Ian Sales - Has Hard SF Grown Regressive?

[Onyx]

The article just made me wonder if I actually know what hard SF is and if I'd ever read any. I thought I had.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Neal Asher might be worth looking at, Brian

 

[Brian G Turner]

I've just started Neal Asher's Gridlinked, and Lois Mcmaster Bujold's Cordelia's Honor is next.

 

[Toby Frost]

But when I pick up modern SF, I struggle to find anything other than a familiarly-ordinary man going on a space adventure. Which, of course, can make for fun and interesting stories - just not visionary in the same way.

I'm quite surprised by this. I thought that one of the biggest current movements in SF was variety in protagonists, particularly in "diversity" areas.

I think there are two main ways that we can use SF in looking at the real world (although they overlap and blur into one another). One is to say “What if there was this amazing machine that did X?” and to write a story around that and the way that a world that includes such a machine would be different from our own. At the far end, you might end up with something like Dune, where there are a lot of amazing machines, and society has changed drastically to reflect them (and, in Dune, their absence).

The other way is to use SF as a way of looking deep into the real world, rather than moving away from it. By this I mean stories that deal with real-world issues or ideas and use SF to present them. The obvious example would be a story where there is prejudice against aliens, say, but I’m not just thinking of crude social analogy: Slaughterhouse Five’s SF aspects echo the protagonist’s state of mind. Not just “robots are cool”, if you like, but “what’s being a robot like?”. The problem with this, however, is that you’re not really talking about SF, or hard SF, or the way society might credibly develop: you’re using SF as a tool to talk about now. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

I’m not sure I have any answers to this rather rambling comment.

 

[SilentRoamer]

I've just started Neal Asher's Gridlinked, and Lois Mcmaster Bujold's Cordelia's Honor is next.

I really liked Bujold and I started with Cordelias Honor.

 

[Joshua Jones]

What I am about to say may sound like blasphemy, but I wonder if there is value in considering hard SF as more of a setting than a genre, or at least being somewhere in between the two. What I mean is, in a futuristic version of this universe with these physics, people will be interacting with one another in a range of different ways, which could produce things like a hard SF police procedural, or hard SF thriller, or even hard SF romance. Even keeping the limitations that it must be about how this plausible technology or that realistic societal shift will change things, one could specialize it down to something like "the effects of colonizing Saturn's moons on the social life, especially romantic aspects, of young people who live there," and have a full on romance novel set in a hard SF universe. For that matter, as varied as Saturn's moons are, you could do a full on space opera set within those moons and still be hard SF if you tried hard enough.

All this to say, I think there is room to create new things in hard SF, especially if we are willing to specialize a story a bit. It may reduce sales to the people who like different things in hard SF, but it could also bring in more people who wouldn't consider it otherwise.

 

[Onyx]

Hard SF, defined the more limited way, is almost invariably about the near future where the technology is safely within known science. That limits where and when it can take place, so it is much like a setting - or at least a limitation on setting.

 

[Joshua Jones]

Hard SF, defined the more limited way, is almost invariably about the near future where the technology is safely within known science. That limits where and when it can take place, so it is much like a setting - or at least a limitation on setting.

That is what I am getting at. I think what the article is reacting against is when we limit ourselves to making the characters more or less accidental, and the technology foundational. Soft SF is the reverse, but why cannot both be foundational? Why not see both the forest and the trees?

 

[Onyx]

That is what I am getting at. I think what the article is reacting against is when we limit ourselves to making the characters more or less accidental, and the technology foundational. Soft SF is the reverse, but why cannot both be foundational? Why not see both the forest and the trees?

There's no reason hard SF, or any fiction sub-genre, should lack features that make the writing worth reading.

So one of two things is happening:
1. Hard SF is defined so narrowly that the 3 guys that actually qualify also don't happen to be good writers.

2. The stories are well worth reading, and the fact that they are about something other than character development is exactly the sort of innovation that makes critics uncomfortable.


Personally, I don't know what is actually being discussed, because when I read a Peter Watts book I certainly feel like a just read a hard SF novel that explores and develops the post-contemporaneous characters in great detail. Is Watts the exception, does he not qualify, are we talking about specific books or some sort of average of all 'qualifying literature' without respect to quality?

I don't know the answer to that question, so the discussion raised in the article and in this thread feel like they may actually just be wanking, rather than real issues. Give me some data to work with and I might have a more thoughtful opinion, but it is possible that none of this has any real validity.

There will always be a percentage of books that just aren't very good.

 

[Joshua Jones]

There's no reason hard SF, or any fiction sub-genre, should lack features that make the writing worth reading.

So one of two things is happening:
1. Hard SF is defined so narrowly that the 3 guys that actually qualify also don't happen to be good writers.

2. The stories are well worth reading, and the fact that they are about something other than character development is exactly the sort of innovation that makes critics uncomfortable.


Personally, I don't know what is actually being discussed, because when I read a Peter Watts book I certainly feel like a just read a hard SF novel that explores and develops the post-contemporaneous characters in great detail. Is Watts the exception, does he not qualify, are we talking about specific books or some sort of average off all qualifying literature without respect to quality?

I don't know the answer to that question, so the discussion raised in the article and in this thread feel like they may actually just be wanking, rather than real issues. Give me some data to work with and I might have a more thoughtful opinion, but it is possible that none of this has any real validity.

There will always be a percentage of books that just aren't very good.

And a percentage of reviewers who take that percentage as representative of a genre, my friend. Glad we found some common ground! Now, as long as we don't start talking about pessimistic and optimistic outlooks, we are good...