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HARD_PURPOSE
March 30, 2022
So what is the *purpose* of writing "Hard SF"?
THE_HARD_EQUATIONS
One of the things sometimes cited as a purpose of
fiction is that it can act as a kind of dress
rehearsal for reality, but the odds are low that a
Science Fiction story can do that, no matter how
much effort is put into rigorously developed
technological ideas.
For one thing, many such stories have a far future setting,
far beyond the likely life-span of the readership.
For another, even if the speculative premises aren't too
extreme, it's unlikely that they'll turn out to be
*right*. Despite the claims for "predicting the future"
sometimes trotted out for science fiction, a cursory
investigation shows even when we get it right we get it
wrong-- e.g. yes, a moon landing happens, but it bears
no resemblence to any of the fictional versions of it.
There is one or two things that SF stories can do
in general to change a person's outlook:
o they can remind people that there will be a future,
possibly a future where human beings continue to thrive.
That may not sound like much, but I've heard
other people claim this as a virtue of things
like "Star Trek", and I gather that occasionally
some activists do the "sounding the alarm" thing
a little too heavily and inadvertantly convince
everyone to give up (deactivists).
o they can get people used to the idea that new
technologies may-- if you'll excuse the expression--
be disruptive, and make them lighter on their feet
than they might otherwise be.
I have my doubts that Science Fiction is still needed
for this: recent experience is more than good enough.
And if anything there are some out there who should
probably tone down their faith in Disruptive
Technology.
In his 1984 piece, Benford suggests SF could be a
useful vehicle to write about scientists-at-work--
that sounds like an excellent thought, but not done
very often, and not easy to do. A good goal for
the, uh, future, but not a reason anyone would care
about the sub-field.
One answer might lie in that worship of "constraint" that
you hear from people like Benford: if you submit to these
tight rules, you will be compelled to do better work without
necessarily understanding why. Asking about the purpose
of the discipline underlying the discipline is not supposed
to be necessary or adviseable.
Myself, I often come back to something like Knight's notion
about science fiction as a vehicle for "philosophical
speculation". Science fictional scenarios can work as a way
of exposing the gaps in our understanding of the world...
To use a phrase I seem to like a lot, you
can use it to "poke fingers in the wounds".
DEAD_PLOTS
ROMANCE_BY_DESIGN
NATIONAL_VOIDS
THE_HARD_EQUATIONS
As Gregory Benford put it:
"We must face the fact that our notions of character
are themselves ethnocentric, and indeed, so is the
assumption that character is central. The
perspectives science allows will not always assume
that human values or human interactions reign
supreme. Characters will be molded by the universe
in ways which will not pay even lip service to
'humanistic values' -- which are often simply the
prejudices of Western Europeans inherited from the
last few centuries, and some times merely those of
people working in English departments. Hard SF
attempts to face this fact squarely, though not
always adroitly or even consciously."
ETERNAL_HUMAN
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