With the
new Star Wars out and the Star Trek Alternaverse in full swing, along with
films such as Interstellar and The Martian,
the hard and soft sci-fi debate has reared up again. Since I write sci-fi, I
thought I would weigh in.
Hard sci-fi
to me is an attempt by the writer to be as accurate as possible with the things
that can be accurate. If the work describes a technology that has yet to be
invented, so be it. It’s necessary for the story. This doesn’t automatically
make it scientifically soft. But when the work describes the time it takes to
travel from, say, Earth to Neptune, given their relative positions to the sun
and their current distance from one another, and at a given speed, that number
is accurate. The author has done the calculations to make it correct.
By no means
does the author have to walk the reader through the math (I would prefer they
didn’t). But calculations that can be accurate in the book are accurate, as are
descriptions of technology.
I’m sorry,
but when I see (old) Spock on that ice planet, looking up into the sky to see
Vulcan implode, I’m out of the story. Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury can all
be seen from Earth with the naked eye, but not enough to make out any details.
At best we get the impression of color. For it to be what the new Star Trek
movie showed us, it would have to be as close as Earth’s moon, to say nothing
of being in a different solar system.
However, I
think the most important aspect of a hard science fiction work is that it
remains consistent to itself. When it establishes certain rules, especially
regarding that technology, those rules are inviolate and realistic to the universe
of the book. If a story says that a ship travels at the speed of light, then it
travels at the speed of light, not one hundred times faster than that because
it becomes convenient to the story later on.
Changing
the rules doesn’t make it soft science fiction, it makes it bad science
fiction. It completely disrupts the narrative of the story, taking the reader
out of the suspension of disbelief.
Soft
science fiction, on the other hand, doesn’t try and make things accurate. It’s
not that they couldn’t, it’s that the story doesn’t revolve around that
accuracy. The focus is not on that accuracy. Stories like The Martian need those details. It needs to be accurate because
there are definite problems to solve that revolve around the science.
My new favorite sci-fi show is Killjoys, which is pretty soft on the
science fiction. From how the moons of the Quad system were (mis)terraformed to
the specific systems on Lucy, the show doesn’t concern itself with those
details. They are building a universe of stories that touch on certain
scientific ideas, and what can happen with those ideas in the future. I love
the show. I don’t care about the specific travel times between worlds, or
nitpick at how compressed the time is because that has never been part of the
initial premise of the show. It remains true to itself as a soft science
fiction show.
I think
works that focus on specific problem-solving, on shows that feature military
and space battles, lend themselves to being harder science fiction. There are
still fantastic technologies, but the hard science is in the details of how
ships maneuver, how weapons work, and what tactics are used.
One last
thing: I think that misusing actual scientific terms (I’m looking at you Star Wars and your insistence on
misusing parsec) is far worse than inventing technobabble (Let’s realign the
dilithium matrix to stabilize the plasma flow from the matter/antimatter
reactor, otherwise we risk collapsing the warp field).
One of my
degrees should have been in technobabble.