Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Michael F. Stemper" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"? Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2024 13:42:49 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 24 Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:42:50 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="9bb0fdae99351b3f456bbd93bf28d077"; logging-data="1028972"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1//8nfMryrPgTG1OgkU16noAhHeCIDH+8g=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.11.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:pG8cDAg8mOsm1FHPF3aeVTK37Vo= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 2118 On 05/08/2024 11.09, James Nicoll wrote: > Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"? > > Hard SF has never been a unified subgenre. Here are five overlapping > varieties of story to which the label applies... > > https://reactormag.com/defining-our-terms-what-do-we-mean-by-hard-sf/ When I say "Hard SF", I mean "a story in which the science, be it right or wrong, is important to the story. Thus, the Lensmen novels are hard SF, since inertialess travel, the sunbeam, and passage of Lundmark's Nebula through the Milky Way having formed the planets of said galaxies, are all important to the stories. This is so even though we know that none of those are valid. As far as footnote 2 is concerned, Ray Bradbury has been quoted as saying that _Singin' in the Rain_ "[...] is a true-blue old-school science fiction film [...]". See: -- Michael F. Stemper This post contains greater than 95% post-consumer bytes by weight.