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THE_HARD_EQUATIONS
March 24, 2022
HARD
HARD_PROBLEMS
About "Hard Science Fiction in the Real RAYMONDS_FOLLY
World", by Gregory Benford, published in
1984 in a scholarly journal, and then BRIDGE_OF_STARS
in "Science Fiction Review" #50:
This Benford essay covers a lot of ground--
definitions and examples, common tones of
voice, the personality types stories appeal
to, and systems of political categorization.
At present, I'm largely interested
in one narrow issue:
What exceptions are allowed
to the rule of the Hard? That ties into a slightly
wider question:
"My minimum definition of hard SF What is the intention
demands that it highly prize fidelity behind writing "Hard SF",
to the physical facts of the universe, what is the goal?
while constructing a new objective
'reality' within a fictional matrix." HARD_PURPOSE
Right there, at the outset, Gregory Benford is
hinting at a much laxer standard than many
adherents of the "hard sf" religion would allow:
it doesn't have to conform to scientific reality
so much as duck any obvious contradictions of it.
The goal is the creation of a *new* reality,
not to explore our Real Reality.
"The fidelity to an external standard
of truth makes hard SF resemble the
realistic narrative, in that it becomes Possibilities is the key word of
a realism of *possibilities*, guided by my own sermons on these themes.
our current scientific worldview." We don't live in a world of fixed
parameters, but rather in a "tree
of possiblities", a forest of
contingencies...
POSSIBILITIES
"Variations are allowed, since the same facts
can be explained by new theories. Thus time
travel and faster-than-light journeys slip by,
since they are probably impossible but
difficult to disprove. Indeed various notions I'm somewhat familiar
of both spring from the speculative end of with the physics here--
physics Wheeler's 'wormholes' which-- allow not as much as Benford,
tunneling 'through' the geometry of spacetime, of course-- and my own
or an intriguing result from black hole impression of these
dynamics, which allows rapid travel forward in sorts of loopholes is
time by tangential trajectories in highly that even if they really
curved spacetime." did exist they still
wouldn't be *good* for
Benford, like me, puts the anything.
emphasis on Hard SF as an
exploration of "possiblities", Tricks with rapidly
which you would think would spinning black holes
require it to avoid things that sound cool until you look
are known to be impossible. at the *size* they would
have to be to allow you
Benford's attitude diverges from to survive the trip.
mine in his criteria-- since our
present state of scientific Whatever form of time
knowledge is, after all travel or FTL you might
provisional, you're allowed to get out of this extreme
just say "we think this is physics, it wouldn't
impossible *now*, but in this look at all like the
fictional scenario it turned out space opera versions.
we were wrong".
Benford praises constraint for the
sake of constraint (hard sf is UNINTENDED
"playing tennis with the net up",
and so on), but his basic stance is UNCONSTRAINED
surprisingly lax.
This strikes me as a gigantic
loophole, a hole in the tennis net
big enough to drive an interstellar
alien invasion through.
"In the same way that the iron rules of the Here Benford sounds like
sonnet can force excellence within a narrow quite the cultural
framework, paying attention to scientific conservative, but he's
accuracy can force coherence on fiction." never been consistent
about this-- he reaches
Okay, sonnets are a tight corset that can squeeze into the modernist toy
the excellence to the top, but there are even bag when it suits his
tighter corsets out there, aren't there? You purposes, e.g. trying to
could go with shorter lines and more restrictive depict a sense of
rhyme schemes, wouldn't that be even better? "alienness".
Really, even a writer committed to the cause
of formal poetry chooses restrictions with a
certain restraint, there's always a balance
between discipline and freedom.
It raises the question of why
you would prefer one contraint "I know, let's write a
to another. story using only one of
the five vowels!"
Benford acknowledges a tension between realism
and "other literary aims" (which I would call
"romanticism"), and makes the point that the
tension is even stronger with Hard SF. Benford
is evidently willing to forgive some exceptions,
e.g. in Anderson's "Tau Zero" there's some
cheating about the (likely) capabilities of the
space ship design in use.
When I was younger, I tended to be a,
uh, hard-liner on things like the rules
for Hard SF, but it may be significant FTL
that the hardest of the hard sf writers
have tended to bend the rules on this.
It could be that that dream of perfect
fidelity to science, and perfectly viable
technological ideas is as impossible as MATHISM
most such dreams are...
CERTAINTY
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