> Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi.
I'd also suggest a good look at Baxter's books and Robert L Forward's too.
I've jokingly called Forward's books science papers with a plot. Timemaster starts out with:
> There exist semieducated but obstinate people who have raised the concept of strict local causality to godhead, and attempt to use such words as "obviously" and "it only makes sense that ..." in an attempt to "prove" that their version of causality cannot be violated, and that any sort of time machine is logically impossible. From my reading of the scientific literature, they are wrong. If I receive a letter from this sort of person complaining about the "impossibility" of the time machines in this novel, I will throw the letter in the nearest wastebasket... unless the letter is accompanied by a reprint of a scientific paper published in Physical Review (or any other reputable, refereed scientific journal), written by the person writing the letter, which proves that the paper "Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves" by Friedman, Morris, Novikov, Echeverria, Klinkhammer, Thorne, and Yurtsever, is erroneous.
My take on it is more of a "what is the focus of the story?" Is it the soft sciences? Psychology and sociology and politics ... and the Foundation.
Or is it one more of challenges met with the STEM disciplines of physics and astronomy and biology?
It's also not a "it is either a this or that." Some books can be both and I think that Clarke is a prime example of this. 2001 is as much of a story of psychology as it is about astronomical distances and the ship needed to accomplish that goal. The Songs of Distant Earth is about two cultures clashing ... with the real problems of engineering a ship to travel (it's a softer story than it is hard).
Protector by Niven likewise scores high on both the soft and hard scales.
Foster tends to higher on the 'soft' side of the scale, though sometimes it edges up there with some real biology and the limits of technology are sometimes real limits.
And so, it is "are the challenges that the characters surmount solved with tools developed from the soft or hard sciences?"
"Use the Force Luke" is not a hard science solution.
I'd also suggest a good look at Baxter's books and Robert L Forward's too.
I've jokingly called Forward's books science papers with a plot. Timemaster starts out with:
> There exist semieducated but obstinate people who have raised the concept of strict local causality to godhead, and attempt to use such words as "obviously" and "it only makes sense that ..." in an attempt to "prove" that their version of causality cannot be violated, and that any sort of time machine is logically impossible. From my reading of the scientific literature, they are wrong. If I receive a letter from this sort of person complaining about the "impossibility" of the time machines in this novel, I will throw the letter in the nearest wastebasket... unless the letter is accompanied by a reprint of a scientific paper published in Physical Review (or any other reputable, refereed scientific journal), written by the person writing the letter, which proves that the paper "Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves" by Friedman, Morris, Novikov, Echeverria, Klinkhammer, Thorne, and Yurtsever, is erroneous.
My take on it is more of a "what is the focus of the story?" Is it the soft sciences? Psychology and sociology and politics ... and the Foundation.
Or is it one more of challenges met with the STEM disciplines of physics and astronomy and biology?
It's also not a "it is either a this or that." Some books can be both and I think that Clarke is a prime example of this. 2001 is as much of a story of psychology as it is about astronomical distances and the ship needed to accomplish that goal. The Songs of Distant Earth is about two cultures clashing ... with the real problems of engineering a ship to travel (it's a softer story than it is hard).
Protector by Niven likewise scores high on both the soft and hard scales.
Foster tends to higher on the 'soft' side of the scale, though sometimes it edges up there with some real biology and the limits of technology are sometimes real limits.
And so, it is "are the challenges that the characters surmount solved with tools developed from the soft or hard sciences?"
"Use the Force Luke" is not a hard science solution.