Hardness and Its Discontents
“Hard” sci-fi and some thoughts on the purpose of science fiction This article originally appeared as a forum thread on Agora Road.
Everybody knows nerds love to argue about stuff, especially if it’s something that’s poorly-defined and irrelevant to 90% of the population. At the risk of sounding like a jaded nerd myself, I’m tempted to say that the perennial argument within the science fiction fanbase over the merits of “hard” and “soft” science fiction fits into this category. On the other hand, the debate over how sci-fi should be written isn’t just a pedantic word game used to win arguments on the internet – although I couldn’t blame an outsider for thinking that was the case.
For the uninitiated, “hard” science fiction refers to stories that are heavily inspired by real-world science and strive to be as accurate to real-world physics/engineering/astronomy/etc. as possible. The classic examples are the works of Isaac Asimov (Foundation), Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama), and Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers), the “big three” old-school sci-fi authors who were all perfectly happy to pause their stories in order to explain how some piece of futuristic technology works. The Three-Body Problem and The Expanse novels (both have also been adapted into TV shows) are more recent and more popular examples of the genre. “Soft” sci-fi, by extension, is everything else The Wikipedia page for “soft” sci-fi defines it as a label for anything that “explores the”soft” sciences (e.g. psychology, political science, sociology), as opposed to the “hard” sciences (e.g. physics, astronomy, biology).” This is an interesting distinction that didn’t occur to me when I first wrote this, but it’s still fairly vague. One would expect that any good novel would “explore psychology” to some extent, regardless of how accurate its science is. – stories that are willing to bend the rules of reality a bit more and where explaining fictional science and engineering to the reader isn’t the author’s main interest. Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Dune, etc.
It’s always been hard for me to pick a side in the argument over which style is superior. The constraints imposed by “hard” sci-fi can often make a story far more creative and interesting than it would have been otherwise. Leviathan Wakes (the first Expanse novel) is a pretty straightforward Tom Clancy-style military thriller, but the fact that the characters are constantly having to deal with things like gravity, acceleration, and delta-v ratchets up the tension and makes the story more compelling than if they were flying around in Star Wars-style space cruisers. Hard sci-fi’s exposition dumps (when they’re done right) can also be fun and thought-provoking in their own right. In my opinion, one of the great strengths of science fiction is its ability to ask “what if” questions about both the future and the present. An author who can work out a fictional scenario to its most logical and realistic conclusion can often pose more interesting questions to a reader than one who’s content to settle with unrealistic genre tropes.
On the other hand, I strongly disagree with implication – raised by the focus on “hard” science and often explicitly stated by “hard” sci-fi fans and authors – that the primary purpose of science fiction is to educate the public in science, and that any author or director who doesn’t make their sci-fi “hard” enough is a menace to society, a purveyor of ignorance, single-handedly keeping us from landing on the moon again, etc. Science fiction is fiction, science fiction novels are novels. Like any other form of fiction they’re ultimately works of art, not science, and they ought to be judged according to the same standards as any other kind of art. Educating the public is fine and good, but a good author should be more concerned with writing a good story – one that’s aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking, emotionally resonant, entertaining, etc. Strict scientific accuracy can be part of this, but it’s not the most important factor.
To me, authors and fans who treat “hardness” as the primary mark of quality in sci-fi are trying to dodge the question of whether or not science fiction can hold its own as an artform by coming up with a special criterion that doesn’t apply to any other genre. Asimov and Clarke’s attempts to present themselves as philosophers, futurists, and “science communicators” instead of authors always struck me as concessions to the literary establishment’s prejudices against sci-fi – “Sure, we have terrible prose, our characters are stereotypes, our plots are straightforward, our style is flat and boring – but at least we can teach science!” Clarke was one of my favorite authors as a kid, but I gradually fell out of love with him after noticing this pattern repeatedly popping up in his stories. Imperial Earth was the worst offender – a novel with no real plot or characters, just a long series of scenes designed to show off some futuristic technology. Sometimes all it takes is one bad book to retroactively ruin everything else you’ve read by a writer. I don’t think these kind of mental gymnastics are necessary. There’s no reason why science fiction shouldn’t be able to shoot for the same goals as “literary fiction” – it often does, and it often succeeds. Gene Wolfe, J.G. Ballard, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Philip K. Dick, and many other sci-fi writers have managed to win critical acclaim without having to turn their books into science lessons. It’s worth adding that there’s a huge amount of genuinely terrible “soft” sci-fi out there, the paperback sections of used bookstores are full of it. If scientific realism is no guarantee of good writing, then neither are pulp sci-fi tropes or colorful cover art.
Despite this, it still seems like there’s a significant bias in favor of “hardness” whenever a debate about science fiction comes up online. The urge to appeal to scientific reason and “realism” when trying to convince someone why your favorite sci-fi IP is better than theirs is simply too strong, and inevitably leads to some pretty obnoxious arguments. A good example of this (although it didn’t originate from the internet) is Stanisław Lem’s essay on the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic I love Lem’s writing, especially Solaris, but it was this piece that irritated me enough to write out the criticism of the “hards” seen above. He starts out with a good critique of traditional alien invasion narratives and a summary of how the book improves on them, but then criticizes the Strugatskys for not taking into account the possibility that the mysterious Zone at the heart of the story could have been created by the crash of an alien cargo ship. He then spends the entire second half of the piece explaining why that explanation is the only one that makes sense. Lem finishes by saying the ending scene – in which the protagonist confronts an anomaly with the apparent power to grant wishes – was bad because it was written too much like a “fairy tale” to be realistic. The entire thing reads like some whiny nerd nitpicking on an internet forum or in a video essay. It’s not a bad review of the book, but the all-consuming obsession with realism and contempt for fantasy is kind of repulsive.
The reason this particular review irritated me so much was because the attitude described above didn’t come across in any of the stuff by Lem I’ve read. Neither the Ijon Tichy stories nor Memoirs Found in a Bathtub felt like they were held down by a desire to be completely realistic, and the Memoirs are borderline surreal. While the sentient planet on which Solaris is set remains mysterious and magical, it still felt very “hard” thanks to the story’s focus on science – both scientific reasoning, as seen in the main character’s attempts to make sense of the strange events he experiences, and the institution of Science itself, as seen in the multiple references to fictional academic works about the planet. And yet it isn’t a great book just because it puts the “science” in science fiction, it’s because all that detail is presented to give context to the emotional breakdown/crisis of faith the main character and his fellow scientists experience when they realize they can’t actually understand the alien organism they’ve come to make contact with. If Lem followed his own critique none of that depth would have made it into the book.
I think the point of all this is that genre labels (and sub-genre labels) are fluid and tricky, and that it’s difficult to keep them straight when you’re actually writing and reading, as opposed to just arguing about stuff on the internet. There’s a lot of good “hard” sci-fi out there, but I don’t think it’s good because of the “hard” label that’s been attached to it – either by its creators or by its fans, after the fact. You can’t reduce the qualities of a good story to a series of clear-cut concepts, and you can’t pretend that a story has to be judged by different rules just because it’s about robots or spaceships. I’d like to think that all the great science fiction writers understood this on some level. Maybe their fanbase will catch up with them, eventually.