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HARD


                                       February 2  1993
                                       October 18, 2002
                                       April    3, 2009

What is Science Fiction? What is Fantasy?
What is it that makes something Hard Science
Fiction?  Is Hard SF better?                     And why would
                                                 you care?
Many people find these to be
exceedingly dull questions, even
(especially?) fans of SF.
				  The reader
                                  is warned.

                                                        Originally posted
                                                        to rec.arts.sf.written.
     I just re-read Vernor Vinge's "The Peace War",
     the first novel in a volume issued by Baen
     books as _Across Realtime_.  Vinge doesn't
     have the flash of a Gibson, but he does manage
     to provide enough novelistic weight to carry
     his premises (characters, plot, imagery are
     all at least ok).

     But what about those premises, huh?  You got
     this lone genius working at Livermore who
     comes up with this boffo idea for generating
     these weird little semi-permanent,
     impenetrable force fields they call "bobbles".
     Some idealistic/power hungry forces in the
     bureaucracy at Livermore decide to try to
     save the world (bobbling nuclear weapons, and
     so on) and end up (a) taking over the world
     (b) crushing all heavy industry for fear it
     could be used to make weapons.  The "Tinkers"
     (read "Hackers") in the outback continue
     making technical advances in secret, until
     they outstrip the capabilities of the
     stultified bureaucracy of "The Peace
     Authority".  Ultimately, the same lone genius
     (now in hiding) with the help of an apprentice
     genius make some advances in bobble
     technology.  They learn to project bobbles
     using radically less energy, though their
     techniques are slower, and the size of the
     bobbles limited, and so on.


So what do you make of all this stuff?
First of all, bobbles are bullshit.
There's no physics behind this.  No
speculative physics even, just a magical
effect the author has come up with, and
back-filled with a small amount of
technical gobbldygook.  So this is
science fiction, as opposed to fantasy?

Well maybe.

      Fantasy is
      "What if you had three wishes."

      Science Fiction is                              IRON-MAN
      "What if *everyone* had three wishes?
      What if you could buy three wishes?"


Even bad Science Fiction tends
to get a little closer to                       I don't mean to classify "The
reality than Fantasy, even                      Peace War" as "bad", by the
when the S content in the SF                    way.  At the very least Vinge
is close to nil.                                deserves much praise for
                                                picking a fairly creative
                       DISCH                    piece of fantastic technology
                                                to write about, rather than
     It sometimes seems to                      sticking to the usual cliched
     me that Science                            things like faster-than-light
     Fiction is the only                        travel.
     literature that trys
     to come to grips with
     the structure of the         But this is an
     world; the way things        exaggeration, of
     really work.                 course.  There is
                                  also, for example,
                                  historical fiction.


            It might be objected that
            these kind of subjects are
            less the realm of fiction
            than of non-, but I think
            there are reasons why the
            fictional approach is
            valuable.

                     Fiction can be a way of
                     getting at the detailed          Consider again
                     texture of existance,            (from DESPERATE):
                     exploring a hypothetical
                     scenario so closely that
                     it ceases to seem                When you really get down
                     hypothetical.                    to it, I think that the
                                                      source of all our ideas
                                                      about ethics are really
                                                      esthetic.  When
                                                      philosphers try to
                                                      resolve ethical issues,
                                                      they always resort to
                                                      hypothetical cases, i.e.
                                                      telling stories. We
                                                      formulate principles to
                                                      generate artistically
                                                      satisfying endings.




   Okay then, how about Vinge's business of
   a conspiracy within a government lab to
   take over the world?  A bit much?  Well,       NANOTECH
   maybe not...  If you start taking the
   nanotech scenarios seriously, this sort
   of thing starts looking really tempting.



   If you hit on a really big technical
   advance, what should you do with it?
   Would you tell your bosses how to
   make the first atom bomb, and hope
   they do the right thing with it?

   Maybe the way to preserving world
   stability is to get to the next
   break through first, and use it
   before the "bad guys" do, whoever       This isn't a great
   you think the bad guys might be.        solution, but it might
                                           be the *only* solution.

                                             And considering the fact that if
      So the villains are                    you take this question seriously,
      believable to me:                      you're contemplating conspiracies
                                             to overthrow the government, this
      They're former "good guys",            is clearly a case where SF is
      who seized power because               performing it's function as "the
      they felt they had to, and             underground literature of
      and then found they couldn't           science", as Benford has put it.
      let go.

      And then the old Lord
      Acton effect kicked in.



And the heroes?  Is it really possible to
beat the big, slow, government labs, with
clever, cheap experiments performed by
small groups of individuals on their own?
I dunno.  Maybe it's worth thinking about
though... before you decide to try to get
rich quick by writing yet another piece of
video game software.

                                    ALONE

So Vernor Vinge gets a "thumbs-up"                        (April  3, 2009)
without reluctance from me, even if
his stuff isn't perfect...                   Another issue: he doesn't
                                             seem to have thought through
                                             the strategic implications
     One issue: how original is              of bobbles.  The Toadkeeper
     it?  Check out the stories in           made the point that if you
     Poul Anderson's _Mauri & Kith_.         can't bobble a bobble, then
     Isn't Vinge covering a                  you might carry a small one
     lot of the same ground?                 in your pocket as a defense.

                                                Or you might make armor
                                                with multiple layers
                                                of embedded "bobbles".


                                                   And record breaking
                                                   sky-scrapers might be built
                                                   of steel-bobble composite,
                                                   with essentially infinite 
                                                   compressive strength.


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