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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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