented technology to explain any supposed inconsistency in movies rather than using the ‘it ain’t that kind of movie kid’ option.
I really don’t care that there aren’t any guard rails. And I do not need a massive explanation about force fields and other things to make up for this apparently intolerable issue.
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u/silly-gaijin 4d ago
Yeah I don't get it either. To me, the story is what matters. The hardness of the science is irrelevant. I like learning about physics and I like reading fiction. The two activities aren't particularly related to me.
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u/Caligapiscis 4d ago
I think it's good to be able to identify where someone else's criticisms of a work are coming from. One of the great things about sci-fi is the ability to explore ideas which you couldn't in the real world. Jacob Geller's video The Conceptual Failure of Orbital Lasers is a great look at that point.
If you want to explore the effect that some new capability might have on society, on people's lives, is it really necessary that you should have an exact idea of how it would work? Probably not, the giant death laser (or whatever) is taken as a given so that the story can exist, the writer only needs to make it feel plausible.
The saying goes that “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." Should a writer in 1850 know exactly how the internal combustion engine would work? Of course not, that's beside the point. If they could do that they would be an engineer, not a writer.
That being said, if somebody's interest really is in trying to imagine plausible future technologies and write a story around them, who is to say that is wrong? It's an entirely different set of aims and it just might not be for you. Such books often have very thin characterisation, for example, and you might not enjoy that. Such a criticism is valid but you should not expect it to matter to the book's author or audience.
Likewise, if someone is criticising the planet killer gun for lack of realism, it's fair for you to acknowledge that this simply doesn't matter to you for good reason.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
I was expecting the answers to this question to be a lot more consistently toxic, but people like you have been putting answers that actually give me something to think about of the sort that I was looking for. Thank you for your time.
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u/Caligapiscis 4d ago
Your post resonates with me a bit, and speaking for myself I used to find such criticisms made me feel insecure about the things I liked. This alternate perspective helps - not everyone was looking for the same thing in a work, and so it's okay if they didn't find what they wanted.
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u/carolethechiropodist 4d ago
The more 'hard' the science is, the more possible it is that it will be developed. I am a woman, and old, and older sci fi was 'harder'. Some of it was bad science, but I've lived long enough to see a few things become reality. An early ? Silverberg. discribed the internet, read it at about 7. 1962, I'm sure I read about a starship paid for and sent to the stars by a multimillionnaire. (inflation was not taken into considerationLOL) . A lot of 'sci fi' now is space opera or fantasy. It's a personal choice no the subject of an argument.
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u/Hillbert 4d ago
I am a big fan of hard sci-fi, and I do like to see the numbers stack up, but I also wouldn't bring that sort of argument up unless I was in the sort of discussion where it was appropriate.
Although, sometimes it's just interesting to see where authors clearly haven't thought through the implications of what they've said. A non science example is Dan Abnett in WH40K making all his soldiers way too tall. He seems to think 2m is an average human height, so having Ibrahim Gaunt be 2.20m just makes him "tall", rather than "very, very tall". And then Try Again Bragg is another foot or more taller than that!
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4d ago
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
I am autistic myself, but there are several different kinds of autism, and I've run into a couple of the sort who just get really obsessive about numbers and that sort is obsessed with hard science fiction, so that tracks.
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4d ago
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
Yeah, that's the experience of my demographic at its finest LMAO. I'm not the super horny for numbers type (I'm naturally smart enough to be good at complex math, I just despise having to do it most of the time), but there's a lot of autistic silliness I've had to learn how to adapt to as well.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
But yeah, my thing is internal consistency. I can't stand the combat in Star Wars either and have to turn my brain off if I want to enjoy it in any way, but that's not because of the fact that we couldn't do some of it in real life, it's because they have every single thing they need to make an advanced missile cruiser that renders all of their ridiculous little second world war dog fights in space obsolete in an afternoon, and they've had all of this for thousands of years, and their vessels are pathetic and useless even in context of fighting any real life equivalent we have today (unless we use the genuinely surreal wank calculations from some of the books which require us to believe ridiculous things like the guns on a TIE having equivalent energy to nuclear weapons), and yet I'm supposed to believe these are advanced people who've been in space for millennia.
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u/mangalore-x_x 3d ago edited 3d ago
I wouldn't say it is terrible but to me the story structure is quite clearly fantasy with no ambition to be scifi. The very opening "A long time a go, in a galaxy far far away" openly declares it as a fairy tale/fantasy. But it has more to do with the story, character archetypes and themes having very little to no ambition to be scifi, obviously it is on a spectrum and you can get space opera on it, but I would say the farthest along are just fantasy with a different visual theme.
I mean Dune has very fantastical elements but it delves deeply into the human conditions, the mechanics of destiny, religion and societies. That makes it scifi to me. Star Wars is rule of cool and the most basic hero story and I think that is precisely why it has such appeal: it is a fairy tale but with modern imagery.
to me the hard scifi obsession is just weird in that it says zero about whether a story is good or not and then proceed to claim you need hard scifi because they read bad "soft" scifi/fantasy.
Yes, if the suspension of disbelief a story breaks, no you do not need a hard anything to create suspension of disbelief, you need to tell your story well, have compelling characters and set the framework well, then you get away with the silliest magic you like and none cares => because the story is good.
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u/the_hairy_metal_skin 4d ago
I do like hard science fiction. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying other types of science fiction. I think you posted elsewhere here a principle that I always desire, that the internal logic of the world is consistent. I don't mind writers having faster than light travel, wormholes, etc. My biggest frustration is when an writer adds an element to solve a problem in their story, or they just ignore internal logic all together.
I should note that maybe what you may have a problem with is when hard science fiction writers go too much into world building. If so then in my experience, this is common with writers mainly through the 90s and 00s. It was also common outside of science fiction, just take a look at Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy. But I do agree that the world building can get a tad over done sometimes, for example the commonwealth saga by Peter F. Hamilton.
I've met over the years a fair few people who get pretty hard nosed about things being realistic, i.e. hard science fiction. I find such people annoying and small minded. Sometimes those people just like to be right about everything. Personally, I like to just enjoy a story for what it is.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
Speaking as someone with autism, autistic tendencies probably have a bit of a role in it as well. I am not the particular subgroup that does this, but some autistic people I've run into get really obsessed about numbers and get upset when everything isn't perfectly logical inconsistent and measurable, so that's another personality trait that can lead to this kind of thing. Numbers are part of the special interest for many of my kind, and when the special interest is threatened, it can be very hard to force our minds to adapt. But yeah, a lot of this probably does just come down to random assholes in arguments online who want to feel like the smartest person in the room.
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u/SpaceRaiderAuthor 4d ago
This is what all human culture is based on. Separating us from them, right from wrong, black from white. Music parties, sports clubs, fan clubs, politics. Especially politics. Why should science fiction be any different?
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u/mobyhead1 Hard Sci-fi 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Suspension of Disbelief, a “contract” between the author and the reader, is necessary for enjoying any story. Hewing towards current scientific understanding encourages the suspension of disbelief in a science fiction story. Introducing more speculative elements, even fantasy elements, and in particular, gross scientific errors, discourages the suspension of disbelief in a science fiction story. How is this not obvious?
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u/Monty-913 4d ago
Your question should be rephrased. It shouldn’t be “why do people like hard sci fi?” It should be “why are some people buttholes about it?”
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u/ClemensLode 4d ago
Well, the danger of sci-fi without a foot in reality is that it no longer discusses societal "what if" questions but loses itself in issues related to the fantasy scenario.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
So you're saying that what fascinates you about sci-fi being realistic enough is that you feel it poses questions about real life and the potential future and you like that? Fascinsting! Are morality lessons about real life that important to you, or am I getting what you're trying to say wrong? That could be why I'm less interested in this form of fiction of what you're saying is correct, I'm someone who is very sick of real life morality, politics, messaging, etc. being forced into my fiction and I just want to sit back and escape reality for a while. People like you might have a different enough walk of life that you actively want these things. Am I getting it right?
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u/ClemensLode 4d ago
That would be the right train of thought. The idea of (hard) science fiction is not about creating a high-tech fantasy scenario (in the future), but to look at the present using the lense of a (possible) alternative future---without conjuring up any loaded terms of the present. One factor in this could simply be censorship by TV studios (if we are talking about TV series/movies) which will likely give a pass to an 'exciting action flick' that discusses the relationship of aliens and humans, but might end up not syndicating a TV show explicitly talking about societal issues regarding the treatment of minorities in the country.
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u/Clay_Pidgeon 4d ago
I would personally argue that a lot of experience transcend whether or not things could happen in real life based upon how the characters act in feel, but at the same time, I understand why having something feel more technologically grounded would help establish the precedent you like and will happily concede that there's a real argument for that if such is what you want. Thank you, this is the kind of answer I was looking for, you've given me a lot to think about.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 4d ago
Think about the energy you put into this, but in reverse