Thousand Worlds, hard or soft?

[CamiloRP]

7 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I wouldn't go that far (one can distinguish between Dragon's Egg or Mission of Gravity versus The Left Hand of Darkness or Lord of Light), but I do recall Martin himself talking about an Isaac Asimov story where the outcome of the plot hinged on water boiling at a lower temperature in a vacuum.  As Martin notes, that was hard science-fiction... yet the story wasn't actually about water boiling in a vacuum. It was about people and their motivations.

Yes, this is kind of what I mean, I think he truly considerers most of his sci-fi possible, and that's why he thinks of himself as a hard SF writer, noted in the video above, I could be way off tho.

[polishgenius]

Obviously there's never gonna be a unanimous agreement on this because what qualifies sci-fi as hard or not has no completely clear definition. For me it's about scientific rigour, not necessarily realism itself. So for example Alasdair Reynolds' Revelation Space series really isn't very plausible at all but everything in it has been extrapolated out from scientific principles Reynolds was familiar with and which were up-to-date at the time, so it's hard SF. Meanwhile, taking Eternal Sunshine as my example just coz I debated its hardness earlier so to flesh that out, that movie uses a concept we can consider quite plausible and within relatively close reach of our current scientific ability, but the creators have absolutely no interest in exploring the actual science part of it, so it's not.

Taking more like-for-like examples, 2001 has the freakout bit at the end but to get there it takes great care to realistically depict potential space travel and all that kind of thing so it's hard SF. Ad Astra has a relatively similar premise and doesn't have the mindfuck ending but although you could plausibly create a film in which everything that Ad Astra does happens with scientific rigour, Ad Astra doesn't feel the need (thinking in particular about the stopoffs en-route, which really isn't how space travel would work) and therefore to me is not really hard SF. (Interstellar, interestingly, goes both ways on this- some parts are very hard SF indeed but then it jettisons scientific concerns as soon as it feels the story is better without them). 

 

That doesn't necessarily mean that the science has to be the heart of the story. For example the Luna series by Ian McDonald is built very hard on scientificly accurate representations of how life on the moon might go, but the characters and plot aren't really concerned with it at all- it just shapes the setting they take place in.


I can't really speak to quite how hard or not that makes Thousand Worlds, because I've only read some of the stories and a long time ago, but they didn't feel like hard SF to me when I read them.