Author Topic: Hard vs Social -- a useful dichotomy?  (Read 3098 times)

bolddeceiver

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on: September 26, 2008, 05:35:26 PM
Having posed a question in the subject, I will admit right out to being rather partisan about the answer.  I see "social science fiction" often placed in direct opposition to "hard science fiction," so much that the former has become somewhat interchangable with the term "soft science fiction," though said term can also have various different meanings.

As I understand the terms (or at least as I tend to use it; I understand how fluid these taxonomies of sub-genre can be), "hard science fiction" refers to science fiction that is based around science that is accurately and rigorously extrapolated from the current science of the time when it is written.  "Social science fiction" refers to science fiction that examines the effects of technological change, social change, and the passage of time on the societal structure.

I don't see why the two are so often directly opposed.  Yes, they are two different goals towards which a writer can direct his energies (except maybe not always, as discussed below).  But I don't see that they are so mutually exclusive as many readers and critics seem to think.

As a long-time reader of science fiction, I know that I expect both rigorously extrapolated (or at very least internally consistent) science AND exploration of societal change in my future science fiction.  When either of these fails, I feel a little twinge of disappointment.

And really, is there such thing as pure HSF?  At least by the definition I used above, HSF is all about rigor.  To me, at least having a glimpse of how the tech has affected society is absolutely necessary from that standpoint.  Any student of history can see that when technology changes in any meaningful way, change is wrought on society.

And honestly, in application this kind of mixing is the rule, not the exception.  As Sam Moskowitz said (and I paraphrase here as I can't track down the exact, sourced quotation), anybody could have predicted the automobile -- it takes a science fiction writer to predict the traffic jam.  All but the worst science fiction recognizes this fact, and some of our most beloved SF classics -- Asimov's Foundation springs immediately to mind -- merge good science and thoughtful sociology.  All this makes it more baffling to me that the critical and fan communities still cling so hard to the HSF/SSF dichotomy.

I'd love to hear what people have to say about this topic.



Listener

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Reply #1 on: September 27, 2008, 11:05:47 AM
I think you can have social SF without any hard SF, but I don't know that you can have truly hard SF without any social aspect. Some of the hardest SF I've read has focused more on the social aspect than anything else. I would think hard SF would be boring if it wasn't about people and the way they deal with the technology.

I think most people refer to hard SF as SF that includes a preponderance of technology, whereas social SF has a few SF elements but is more about the social implications than the tech itself. I know I do.

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stePH

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Reply #2 on: September 27, 2008, 02:21:48 PM
I think you can have social SF without any hard SF, but I don't know that you can have truly hard SF without any social aspect....  I would think hard SF would be boring if it wasn't about people and the way they deal with the technology.

Supposedly that's what Astounding Science Fiction was publishing in 1938 at the time John W. Campbell called in L. Ron Hubbard and other writers of adventure stories to get "stories about people" in the magazine.  Before that point the magazine's content had been "stories about machines or machinery" written by professors or scientists.  Or so Hubbard says in his introduction to Battlefield Earth.

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