Can we Veeky Forumstards all agree that Hard SF is pointless since all the "hardness" does is interfering with the...

but dude, "Consider Phlebas" had a giant fuck off ATOMIC TRAIN CRASH!

>getting caught up in meaningless byways (oh, excuse me, "research") that becomes more outdated by the year
>discipline

Memes aside, research only helps out if you know how to tell a story worth a damn to begin with, like Frank Herbert. Asimov, as an example, is dry as shit in comparison.

No.
Hard SF means that the universe and story doesn't amount to random fantasy that you quickly no longer care about, due to no constraints or consistency. Something actually being believable also goes a long way for immersion and care.

Any good fantasy story does have constraints and consistency though, there's ultimately no real difference between them.

Do you have the attention span of a fishie?

Who writes "hard" sci-fi, Asimov? It's boring and pointless, really. I see no merit in it. Someone like Asimov could never attain the transcendent aspect of Gene Wolfe. Literature is an art, not a science. What worth is speculative materialism in fiction? Less than dirt.

>Asimov
>Hard SF
I, Robot, Foundation, the Robots books, all of it is social SF. The social sciences are soft sciences, idiot. You can't write hard SF about the soft sceinces.

>hard sci-fi
>low fantasy

>Someone like Asimov could never attain the transcendent aspect of Gene Wolfe
>he hasn't read Foundation

dosnt 'hard sci fi' just mean self-consistent sci fi ? like its called science fiction and in hard sci fi its clear what the fictional science is and in 'nonhard' you just feel like the writer can lazily jam whatever and do a shitty deus ex machina whenever he wants .

this is the worst Ringworld graphic I've ever seen.

Something it seems most anons in this thread are missing about hard sf is that it also requires some amount of introspective on humanity to qualify.

That goes for any fiction, m8

SF in general should never be hard for just for hardness's sake, but it should always be hard enough to not look like asspull. Whether or not that makes it qualify as "hard SF" depends on your own standards.

>I see no merit in it.
Maybe your background has something to do with it? Many of hard sci-fi authors and fans come from a STEM background. It's just a difference in culture.

I kinda have to disagree with that. Because if you limit yourself more into the realms of reality, you have to get creative about how you build your world. One of my favourite authors once wrote:
"Constraints are a creative force in world building. That's one of the reasons I don't invent impossible technologies unless I absolutely have to. It turns out that if you stay within the parameters of known science, you're forced to solutions that are far more interesting than ones you could come up with by breaking physical laws."

This. All SF is just a sub-genre of Fantasy.

I'm actually studying for engineering, though perhaps I'm in the wrong field. I have always hated the material obsession that pervades every crevice I've penetrated in academia.

A vision of a world that could possibly be will always be far more captivating to the imagination than a world that absolutely could not be. Even pure fantasy stories make attempts at bridging their world with reality, to some kind of understandable and feasible mechanics and biology.

It's the same as if you tried to write a story about a completely normal world but in it an average person lifts up a bus with their bare hands, simply because the author believes that that's something ordinary humans can do.

Advanced material sciences and astrophysics may be simpler for you to ignore when a story takes liberties with them, but that's just a matter of your own ignorance. If you understood their esoteric properties as intimately as you understand your own body, you would find it just as jarring to see them misappropriated without a hint of irony.

Most of Stephenson's stuff isn't hard sci fi. Seveneves is the exception.