Previously: How to tell if you are in a high fantasy novel.
Something has gone terribly wrong with the earth’s orbit, but modern gender roles are still pretty much intact.
Even ray guns cannot destroy man’s oldest and strongest enemy – hubris.
A beautiful woman who represented all that was good and pure in human civilization is horribly killed, and it is at least 45% your fault.
A princess of the warrior caste with gleaming indigo skin longs to understand this Terran concept your people call ‘love.’
Racism no longer exists now that all of humanity has banded together to speak English, vote democratically, adhere to 20th-century American social standards, and battle alien intruders in a thinly veiled metaphor for anti-immigration sentiment.
You live in a world where robots masturbate, for some reason.
The ship’s doctor has a drinking problem.
You’re going to have to go through the asteroid belt you’d hoped to avoid at the beginning of this journey.
Everyone living on your space station has forgotten about the importance of crop rotation.
There are Core people and there are Rim people. Core people wear silver, gender-neutral clothing and love fascism and artificial light. Rim people wear floor-length WWII-era trench coats and love modified libertarianism. These are the only two kinds of people. Plus there’s one ocean planet full of mermaids.
You have discovered/cured/invented something desperately important, but at what cost?
You have come to realize that you are the enemy you have been hunting all along. Your cynical android companion self-destructs after helping you achieve this realization, and upon its almost-human face settles a look that could almost be peace.
You are the real monster.
An artificial intelligence program is intentionally misunderstanding your commands by interpreting them in the most literal way imaginable.
At least one alien species appears to practice an independently-evolved version of Confucianism. You will have sex with at least one of their most important priestesses.
A sinister representative from a mining corporation with a near-total monopoly on whatever the made-up-sounding mineral that powers spaceships is sends you on a simple-sounding mission. What you think is the mission is in fact not the mission at all; your new mission is to figure out the actual mission and to thwart it before it lays eggs.
Your life story mirrors perfectly the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, but your ship travels between the stars, rather than between a chain of Mediterranean islands.
Your lifelong mentor has betrayed you and all of mankind in a shocking twist. He is deeply grieved but utterly without remorse. When you finally have the opportunity to take your revenge, he is so old and near death you find yourself unable to harm him, because he is so unlike the man who once turned you in that he might as well be an entirely different person. Besides, you have less than 45 minutes to restart the sun with nuclear weapons.
The only thing more mysterious than the crystal star your ship is orbiting helplessly is the human condition.
As you lay dying in the red dirt, you wonder whether the robots were truly evil after all. You will never know.
At least one alien species composed only of women has been searching for centuries for the single male who will lead them into a Golden Age. That male is you, and you will have to have sex with their beautiful witch-queen, whose arms are entwined with copper jewelry and whose eyes are the color of sunset.
You tame the most dangerous beast living on an alien planet with a single biome. The locals tried to master the beast for thousands of years, but you nailed it in about a week.
The true meaning of this silent, ancient ziggurat will at last be revealed, if you could just translate the pictograms.
Science has answered many questions in your long and storied life, but it has never answered the question of meaning. Death is the final adventure, and you’re about to take your first step onto the Black Path Between The Stars.
Grateful joke assistance credit to Christian Brown and Connor Goldsmith, who are into hard sci-fi.
Tags: books, how to tell what novel you’re in, i’m into hard sci-fi, science fiction
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OMG I am in a soft science fiction novel. BUT AT WHAT COST
I’m going to punctuate every suggestion someone makes at facutly meetings with “BUT AT WHAT COST” from now on.
The 70s were a special, special time.
throw in the 60s and those were pretty much my exact thoughts reading this.
no, I’m not looking for Andre Norton books floating around online to relive my tween years and stay up until unnatural hours, why do you ask?
DUNKED SO HARD ON DAN SIMMONS
I was just thinking how perfectly this fits the Hyperion Cantos (which I’m enjoying… sort of? but boy does it have a lot of old tired tropes)
Honestly, the first book’s my favorite sci-fi novel ever and I think it suffers a little from how many of the devices it uses BECAME old tired tropes.
…but that ain’t gonna stop me from goofing on it.
The first book was definitely more impressive as well. I’m almost done with the second, and I keep running across stuff that makes me want to write very pointed letters to Mr. Simmons
Followed up by a pretty solid facing of CJ Cheryyh’s Foreigner series.
THEY DON’T LOVE YOU, JASE, THEY NEVER WILL.
eta I only read the first three books, so maybe the atevi do learn about this human emotion called love someday.
They will, however, eventually bone you and then hold you in their very very big, strong, warm & ebony arms.
Nah, sounds like love enough for me ^_^
After watching a beautiful woman perform “How To Tell If You Are In A Jane Austen Novel,” I can’t not hear Mallory’s voice narrate this in my head.
“A sinister representative from a mining corporation with a near-total monopoly on whatever the made-up-sounding mineral that powers spaceships is sends you on a simple-sounding mission. What you think is the mission is in fact not the mission at all; your new mission is to figure out the actual mission and to thwart it before it lays eggs.”
i read this one in the slush pile a LOT.
THWART IT BEFORE IT LAYS EGGS. Perfect.
Sometimes it makes it out of the slush pile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkkvYIei5eQ
I came here today to announce, loudly, in lieu of a useful comment, that MY LOVE FOR HARD SF IS PURE AND ABIDING.
I didn’t immediately post this article to my SF FB group only because I had to read it three times to decide which to use as a pull quote.
“Racism no longer exists now that all of humanity has banded together to speak English, vote democratically, adhere to 20th-century American social standards, and battle alien intruders in a thinly veiled metaphor for anti-immigration sentiment.”
I like to call this the Holodeck Problem, or We Are a Crew of Beings from Thousands of Planets but Most of Our Cultural Reference Points Are American.
I would kind of love to see some variant of Star Trek where they’re constantly referencing cultural in-jokes from various planets we, the audience, have no way of knowing.
“He seems to be sacrificing his daughter for the greater good.”
“Ah, yes, like 54-BII and the king of Karaq.”
“Let’s hope this one doesn’t have a goldfish.”
*everyone laughs*
Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra!
Timba, his arms spread wide!
I love you so hard.
Unreadaethel and Houblonchouffe at Tanagra! When the door opened.
Their eyes uncovered!
Ok, we’re getting a bit racy now.
Quite–sorry about that!
I mean, I don’t mind, but we’re in public, in front of god and everyone.
So much Toast love. So much.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
That is immediately where my mind went, too. Temba, his arms wide.
AMAZING
Well I mean there’s already a a McDonalds in Addis Ababa imagine what a couple hundred more years of aggressive marketing could do.
By day 3 the strange insectoid conquerors from the Crab Nebula will all be in Juicy pants and popping Lexapro, they never stood a chance
The name Starbucks isn’t actually a reference to Moby Dick, it’s a prophecy of the company’s future.
There’s your conference paper title right there.
“There’s this bridge between these two planets and thousands of humans travel on it every day, and there’s this robot who does maintenance on the bridge. One day he removes a bolt, the bridge collapses, and everyone dies.”
“THE ARISTOCRATS!”
omg
*tap dance on speed* It’s! My! Job!
You are overcome with love for a dark-skinned foreigner and his old-timey religious practice of “peace.” You are definitely not in love with his extremely attractive features, nor those of your foil, whom you will murder while naked. In a shower. Hand-to-hand.
SALAAM
oh my god
your closet is a little translucent mr. card, and the underage homoeroticism is freaking me out a little now that i am an adult person and not the preteen i was when reading ender’s game for the first time
Interstellar travel is accomplished by means of the Something Drive or Whoever Effect or Whatnot Gate. The prefix is probably two hyphenated names, one of which is Anglo-Saxon sounding and the other isn’t. It was a spectacular discovery by these two researchers that changed human history, but now it’s such a part of the fabric of life that nobody you meet ever needs to talk about how it works.
Well to be honest I still haven’t entirely figured out how the internet works.
As you know, Bob, the Internet would never have come to pass without discovery of the Brandenburg-Rodriguez Effect.
BERNERS-LEE. Truth in television, if you ignore the fact that it’s one person.
my GOD
So… does this mean…
Somebody check the Earth’s orbit, quick.
Also, I wish to request a meatier character arc.
We’re out of protagonist-level character arcs. How do you feel about being the protagonist’s best friend who dies in the middle of the book to provide additional motivation?
Honestly, a best friend and a meaningful death sounds like a pretty good deal.
It’s only the sassy minority characters who get that option, tho.
did someone say my name
Sorry, the only options are “becomes slightly more cynical” and “falls in love, becomes slightly more optimistic, then loved one dies and becomes WAY more cynical.” That’s all we got.
The first option sounds suspiciously like the arc I have now.
I guess I could handle falling in love, as long as the loved one never finds out about it.
I’ve been led to believe it’s a series of tubes.
As you know, Bob, Shaw-Fujikawa drives are a series of tubes.
Haaaa the slipspace drives in Halo are Shaw-Fujikawa drives.
I legitimately did not know that, because in my experience the plot of Halo is “four Master Chiefs kill each other in a dry valley until Chad yells ‘THIS GAME IS GAY’ and turns off the X-Box.”
There is a surprisingly good expanded universe for the Halo series that I feel like 90% of its players never even see.
I believe it! Bungie games always have fantastic stories.
The distinction between soft and hard sci-fi is entirely in how willing random middle managers and deckhands are to spout forth an unabridged encyclopedia entry on the mechanical principles behind the power cells on the space frigate that is absolutely identical to a 17th century privateer ship, only in space.
Like Calabi-Yau manifolds?
“The ship’s doctor has a drinking problem.”
Now that you mention it, I can’t remember an instance of Dr. Zoidberg ever taking a drink without vomiting from both his salt water and fresh water stomachs.
Also I always wanted an episode of DS9 where the Universal Translator malfunctioned and nobody could speak to each other anymore, except Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien, only O’Brien is too busy trying to learn Japanese so he can find out what Keiko is depressed about this time (“Computer, how do you say, ‘I know you think you’re wasting your academic training as a botanist, but Quark is looking for a part-time busboy’ in Japanese?'”)
I think she was probably annoyed because O’Brien’s true soul mate was actually Bashir. You don’t need a universal translator to translate that love!
I always wanted them to do more with Keiko’s character. Like if you’re gonna have her be mad all the time (TOTALLY LEGIT LIFE CHOICE, KEIKO), at least explore why!
Yes! I kept waiting for a Keiko episode where she’s off finding cool-ass plants in the Gamma Quadrant, but alas. Here’s another Nog episode.
Having just started DS9, I am hoping for an episode where somebody invents in-ear communicators so that Crazy Old Sisko doesn’t have to move away from a crowd of people when O’Brien calls him about something.
Half the world is Chinese or just vaguely Asian yet all or almost all of the named/ shown characters are white.
Diversity is when your white characters say something in a non-English but real Earth language?
NuTrek, I’m looking at you. (I’m basing this on the fact that 60% of humans currently live in Asia.)
This fact has made me increasingly impatient with mainstream sci fi stories/books/movies/shows that seem to have 90% white casts. Something happened to me last year, and now I can’t watch/read any of them without deducting like, 10 Hieu points* from them.
*a metric as meaningless as it sounds
Nah, that sounds like a totally legit measurement, right up there with Bechdel’s test. “On the Hieu scale of diversity, these mainstream sci fi stories/books/movies/shows have utterly failed.”
Have you read China Mountain Zhang? It’s excellent and sent in a world where the Chinese government is in charge.
I love Firefly but this gets me EVERY TIME
and not just novels and tv shows. How many Asian characters were in any of the Mass Effect games? Kai Leng (ninja bad guy) and??
Don’t forget about Emily Wong and Khalisah al Jilani! And it might be because so many characters were non-human, but I thought Mass Effect actually did a pretty decent job of including POC?
Yes, thank you! I definitely noticed the Black characters, which is why I was surprised I couldn’t remember more Asian characters.
Also Kasumi is a companion if you get her DLC!
Idek if I’d call it a pretty decent job though. Emily barely appears in ME2 and ME3, and Khalisah was badly portrayed most of the time and you had the option to punch her every game :/
I read somewhere (and if it’s on the internet it must be true) that Simon and River were originally supposed to be Chinese, but Fox vetoed that. Maybe they thought Zoe was enough diversity? But that exists somewhere in a parallel universe that’s doing better at this than ours.
The only recent sci-fi movie I’ve seen that comes CLOSE to subverting this was Sunshine, because you only had four obviously white people.
Also it’s pretty and has a nifty plot.
“We live in a post-racial society, as seen by the fact that everyone’s like… 95% white.”
the need to better understand the hard/soft science fiction distinction has destroyed my ability to laugh:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction
At least one alien species composed only of women has been searching for centuries for the single male who will lead them into a Golden Age. That male is you, and you will have to have sex with their beautiful witch-queen, whose arms are entwined with copper jewelry and whose eyes are the color of sunset.>>
Change ‘male’ to ‘fat white lesbian with great hair’ and you’ve nailed my fantasy life.
Fun activity: assume basically every first novel is someone wringing 100,000 words out of their fantasy life. Especially Tolkien.
Mine is gaining the superpower of perfectly perceiving and manipulating human tissue, and rather tediously setting up a series of clinic days and collaborations with medical researchers. YOUR FANTASY LIFE IS BETTER.
I love this and will now be employing it at all opportunities.
I begin with the first words of my debut novel:
The raven-haired lesbian sat on her couch eating crackers. There was a knock on the door. She answered, brushing crumbs off her three layers of cardigan.
On the other side of the door stood a beautiful witch-queen. The witch-queen had copper jewelry on her bare arms, and her eyes were the color of a sunset, sort of yellow at the bottom and then pink and then blue/purple, sort of an ombre, you know.
“You must come with me if you want to bone,” said the witch-queen, and the raven-haired lesbian said, “Uh, I’ll have to ask my wife, I guess? Do you want to come in and pet the cats until she gets home?”
The witch-queen considered the offer, then nodded. She did want that. They went inside and ate crackers and petted cats, and later had a scorchingly hot threesome with the raven-haired lesbian’s lovely wife.
*90k word description of threesome redacted*
The End! 😀
Bless this.
You are my new heroine.
I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Amazing.
“come with me if you want to bone”
Even though it’s nearly a year after you wrote this, I want to congratulate you for the best encapsulation of a porn parody of The Terminator.
Amazingly, you managed to make me laugh harder than anything else in this article. You ROCK!
Somebody needs to find herself a copy of _Daughters of a Coral Dawn_….
The true meaning of this silent, ancient ziggurat will at last be revealed, if you could just translate the pictograms.
The twist: IT’S A LIVER PYRAMID.
The best kind of pyramid.
I didn’t know there sci-fi could be catagorized as hard vs. soft.
*runs away*
Yeah, I guess I’m from the wrong end of the nerd pool, here– help a sister out, guys, tell me the difference? I am dying to understand your reference!
hard science fiction is supposed to be plausible, whereas soft science fiction just *handwaves* most of it (also, as Cathrynne Valente said, hard scifi gets +9 for white men)
Hard sci-fi is way more interested in how spaceships work (and telling you how they work, in detail, at length) than in things like, you know, characters, or plot, or the possibility that gender/race relations might not always be exactly the same as they are now. (Okay, that’s not always true. But it mostly is).
Well, speculating about gender and race is kinda risky.
Bad case scenario – people get their panties in a bunch over how you portray something they deem to be “ingroup” (usually exposing themselves as a load of douchebags in the process, but often that’s a rather cold comfort)
An even worse case scenario is that someone might like your utterly made-up society so much they try to “live it IRL”, in which case you end up looking like a crazy cult leader, whether you want it or not. And also get a bunch of cosplaying weirdos following you around (because they noticed your book around, and found its ideas very attractive!)
Speculating about consequences of FTL/alien gut biomes/AI designs is usually not risky.
Worst case scenario – a physicist/biologist/programmer will look at you really condescendingly. If/when you meet one, that is.
I tend to think of it as:
Soft–there is technology but you don’t really care about how it works. The story is really about the people/culture/statement/story the author wants to make/tell. See Snowpiercer (though that’s so soft, it’s allegorical). Stop thinking about how the train works.
Hard–more of a focus on the technology, how it works, and how it actually will affect/change the people and culture. Some people insist hard science fiction needs to have scientifically sound technology, but the intersection between that and real life is…very large.
TV Tropes is pretty good on this one.
A character is shown a machine for traveling into the past and asks, “How does it work?”
–In soft SF: “You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and pull that lever.”
–In hard SF: “A good question with an interesting answer. Please have a seat while I bring you up to speed on the latest ideas in quantum theory, after which I will spend a chapter detailing an elaborate, yet plausible-sounding connection between quantum states, the unified field theory, and the means by which the brain stores memory, all tied into theories from both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.”
–In really hard SF: “It doesn’t. Time travel to the past is impossible.”
This is tangential, but I love Steven Brust’s [paraphrased] take on this:
“Don’t explain how your time machine works, because they don’t. Every time you make an assertion, you’re inviting the reader to argue with you. Describe the experience of using the time machine, and if you do that well enough, they’ll fill in as many details as they need.”
Or from the reader end of things, to paraphrase: “If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts, repeat to yourself, ‘it’s just a [book], I should really just relax.'”
Fringe was often pretty great hard sci-fi when dealing with the alternate universes and some of Walter’s experiments. Other times it was soft but still plausible.
What I am saying is that I really miss Fringe.
Asterisk! My pop-tarts!
Hard sci fi: Have I mentioned recently I’m smart? No? Well how about a giant honking physics lecture in your novel?
Soft sci fi: Thank god we figured out faster than light travel, how does it work, um WOO HOO ALL ABOARD THE FUN TRAIN!
(I joke. Mainly. I’m firmly on the soft sci fi part of the equation because I dropped science classes to fit in more humanities somewhere around year 10. I don’t need to know how you make a clay copy of yourself to go out and do your job and then upload their memories to you at the end of the day, I just need to know that it’s awesome and results in a fun world to play in.)
Basically, if your “science” doesn’t make someone who actually is involved in a relevant field laugh maniacally, then it’s somewhat close to the hard part of the spectrum.
Due to the sheer amount of work and CYA it takes to come up with plausible (or at least “not implausible at first glance”) future technology and the amount of exposition it takes to actually “show off your science chops”, it correlates with narratives that are somewhat light on character (not necessarily a bad thing, since I don’t want every goddamn book I read to be some kind of character study!).
If done right, it can improve suspension of disbelief.
But if done wrong, hard scifi becomes, essentially, a service manual for nonexisting gadgets
Watch Party Down! You’ll get it.
As you and I both know, Hieu, hard sci-fi is a medium where people say “As you and I both know” and then go on to explain how something equivalent to internal combustion works. Or people spend time musing on how the interstellar communication system works, which is a lot like trying to recognize the different types of transformers on telephone poles; legit something I do with my time, and also apparently not something human beings do with theirs.
After looking it up on Reputable Source Wikipedia, apparently it means any sci-fi I’ve read/heard of is soft.
Oh! I feel like this is a great time to recommend some feminist hard sci-fi? Yes? Other people chime in?
1.) Lilith’s Brood, Octavia Butler. After nuclear war pretty much destroys everything, aliens come and fulfill all the softest, nicest tropes about enslaving Africans. They are very understanding, and humanity would have died without them, and it is still just TERRIBLE. Awful. The worst. Also the aliens like us because we get cancer. Good biology.
2.) Vorkosigan Saga, Lois Mcmaster Bujold. Good solid engineering, good biology, and a ten book discussion of the value of life when you can clone and modify and produce children while maintaining body autonomy. SO COOL. Ethan of Athos is 90% awesome, 10% I want more people to read it so I can tell if it’s squicky, and Falling Free is ALL GOOD.
3.) Dragon’s Egg, Robert L. Forward. The first bit, on Earth, where gender roles are still very much in evidence and women have to science discretely and then stop sciencing when they marry and have a child made me sad and irritable, but then you meet the aliens, and the female aliens are hardcore as hell.
4.) Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson. Scientists form a small colony on Mars, and set it up for terraforming. The second book is the best, and possibly the actions of characters only make sense if you have spent time in Davis.
My understanding is that “hard” sci-fi involves a lot of techno-babble and is more about concepts than people, and also that I don’t like it. Is the Vorkosiverse hard sci-fi? If so, I will have to redefine my definitions.
I feel like Bujold is just a very good hard sci-fi author; that the thesis of the saga is “all true wealth is biological”, and she defends that thesis really well while we watch Miles bounce from one adventure to the next.
As far as I understand, “hard” SF has traditionally been “hard” in several ways that mostly showed up together: technobabble, and a basis in “hard” sciences like physics rather than “soft” sciences like sociology, and plausible (or plausible-sounding) science, and the science being central to the plot, and the characters and plot often taking a backseat to the science.
But that makes it hard to classify SF that is “hard” in some but not all of those ways. I think scientific plausibility is the main one that gets used these days. And aside from all the wormholes, the Vorkosiverse is pretty plausible. Plus many of the plots depend on the science, usually medical science (eg. all Miles’ health problems, especially the cryo-related ones; Simon Illyan’s memory chip; all the societal implications of uterine replicators; Lord Dono; the ethics and societal effects of creating people who are arguably not exactly homo sapiens through genetic engineering).
I’m tempted to argue that it’s almost too plausible. Barrayar seems stuck at a level of computer usage that I guess would have been plausible when she started writing, but seems odd to me now.
I think Bujold is good hard sci-fi, because she lets the science drive the plot instead of the plot driving (or excusing) the science. Each of her books asks “how would people’s lives change if X technology was possible?”
Just because people also have feelings and fall in love and make stupid jokes doesn’t mean it’s not hard! After all, technology changes society, and society is made up of actual people making actual messy choices. (Something I learned from reading Bujold, actually.)
I have always thought of “soft sci-fi” as essentially meaning “fantasy, but in space; refers to technological and scientific advancements vaguely, in the same way one might refer to ‘Dwarvish metalworking secrets’.” Which I think goes along with your criteria of plausible-sounding science and science being central to the plot.
Greg Egan’s “Orthogonal” series. Here’s a good summary. Strange physics (you probably won’t like the book if you don’t really like physics; that’s not an insult), surprisingly strange alien biology (i.e., there’s no sexuality, not really) out of which the author still manages to build something that looks like feminism.
Yessssss.
Does the macguffin that makes future life possible allow manly men to re-fight Earth’s conflicts among the stars? Hard sci-fi. Does it make life better or easier for women? Soft sci-fi.
Or at least, that’s the impression I get from people who care a lot about the distinction.
nail – head
Magic totally exists, but because we also have spaceships, we call it “psionics” instead. Prophecies work about the same as ever, though. I’ve spent my life programming our giant, super-advanced computers, but I recently discovered that I have latent psi powers, which I cannot fully control. Through a series of harrowing misadventures, I’ve found myself stranded on a planet inhabited by superstitious, scantily clad barbarian tribes. Just recently I’ve been having significant dreams about an unfamiliar, fiercely beautiful witch-queen.
Psionics: it’s like magic, but for manly engineers.
MZB anyone?
Oh, did the Asimov estate approve of a new Foundation book?
YASS, I have read way too many Catherine Asaro books and loved them at the time, but oh lordy they are trope-tastic. I don’t dare go back and re-read for fear of blushing my way through the lot. They *do* avoid some of the worst of what’s noted in the above list, though.
And you’ve had it with these [Chinese cursing] snakes on this [Chinese cursing] starship!
ETA: response to kilks401’s comment about Asian dominance and invisibility.
I still miss the Television Without Pity “translations” of the cursing in Firefly.
“The academy is overrun with locusts!”
You will know women are exotic because their skin is olive. And their eyes chocolate.
And their lips grenadine.
Oh shit you nailed it.
This comment brought to you by the pomegranate seeds at the bottom of my whiskey shot.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/if-white-characte…
Probably the core people are also all ‘creepily’ androgynous and somewhat indistinct from one another, losing all their individuality and soul in the search for a more efficient, vaguely effeminate way of living. All the rim people, of course, remember how to be REAL men and REAL women.
I’m not bitter.
Swap in “TV series” for “novel” and these still work perfectly (cough Firefly cough)
yeah, mine is definitely firefly influenced, but I have also seen variations in actual novels.
There are hypnotically glowing panels which you must ABSOLUTELY NOT TOUCH because danger, until there is a bigger danger and so you must square your jaw, mutter “It is time” and touch one.
I’m picturing Dougal in “Father Ted” staring at the enticing DO NOT PRESS button on the airplane.
Mallory, you are the wind beneath my (hot sex-crazed Venusian girlfriend’s) wings.
So, if soft SF focuses on character and social sciences versus pure physics and tech, and I grew up on Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” show which featured a dandelion-fluff spaceship of the imagination, then it is my destiny to write the work, which becomes a new genre itself, which will be called COWB– er, DANDELION-FLUFF SCI-FI.
Everybody needs a goal, right?
You will have sex with at least one being, robot or otherwise, who does not understand “love” and is simply curious, or in whose society sex is as simple a transaction as a handshake. You will make them understand monogamy.
Your and your planet’s financial situation will either not be discussed at all or will be discussed at great length, for many pages.
There will be a Council. They will take up an entire planet and somehow never get anything done.
Any SF: The engineer says a number of complicated words and then solves the problem with percussive maintenance.
totally stealing “percussive maintenance” for future use…
I have a t-shirt that says
Bigger Hammer Hardware –
Precision, Persuasion and Percussive Maintenance
I made it Cafe Press and wear it to all the set builds.
Our DNA sequencer is having issues with the home-machined syringe that replaced the no-longer-produced-syringe, and so I spent several hours yesterday running the diagnostic, flicking the syringe while whistling, and running the diagnostic again. And again. And then getting someone with more training to do exactly the same thing for another hour.
Percussive maintenance is REAL.
… So if it takes repeated percussions, is it a Percussive Maintenance Sequence? Because I am totally steal- using that somehow even though I don’t generally write sci-fi.
I’m going to drop it into class with my engineering students and see if any of them figure it out.
Technically, I believe this proves that “Happy Days” was a form of SF. And the fact that “Mork & Mindy” spun off from it is my Q.E.D.
and is Scottish.
This is pretty much how I fix things IRL but the difference between the pros and amateurs is that we know to wait until the non-experts are out of the room
Percussive Maintenance would be a great name for a band. Possibly the one doing the theme song.
The caste system on your home world is gently enforced. You, a lower-caste person, attempt to enroll in the Academy. The enforcement of the caste system becomes less gentle. You persevere and graduate, only to find yourself prevented from accomplishing much of anything. You return to your village and dream of greater things. Your children despise you.
This is my actual post-graduate school trajectory.
MY LIFE (± kids)
Um, given the current statistics on women in education for certain fields vs women finding success in those fields, I don’t think this qualifies as fiction.
Is this soft SF or a Thomas Hardy novel?
You’re in a soft science fiction novel when your spaceship has 1000’s of buttons in the cockpit instead of a couple of buttons that say “fly” “shoot gun thing” and “land”.
Conversation with the spouse:
“So I hear that 50% of children will be born autistic?”
“That is almost certainly not true.”
“We’ll be a voting bloc!”
“The data is pretty sketchy though…”
“THIS IS THE ONLY WAY WE’LL GET TO A FUTURE WHERE EVERYONE WEARS JUMPSUITS.”
One piece or two piece?
How do _you_ feel about waist constriction? If you are a fan, two piece. If you are _not_, one piece. It’s just clothing. Everyone looks wonderful in jumpsuits.
Nonsense, autistic people would never put up with jumpsuits. Too binding. Unless maybe they are holographic, which would be awesome.
I second the “naked, with holographic clothing” proposal, but jumpsuits are basically fancy sweatpants, right? They can be baggy, and the inside can be fuzz or featureless smoothness or whatever.
Your highly advanced combat spaceship/giant robot must by piloted by humans, and not by infinitely faster, more precise, and less fallible computers. When the time comes to fight actual computers, you are able to match their speed and precision, rather than being immediately reduced to your component elements.
Also, the space armed forces that you have just joined is totally not a thinly-veiled metaphor for fascism…OR IS IT?
Look, be reasonable. How are you going to fit one of those giant battle computers into that tiny cockpit?
Yiwoeu thrasx m’nuardle.
____________
APPENDIX
Yiwoeu: pronoun of the fifth-person syntax, used to connote spiritual commonality between the speaker, the listener, and the unity of all life.
Thrasx: to comprehend by viewing a concept’s thoughtform resonances in higher dimensions, a skill taught only to members of the Scholar caste.
M’nuardle: the practice of chronosophical immanence, achieved through study of the Ninety-Three Sacred Algorithms, which were revealed by the Golden Ones to your distant ancestors, who are described so vaguely that it seems at first like they may have been sentient dinosaurs, but it later becomes apparent that they were actually domestic housecats.
“Groabh vrka shhznngrw krrzzhnr.”
“Nuking it from orbit will never work, Zakhrad, the incubator is protected by quantum phase shields.”
Someone’s name is Stacker Pentecost and not one person comments on it.
I met someone the other day whose actual last name was Pentecost. I asked him to repeat it because I couldn’t believe I heard it right, and then I felt like an ass because I’m sure he gets that all the time. So yeah.
I’m now feeling meta-surprised that there are people surprised by a nice, old British last name like Pentecost.
I’ll grant you Stacker, though; I instinctively parse it as an epithet, “he who stacks”, a la Counsellor Troi or Professor Jones, and then I’m left wondering what he stacks.
I like to believe that in the face of apocalypse, humanity took what joy it could in goofy names for their doomed children.
He’s an indirect descendant of Praisegod Barebone.
Your beautiful, fragile sister is losing her mind on a space craft/ also you are in love with her but then everyone is losing their mind and it turns out you are all just little tiny sperm driven outward into the stars to fertilize some alien-star-egg planet with your brains and this is the final culmination of humanity. Also you had sex with your beautiful fragile sister when you were kids and are a very unreliable narrator. I love you, Alice B. Sheldon.
“The ship’s doctor has a drinking problem” totally made me think of “A Momentary Taste of Being”, too. I also love Tiptree/Sheldon, for her sophisticated use of SF tropes, among many other things.
Warlike civilizations are capable of retaining feudal societal structures, creating weapons of both specific and mass destruction, and inventing vehicles capable of interstellar space travel but cannot handle advanced medicine.
Also, they’re all played by actors of color.
The free market will fix it there’s just a little bit more burdensome regulation to get rid of
The events that led you to this moment are a result of you traveling in time to prevent it, even as you are currently creating those events. You’re whole life is a glorious, impossible, closed loop.
Please write that story! Powerful!
This is the first one of these to make me think “I don’t read enough.”
I was very confused at first, because I’ve only heard of “soft science fiction” as used to differentiate “Real, manly, SF” from that silly SF written by ladies.
like this!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/foz-meadows/romance…
So I was all like, “what are all these dudes doing in my soft SF?”
Definitely want to read the one about Core people and Rim people going to the mermaid planet. Actually I think I just wish there were a Firefly episode about a mermaid planet.
I vaguely remember reading an Andre Norton about a mermaid planet.
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross has a mermaid planet. But it’s 80% about futuristic banking, and it doesn’t have Core people and Rim people, so it might not be what you’re looking for.
QUESTION: is Dune considered soft sci-fi because it’s all about languages, religions, & warrior-assasain-nuns who are mainly concerned with breeding? Or because it has *another* conflicted male Messiah figure at the center?
I sort of feel like DUNE straddles the two. It’s got a lot of hard scifi babble about laser shields and atom bombs and breeding programs, but it’s also got the soft scifi trappings of space witches and galactic empires.
It’s also got people who take so many drugs they can teleport to another planet, and any kind of FTL travel seems to be the first thing to drive people who really care about ‘hard sci-fi’ into fits.
Worth noting that Dune was inspired by real efforts to stabilize sand dunes in Oregon, which Herbert wrote about in magazine article (never published). He even dedicated the book to “dry land ecologists.” Ecology isn’t the usual inspiration for “hard” SF (compared to physics, bionics, etc.), but it’s still science, damnit!
What was that about warrior-assassin-nuns?!?! I’ve never read Dune, but man….you had me at warrior-assassin-nuns! *pulls up local library website in adjacent tab to place hold immediately…*
Don’t get too excited, they spend a lot of time fussing around the male messiah.
true. I bet they are better in the fanfic.
I guess I assumed the Star Trek ones: permanent wedgie in the service of sex appeal. I’m hoping technology can solve this.
I read in the cast interviews that those had stirrup leggings and no give, so they actually gave everybody horrible back pain.
Methods of transport never need routine maintenance despite regularly travelling distances measured in light-years.
How could I forget this classic:
Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To ‘Quantum Flux’
“ROLLA, MO—A reading of Gabriel Fournier’s The Eclipse Of Infinity reveals that the new science-fiction novel makes more than 80 separate references to “quantum flux,” a vaguely defined force the author uses to advance the plot, resolve conflict as needed, and account for dozens of glaring inconsistencies.
“…In Fournier’s novel, the idea that particles of energy can appear suddenly out of nowhere is used to explain events that might otherwise seem random, such as how a starship achieves light speed despite the total destruction of its engines in battle, why a loyal first officer suddenly decides to spy on behalf of the aliens who murdered his family, and what became of the security captain whose Southern accent was getting annoying to work with.”
Wait, are you saying that quantum flux is even more effective than reversing the polarity?
Replace “The Eclipse of Infinity” with “Interstellar” and “quantum flux” with “gravity” and it works just fine too.
The image is from “Rendez-vous with Rama” a hard science fiction novel.
Yup, I was just going to point that out myself XD
aaaaand now I need to go reread “The Crystal Star”.
Ew, “soft sci-fi”???
Also pretty sure if you give a robot something to masturbate with, they will figure out how to masturbate with it. I’m like 80% certain there is a grad student studying this in Japan.
Ew?
You are the smartest most mysterious supergenius of your generation and you are driven by some mysteriously undefined source of infinite willpower. Civilizations composed of highly idealized governments seek your new invention. You end up on the lam and after much soul searching, you meet a woman who is completely enthralled by your sheer intellectual prowess that she is willing to give everything up just to advance the plot. You never have sex with her because you are too busy singlehandedly altering the systems of power which govern your planet.
Now tell me if that is Atwood, LeGuin, or Rand
could also be Card.
It is for sure both early LeGuin and Rand, which means it is probably Atwood as well?
yep. Though it’s “late” Atwood.
Specifically O&C, which by the way was a huge disappointment, followed by a sequel that has gone outright cultish and has creepalicious “bonus materials” which are intended “for amateur devotional or environmental purposes” (seriously, Atwood, WTF)
Thanks guys for this hilarious take on every cliche in the history of Sci-fi. Glad I am not it, although I do not think there’s anything wrong with sunset colored eyes 🙂
I believe it was Steve Grand who once said “though there is no reason a robot should want to masturbate, to be true artificial intelligence it must be allowed to choose for itself.”
As far as I can tell, soft SF has women with agency (which WILL be called Mary Sues), while hard SF has technobabble and 97% cis white het ‘Murican men. And also a dead woman.
*cough* Gor *cough*
*snicker*
The kids these days, they are terrible. Every generation believes this, but this time it is empirically true. Just look at them, with their holovids and their sparkblades and their hoverbikes, their incomprehensible slang, their outrageous clothing and gutter philosophies. They have an unprecedented appetite for violence, iconoclasm and transgressive gender roles. Modern society has done this to them. This is totally a new and futuristic problem, for which there is no solution, and the kids will eventually destroy all that our hypocritical civilization has built. They certainly won’t ever abandon their ideals and get jobs, why would you even think that.
FREE THE AMBERED!!!
“An artificial intelligence program is intentionally misunderstanding your commands by interpreting them in the most literal way imaginable.”
Is that what Amelia Bedelia is up to these days?
This is a very funny article! I like how it makes fun of some of the overly used stereotypes in science fiction.
All planets except Earth come with a single basic climate and biosphere. It’s dunes or tundra all the way!
We’ve been a single climate planet several times! Other planets can do it too!
“The locals tried to master the beast for thousands of years, but you nailed it in about a week.” That’s so great.
Are you going to do a post called “How To Tell If You Are In A Harry Potter-esque Novel” next?
Definitely what I needed to read after “Quatermass” and the novelization thereof. (You guys, after what happened to Barbara Kellerman in this one, I don’t wonder she became the White Witch.)
I don’t care. I’m still free. Long as I got the Serenity Prayer.
The Serenity Prayer is basically about the ability to FF through the opening credits, right?
Well, trying to channel Firefly as I saw the reference to the ‘Verse in the article above, but, obviously, epic fail in progress. 🙂
I think someone confused the definition of “soft science fiction novel” and “television science fiction series”
I don’t know if Janet Kagan counts as hard sci-fi or not – I think it depends on how you count anthropological and biological sf – but I have to recommend her because she’s great and not as well known as I think she should be.
Hellspark is the story of first contact with a possibly sentient race on a mineral rich planet – lots of interesting things about culture and language and sentience.
Uhura’s Song is a Star Trek novel about Uhura saving a planet of cat like people from a plague and it’s awesome (iirc – it’s been years since I read it but it stayed with me).
ETA – This is in response to LeastBittern’s comment re feminist hard sf
Yaaassssss.
That’s pretty good – but let’s not let hard sci-fi off the hook just yet.
HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE IN A HARD SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
Space travel is hugely inconvenient and cartoonishly unpleasant. Everyone does it anyway.
The tenets of a major world religion are revealed to be explicable in terms of flaws in human neurochemistry.
You’re sticking wires into your brain to address a problem that probably could have been resolved short of impromptu brain surgery. No one points this out.
The societal implications of revolutionary new biotechnology are eclipsed by the fact that it enables your bizarre and heretofore-impractical sexual fetish.
Somehow, there are vampires. A woman with a very serious haircut spends twenty minutes explaining why this is perfectly scientifically plausible.
You are a white man with an Indian-sounding name.
(Feel free to add your own, folks!)
Ha! Love these.
Seconded!
The societal implications of revolutionary new biotechnology are eclipsed by the fact that it enables your bizarre and heretofore-impractical sexual fetish.
I’d say this is an entirely reasonable development. Even sociologically hard (badum-tishhhh!)
P.S.:
as a Watts fan, I laughed at the last two way too hard.
I'd say this is an entirely reasonable development. Even sociologically hard (badum-tishhhh!)
P.S.:
as a Watts fan, I laughed at the last two way too hard.
I read this as mocking hard-meaning-sort-of-consistent-with-modern-physics SF for preening itself on its Realism while ignoring history, sociology, ecology, and often biology.
You said it well.
I read this as mocking hard-meaning-sort-of-consistent-with-modern-physics SF for preening itself on its Realism while ignoring history, sociology, ecology, and often biology.
Oh man, you will not regret it. So good and so brutal!
Please please do “How to tell if you are in a Cyberpunk novel” next
Technology, philosophy, economic theory, human thought itself, all of them have reached heretofore impossible levels of sophistication!
…Which is why everyone decided to switch back to a monarchy for governance.
It was building, but this finally made me laugh out loud, and it was kinda hard to stop. Love you Toasties.
Also: the natives of this alien planet all look pretty much like white guys with only one suitably alien feature (like glowing eyes or red hair or something.) The white hero will, of course, acquire this trait by act 3 to indicate that he has learned their ways. The term “cultural appropriation” will never be uttered.
I still cannot trace the quote “Show me more of this Earth thing called kissing” to a point where it was used unironically, and not as a reference to cheesy soft sci-fi space-babe lines. Even Altaira Morbius never says it.
Someone has genetically or robotically engineered a woman who is literally perfect. You're going to have sex with her.
It’s not letting me reply directly at the moment, but this is in reply to cleo up there. THANK YOU! This is exactly what I’m looking for right now. All about the “anthropological and biological sf” and “interesting things about culture and language and sentience”! Those are always the best stories I read in collections, and I’ve read all of LeGuin and what I like of those authors that I have found so far, so. I really love character-driven sci fi, too, so maybe those often overlap with these types.
Most of these types of sf that I’ve read have “qualified” as hard sci fi, I believe–I know it’s getting too soft for me when I start to feel more like I’m reading a fantasy novel or maybe a soap opera. There’s also some similarly interesting and well-written politically-focused novels (the thoughtful ones) and maybe Harry Turtledove? I haven’t read much of him yet because the novels look fantasy-ish (which is just not what I’m looking for, nothing wrong with it) and jingoistic, but I read a short story of his recently that I really liked. Anyone read him? Should I try?
I wish there was more of *these* types of “hard” sf, although I don’t like to use that term so much because many authors or editors have wielded it as some kind of libertarian or patriarchal achievement–ahem, genre, which considers itself to be what all sf *should* “aspire” to. Whew. Maybe needed a sentence break in there somewhere. Feelings.
Anyway, gotta get to Overdrive and LinkCat and start looking for Kagan and Hellspark. Thanks!
Harry Turtledove writes a lot of alternate history these days, starting with his Byzantine novels. He is a scholar of those days.
Jingoistic is not what I would call him. As a Canadian, I like that he actually notices that other countries have histories and cultures that differ from the USA. For example, in his alternate Civil War, both English and French Canada play a role, and while neither likes the Northern US invasion, they do so for different reasons and with different results.
If you like hard SF that uses ‘softer’ science, check out Julie Czerneda’s Species Imperative. An ocean biologist saves the universe. Lots of well imagined aliens and solid biology as a background.
It's not letting me reply directly at the moment, but this is in reply to cleo up there. THANK YOU! This is exactly what I'm looking for right now. All about the "anthropological and biological sf" and "interesting things about culture and language and sentience"! Those are always the best stories I read in collections, and I've read all of LeGuin and what I like of those authors that I have found so far, so. I really love character-driven sci fi, too, so maybe those often overlap with these types.
Most of these types of sf that I've read have "qualified" as hard sci fi, I believe–I know it's getting too soft for me when I start to feel more like I'm reading a fantasy novel or maybe a soap opera. There's also some similarly interesting and well-written politically-focused novels (the thoughtful ones) and maybe Harry Turtledove? I haven't read much of him yet because the novels look fantasy-ish (which is just not what I'm looking for, nothing wrong with it) and jingoistic, but I read a short story of his recently that I really liked. Anyone read him? Should I try?
I wish there was more of *these* types of "hard" sf, although I don't like to use that term so much because many authors or editors have wielded it as some kind of libertarian or patriarchal achievement–ahem, genre, which considers itself to be what all sf *should* "aspire" to. Whew. Maybe needed a sentence break in there somewhere. Feelings.
Anyway, gotta get to Overdrive and LinkCat and start looking for Kagan and Hellspark. Thanks!
“A princess of the warrior caste with gleaming indigo skin longs to understand this Terran concept your people call ‘love.’”
I’m excited for Laini Taylor’s new bood too