@@alquinn8576 Who pays SpaceX? The whole idea with private contractors is to save money. But I have difficulty understanding exactly how. NASA argues that all the failed launches aren't a problem because they are still cheaper than NASA's programs of old. The reason they are failing is the lack of know-how. They don't have the collected know-how of NASA. The cost of these cheaper launches still add up.
Sleeper ships here I come! I love when space travel takes so long that any characters we would relate to would be long dead before the protagonist reaches anywhere.
"Uhmm, actchuall-ay, Hard is in austria, at the shore of lake Constance. Clearly you are not into science fiction, this is basic knowledge, you normie." *sniffs back snot*
"I'm incapable of relating to a character unless their IQ is at least as high as I perceive mine to be". Yes, that accurately sums the type of pretentious people this video is satirizing
Into Darkness, Reasons to Be Cheerful, and Wang's Carpets are all ridiculously good Egan stories and I really don't care what anyone thinks of me for trying to get that out there. I put a million dollars on that man.
I always found that mindset hilarious because the character I relate to the most in all of fiction is Eren Jaeger, and he's a hot-headed, emotionally immature teenager who's own recklessness gets others killed. (Hell the other main characters even say he's that last person they would have wanted to have the powers he has, and the only value he has is in that power lol).
Well i mean there's a difference between how you define words vs what you enjoy in a novel. For example, if I DID enjoy sci-fi, although to be honest I'm not a fan of sci-fi or fantasy when it comes to novels, prefer that stuff in my dnd and video games, but i mean i used to read eragon and stuff years back> ANYWAYS lets say i did want a "Hard sci-fi" recommendation and someone comes at me with Martian. I'm gonna feel like they have wasted a huge amount of my time with that recommendation and im gonna thoroughly annoyed like, that's not what i wanted Yknow? Is that so pretentious to like, have a preference and desire for other people to understand what that preference means? I just find people recommend me things A LOT and I don't like it, I don't like it at all.
@@neofluxmachina It's more that String Theory has been losing favor among the scientific community because it's all wrong... I guess. Apparently it's more fiction than actual physics. Don't quote me on it. I've seen a lot of people way smarter than me calling for the death of String Theory.
@@neofluxmachina Basically string theory isn't even actually scientific. It's purely hypothetical and nothing else. Not only that but it's a hypothesis that, while cool, is generally believed to basically just be a bunch of scientific sounding ideas that make no sense in reality. Essentially, it's like a sci fi explanation for the theory of everything, at least right now. Because as it is, it makes really good lore for a fictional world, but an actual scientific theory? Not so much.
My favorite takedown of string theory is the book "Not Even Wrong". The oversimplified point of the book is that string theory isn't testable so therefore it is "Not Even Wrong"
As someone who spent way too long researching string theory for a sci fi novel only to simultaneously lose faith in both the fiction premise and the irl theory, I felt that in my S O U L.
Hard fantasy exists. Really, hardness is an attribute of speculative fiction in general. As long as you have good worldbuilding and consistent rules for how the world works, it doesn't matter whether you call those rules "physics" or "magic".
@@DanielLCarrierme and the boys on our way to break our teeth on crunchy magic systems. But Fantasy and Sci Fi are the same genre just split into different categories to sell more books
@@mistuh69420They are not the same genre. The defining difference is that one is the genre in which anything goes, while the other is based on scientific theory, the consequences of which merely _seem_ fantastic. They used to be grouped together because booksellers couldn't tell the difference. With robots, spaceships, computer networks, and in-vitro fertilisation having become mundane reality, the difference is now obvious in retrospect. (And fantasy sells better. Look at Harry Potter for example. There is a saying that every equation in a book halves its sales, which seems to be supported by hard science text books not selling as well as romance novels, but it is certainly not true for sci fi.)
Do you still have a story if all those things are true, though? I know of an upcoming video game, Immortal Gates of Pyre, that the dev claims is realistic. It's an rts with tons of planned factions fighting each other. Thing is, several of these factions have utterly awful methods of maintaining social cohesion. There's a republic that has using the military as one of its checks and balances. There's a biotech religion with a literal physical god chewing on a mountain, that apparently doesn't care if her prophets start ripping out each others' hearts instead of their enemies. I can see a point here; the dev wanted a ton of different matchups that were suitably dramatic. Thing is, such a system has the characters suddenly forgetting political lessons about keeping the team together, so that the gameplay can be more one to one with the lore. That and it seems pretty unlikely that all the factions' leaders are suddenly at each others' throats and none of them have a sane disagreement resolvement policy. But it sounds pretty fun, and isn't that the point of most fiction?
Ftl or interstellar travel is foundational to any grand sci fi narrative that isn't extremely limited in scope. Also you don't know anything about energy or AI. Nothing at all. So stop pretending you do know anything about it. It's silly
The FTL thing also bothers me greatly. It should be perfectly possible to site a sci-fi novel of epic scale inside the solar system without FTL, within a dyson swarm or the beginnings of one. Also the focus on settling on planets over space stations probably don't make sense over a large timescale, and the low numbers of population in sci-fi also irks me. Even Asimov got that part strangely wrong, giving the population of the ecumenopolis capital planet of the galactic empire a staggering 30 billion inhabitants... when we in the 21st century are closing in on 10 whilst most of the planets surface is still free from urban sprawl...
I was hoping the last guy, after explaining why his more complicated book was real hard sci-fi, was going to turn and say something like, "Oh, the Martian is pretty good too."
I arrived to the same conclution but with fantasy novels. "The most fantasy you can do, is create a whole new language that has evolved solely in the world of your novel"
That and you have to make it really different from your native language to count and have tons of everyday words to fill it out. So if you're an English native make it have genders, and the more the better. Best look up that IPA alphabet!
@@adams13245 a friend of friends i saw once who is studying linguistics told me how he was tasked with analyzing an obscure language where verbs never inflect at all, but all the other words in the sentence have different endings depending on the tense/aspect/mood of the verb... reality is stranger than fiction especially when it comes to languages
star trek? you mean the show where they come up with a blatantly ridiculous pseudoscientific concept every episode that never gets mentioned or expanded upon ever again?
Was this just a joke about Egan's Clockwork Rocket? You know the first book of the Orthogonal series. The one where he essentially invents a new coherent theory of physics just so he can tell an interesting story.
@@genericallyentertaining as long as you enjoy something written from the perspective of a plant-alien-thing who lives in a universe with arse-backwards physics. Personally, I loved it.
From the famously realistic historical politics simulator A Song of Fire and Ice. I remember when the zombies fought the dragons at the fall of the Ottoman Empire
dang, was gonna write a "sweet summer child" joke about how the LHC doesn't close, I'm assuming they work in shifts, but remembered the time I was called a sweet summer child and still haven't gotten over it. I mean in what context could they have mistaken my comments. I didn't even assume facts like this time, but spoke from decades of experience, in which I used that exact phrase. Does a couple more decades of experience cause such a huge paradigm shift in your perception of reality drastically changing to the point I couldn't even imagine yet. That, or they were a troll, bot, or kid. Probably a trolling-bot-kid centuries old, yet still in its infancy, slowly roaming the web plucking human hearts like strings on a harp to shape their view of reality... wait, thats a good idea for a hard scifi novel, if only I could come up with
I once encountered (but didn't read) a sci-fi series (_Orthogonal_, by Greg Egan) whose premise is "what if space-time used the Riemann Metric instead of the Lorentz Metric", and this produces a universe where many of the equations of basic physics go backwards. (e.g. time contracts rather than dilating at high speeds, and more generally the difference between timelike and spacelike world-lines is a local convention rather than a universal one). The story is told from the point of view of inhabitants of the world so it's not immediately clear what is going on. Fortunately there is a whole load of pages on the author's own website to explain it.
The peak of hard sci-fi is of course Eliezer's _fanfic_ of Greg Egan's _Permutation City,_ in which he invents a novel ontology of existence that technically crosses over _every computable universe._
Okay but saying that no hard sci fi can technically be considered hard sci fi if it includes both quantum mechanics and general relativity is actually such a killer comeback 😅
The assumption behind far future hard sci fi is that any theory which successfully combines those two disparate concepts relies on novel physics anyway. It's fairly similar to the idea of alchemy in a lot of magical novels. This idea that chemistry is some kind of spell is enduring so it gets reused in physics and biology depending on your take on things. I personally really like that take so it works with me
@@ralalbatrossI suppose it's not impossible that the quantum world and the, uh... I don't know, macro world? Both straight up do just follow different rules. It would explain some things.
@@catpoke9557 The real problem is: Why does gravity only impact big things? That makes no sense. There is not a jump in which the macro world goes to the quantum world. Molecules, can quantum tunnel. The world seems to be continuous. So even if gravity is independent from the rest, when does it becomes independent? Edit: gravity does affect small things, but we don't know how it affects particles in a non collapsed state. My bad, I am stupid.
@@vidal9747 Gravity affects small things as well. Gravity doesn't just tug on an object, it tugs on the very particles the object is made of. That said, it is true that we currently don't have a theory that fully integrates with quantum theory. I don't understand it myself but apparently there's some kind of conflict between the two, or something.
@@vidal9747What if there's a world above us and to that world WE'RE ITS Quantum World! Like a jump between tiers large enough to rival that one fucked up space civilization tiering system's. On an unrelated note I am super high rn.
I want the reverse of this: “YOU CALL THAT SOFT SCI-FI?!? GOOD SIR THEY EXPLAIN HOW THEIR LIGHT SPEED TRAVEL WORKS FOR A WHOLE PARAGRAPH, IT DOESN’T DESERVE SUCH A TITLE! I PREFER THE SCREEN PLAY FOR THE JETSONS. “ “WHAT A POOR EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE IF YOU WANT SOME TRUE SOFT SCI-FI YOU SHOULD READ THIS:” “…. this is just The Hobbit”
Fan: "Is there a way to overcome Heisenberg´s Uncertainty Principle to be able to know a particle´s position and location at the same time?" Brando Sando: "RAFO"
Trying to figure out what "hard science fiction" even means is one of my favourite conversation topics with other sci-fi nerds because there's no real answer. Can FTL travel be considered "hard" if it's applied rigorously within the book? How about using real theories, but misusing them? Endless arguments! I don't even need another person, I can argue about this topic among myself...
You can write hard sci fi in a world where negative energy densities exists and happily jump in your alcubierre bubbles in all their causality breaching glory. What hard sci fi means to most people is 'I can imagine NASA doing it'. Most of the time they have no idea what NASA actually does Trust me. If we discovered negative mass densities in CERN tomorrow NASA would spend the next few days breaking open the bubbly while they dusted off all their warp drive blueprints from the JPLs future drives programmes. Every few years the casimir effect creeps back into the public consciousness too and that keeps getting creepier every time it does. Now we have all kinds of non homogeneous cosmology going on and things are moving quickly again so life is interesting once more :)
I think it pretty much just means that whatever they do has some sort of real life explanation out there somewhere. Like there's a few theories on how faster than light travel could be done. But there's not a chance that every intelligent species outside of Earth looks like a slightly modified human. The only way, in that case, for something to be hard sci fi but include only humanoid aliens, would be if maybe the aliens all evolved from humans or were forced by humans to change shape through GMO or something. That's just one example of something that, without any explanation, makes a sci fi feel more like a fantasy.
The Mohs scale of scifi hardness. FTL but everything else is perfect would be a 4 or 4.5. The Martian is about a 5, and real life is a 6. Star Wars is a 1, for reference.
For what it’s worth I found Schild’s Ladder to be a pretty humane book on some level because the ending always leaves me with a feeling of regret for all of the experiences they missed while chasing the science. Or maybe I’m mixing it up a bit with Diaspora. Both great books in any case, even without much undergrad in my case Great video but maybe the last guy should have been holding The Road to Reality 😂
Yeah, I've also wasted much time reading so-called hard science fiction, including Poul Anderson's, Ben Bova's and Arthur C. Clarke's. Usually the characters are mere Lego men, and it's a huge mistake to believe that The Martian is well researched -- it's actually crammed with blunders. Admitted, some of those novels do work well as superficial entertainment, but one should rather ditch that reading fetish and get a life!
Diaspora is one of my favorite books! Ive never seen someone else mention it before. You certainly can appreciate it without an undergrad, I did as a highschooler (ah read your comment better, niether of us have the undergrad lol)
the next day in the news: quantum mechanics and newtonian dynamics have just been unified by three up and coming novelists who just wanted a better framework for their new fantasy novel "einstein was wrong"
"im gonna go watch star trek..." This one hits hard. We have the same kind of people in historical reenactment. I friend of mine saw a woman totally losing her crap, because the lid on a kettle at the fireplace was from the 15th and not 14th century. She refused to cook with or eat something from that kettle.
This is where RUclips cut off: "friend of mine saw a woman totally ..." I mentally responded "maybe, but I doubt anybody in these comments has, for days"
I stopped saying I like hard scifi specifically because it seems to attract the sort of reddit try hards who read one Wikipedia page explaining the book and now act like they earned a PhD. I just want the spaceship to be build able, damn it.
Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy was my first brush with "hard" sci-fi, and later I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Frankly, I prefer space operas. Repackage me some Shakespeare with a dash of Days of our Lives and give me some pew pews. The Expanse is about as hard as I like it, now.
@stm7810 Harry Potter isn't even close to what I'm describing, lol. For one, hard sci-fi has to be sci-fi in the first place. More importantly, though, basically no focus is given to the inner workings of magic in Harry Potter. We're told what spells do and how they're cast, but we aren't given any details beyond that. Harry Potter is pretty much the opposite of a hard magic system, we have the details relevant to the plot, and nothing else.
The fantasy version of this is : You **HAVE** to at MINIMUM simulate the entire Solar sytem. Tectonic plates, Movement and the geological makeup of the rock which is mentioned in chapter 2383 of the main book Chapter 4, Appendix 87, Footnote 987. The evolution of all its major creatures; from bacteria, to sentient life. The cultural, technological, and linguistic growth of said sentient life. Oh, and dont forget the magic system which, to undestand, requires reading the 437 page seperate book, down to every footnote, and the footnotes in said footnote.
😅I put a bibliography in my first novel No Lack of Sunshine. Needless to say, I got a few comments that it was a bit dense. However I got a good comment saying the detail helped the realism.
@@davidwuhrer6704 There is quite a bit of research that makes for good fodder for sci-fi. Mine was about moral machines, and imagined a robot trying to raise a baby and teach it 'right' from wrong. It was my debut, and lags a bit, but there is a moral machinery project out there IRL.
My God, this is so niche. I did not think this would exist, I thought people like me are extremely rare to have anyone care to make an entertaining RUclips channel on. You have my sub, sir.
I'm here at 1:05 realizing there's more than half of the video remaining and I'm on the edge of my seat wondering what could possibly come after Egan...
As soon as they started in on the difference between science and science-fiction, my first thought was "if this doesnt lead into a joke about string theory I'm going to be deeply disappointed"
Martian was pretty awesome. Artemis less so. And currently 300+ pages into Project Hail Mary is really interesting :) I'm probably gonna finish it this year ;)
Right!? I heard that bit and thought "well, you kinda just circled back to Schild's Ladder (or Diaspora), didn't you?" Though more on-point would be Egan's Orthogonal trilogy, which I was half-expecting to be brought up since the word "orthogonal" had just been used a couple lines earlier.
I haven't actually read him, but I hear him mentioned a lot in hard sci-fi discussions, so I figured I'd throw that in. Despite what this video might imply, I do enjoy hard sci-fi when it's done well, so I may check him out some day.
@@genericallyentertaining I honestly don't think you'll be disappointed. The 'hardness' of his settings isn't the point. He uses it as a background to tell stories about people, societies, and their development. He just happens to base everything on scarily rigorous maths.
Ok but here me out: Feynman's Lectures on Physics are unironically a good read. And it's actually open access and meant to be be a freshman course, so anyone with a high school diploma has all prerequisite knowledge.
Wait a minute I just realized something. We all judge sci-fi on how "realistic" it is based on our current day understanding of physics, but is it really "realistic" to assume that those hundreds or thousands of years in the future we'll have the exactly the same understanding of physics that we do today? What if one day we discover it is perfectly possible to travel FTL, or that gravity can be easily controlled, or that stars are actually full of water?
No, but seriously, the best thing about Half Life is how all the chapter titles and music tracks are named after real physics stuff. Like "CP Violation" is such an amazing double entendre; same with "Surface Tension." Half Life is so real for that.
@@genericallyentertainingHL2 references string theory (Calabi Yau Manifold) and zero-point energy (the lowest possible energy a quantum system can have). I never realised they were real terms until relatively recently lol
I think i needed this. Im an aspiring scientist and sci-fi writer both, and i love hard SF and you managed to fit a tension that ive been struggling with forever into a quick sketch XD. Incidentally I love all the books (the fiction ones, i don't read textbooks for pleasure 😂) mentioned and also Star Trek ❤
Hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi (most readers don't even care about the distinction; but there is a school of authors who care strongly about plausibility and want to be set apart from scientifically implausible "science fiction"), but Chinese science fiction has six sub-genres (not all of which might qualify as science fiction at all).
It’s sort of a mess to dive into, because what counts as hard varies wildly from person to person. This video is honestly only slightly exaggerated. It really can get that petty. The Martian is fairly well regarded as hard sci-fi because it relies on real world physics to ground the world. The Expanse is widely considered hard sci-fi because, although there are breaks from reality in places, those breaks are mostly understandable and explainable within the context of the world. Something like Star Wars is definitely on the softer side, almost to the point of being science fantasy. While some attention is paid to the laws of the universe, there’s little to no effort to adhere to any sort of realism. Space wizards and laser swords exist alongside spaceships and planet killers. Star Trek is a little more plausible, but it’s infamous for pulling out random strings of technobabble as the plot demands. Then you have borderline cases like Dune, where the science is given as much consideration as the fiction, but elements of mysticism are also present. Hammer’s Slammers would be another borderline example. Certain elements of the world are only given cursory explanations, just enough to justify the tech base, but the author paid a great deal of attention to realism in the details he thought were most important. Line of sight energy weapons with enough power to vaporize small mountains are hand waved just enough to be plausible, but the tanks are thought out well enough that the US Army considers them a benchmark for creating the ultimate fighting vehicle. My advice? Read what you love and let the pedants argue over the details. It’s not worth the headache to draw a line in the sand because no matter where you draw it, there’s always an exception.
@@gatling216 What laws of the universe doesn't Star Wars disregard? Star Wars is not science fiction, it is pure fantasy. It is a fairy-tail set in space. (And contrary to what most people think, outer space is not fiction.) There is no such thing as "science fantasy". Literature is fundamentally split into text books and fiction. Actual science is on the text book side. Fiction based on science is on the fiction side. Fiction not based on science is also on the fiction side, but not under science fiction. Fantasy as a genre first existed in music, as something that seems to describe something, but doesn't. Dune does not dabble in mysticism. Frank Herbert tried to make everything scientifically plausible, extrapolating then-current trends, with the inevitable effect that things seem mystical if not examined closely. The future sight, for example, seems like occultist magicks, but Herbert explains that it is basically statistics done unconsciously by the highly trained mind using techniques developed over the course of over twenty millennia, enhanced by mind-expanding drugs resembling LSD (but of course much more sophisticated). Religion plays an important part in the story, but not as something hinting at or revealing a hidden works beyond actual reality (like the deities in D&D), but as a cultural artefact and a tool of political control. Like with Star Trek, many of the scientific hypotheses in the story have been discarded by scientific progress. Polywater? Not a thing after all (although homeopathy still claims otherwise). Genetic memory? Not a thing either (although the Assassin's Creed franchise is still propagating the meme), the actual explanation is much simpler. Faster than light travel? Oddly, ST:TOS works fine without it, but TNG onwards doesn't. Dune, of course, relies on it. And there is the Alcubierre drive (for Star Trek) and the Einstein-Rosen bridge (for Dune), so the idea of FTL is not entirely discarded yet. Dune is soft science fiction though because it dabbles in geology (Herbert was a geologist), biology, psychology, and political science, all of which are soft sciences. It doesn't even try to bother to explain any of the physics, or even the meteorology. (There has been a paper recently, showing that while the planet Arrakis is meteorologically plausible, it wouldn't have polar ice caps as Herbert said: Not enough water in the atmosphere.) (For some reason I feel the urge to say "He's not Herbert; we reach.") Coming back to outer space not being fiction: To the uninitiated, fantasy and science fiction seem alike, both describing exotic locations and events with no resemblance to everyday life. So at a glance the difference seems to be that the one has deep space and lasers, and the other has elves and demons. Star Wars has space biplanes and laser swords. It is understandable that people are confused. Although it is puzzling how many believe the ISS to be somewhere in Ohio. William Shatner was surprised that someone was talking to him from space on the Star Trek sub-Reddit. It's just a TV series, it's all made up! How can space, of all things, be real‽
That's John Clute's definition, except his is not restricted to the future. My problem with that is that anything is plausible to someone who is not scientifically literate. Urban fantasy is plausible to some of the authors.
Yup, pretty much will vary from person to person, but when you have a guy who calls Star trek "realistic" and another that plays children of a dead earth 3 hours a day in the same room hilarity is bound to ensue.
Lol in every single argument about this I've ever seen online, I've only ever seen Tau Zero come up as a viable option presented by the gatekeepers (oh and maybe Children of Ruin more recently)
I remember a review that said Children of Time didn't count as hard sci fi because it had cryo sleep that worked too well. The idea was that even the best cryo sleep can only greatly slow aging, not stop it. Which, sure, I can see that (though the article didn't go in depth on the mechanics of what was causing the aging, which seemed rather "Take our word for it.") Thing is, with how much sci fi feels they practically have to use ftl I feel we can cut Children of Time some slack. It feels like there's a idea that only sci fi that can be argued to be "true to life" can be said to be quality, which is incredibly limiting. That and any look at a society more than a year or two into the future (let alone dozens of hundreds or God forbid, thousands.) is going to have differences simply due to the massive number of factors that go into determining the future. As one of the sci fi nerds in Generic Ent.'s video said, isn't quality of a work orthogonal to scientific rigidness? Another thing is that I've noticed a lot of people complaining about utterly unrealistic works (like Star Wars) not being "realistic" in certain highly specific ways. They'll say the Empire should use real military tactics, but ignore that, in space, land bound military tactics are likely to get you killed. One of the biggest ones is the ranges people square off at; I've heard from Issac Arthur that, due to space being a near vacuum, fights will probably happen at ranges where you can't see the enemy ship with the naked eye. Which would massively change Star Wars as the usual hotshot fighter pilot would be killed off by the utterly realistic point defense before he could get close enough to see the enemy vessel. Yet these loud mouth know it all say that they want Star Wars to be realistic, then leave out foundational parts of space combat. It's ego stroking for nerds, since they don't know, or care about the massive distances of (possible) IRL space combat, they ignore that and coast on the audience's lack of care or knowledge for the same. Nevermind that Star Wars was never realistic to begin with. Why the nitpicking and long winded rants? If I had to guess, it's ego. The people going crazy about realism often come off as emotionally stunted man children who think they have to prove their intellectual superiority in order to be good enough. Which sounds pretty similar to the sorts of people who think only hard sci fi counts as quality. It's not based on actual care for realism, but on childish ego mania.
@@adams13245See also "Sacred Cow Shipyards". I've always thought that Star Wars looks like WW2 because electronic guidance and countermeasures have been raised to such perfection in that world (a world that's had FTL longer than we've had domesticated horses) that having a "squishy" piloting a comparatively simplistic and "dumb" ship is the only way to even get near the enemy. Anything electronically-guided (or worse, sending a signal back to the ship that launched it) will be instantly "hacked" and turned back on the attacker, or just destroyed. As for point defence, any "active" detection methods, much like sonar on a submarine, just scream out "HERE I AM!". Much better to have onboard guns aimed by people, even if they miss!
And then there's me who pivots in the other director and wants to see more Science Fantasy. Combine Sci-Fi and space settings with more fantastical elements like Magic and such. Basically the Sci-Fi verison of "Fuck it, we ball!" I know a lot of people would say Star Wars, but I wanna throw Xenoblade Chronicles into the ring.
I had a course about science in science fiction; the professor was exactly like these folks. I’m very, very glad that I dropped that class after he referred to the concept of human colonization of any place other than *possibly* Luna as ‘magical thinking that insults science itself’.
Cryptonomicon is hard sci fy. But to be honest, didnt the genre started after a grumpy fanboy complaines to Larry Nieven that Ringworld had the physics all wrong and Nieven wrote a sequel fixing It?
My favorite hard science fiction are the old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comics in the back of the Sunday newspaper. *Ssssiiiiippppp* ahhhh, yeaup. Now that there will put a strain on the old noggin, I tell you what.
![The 15 Best Sci-Fi Books I've Ever Read [Updated Again]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/k0H584ftkQU/mqdefault.jpg)
![The 15 Best Sci-Fi Books I've Ever Read [Updated Again]](/img/tr.png)
_The Martian_ qualifies as genuine science fiction, as it takes place in a bizarre alternate reality in which NASA is funded.
so fucking true
government policy fiction lol
NASA's budget is 3.5x more than SpaceX's
@@alquinn8576 When NASA sends an electric car to Mars, it gets there.
@@alquinn8576 Who pays SpaceX?
The whole idea with private contractors is to save money. But I have difficulty understanding exactly how. NASA argues that all the failed launches aren't a problem because they are still cheaper than NASA's programs of old. The reason they are failing is the lack of know-how. They don't have the collected know-how of NASA. The cost of these cheaper launches still add up.
you aren't reading hard sci-fi unless the book itself is rated 10 on the mohs hardness scale
I write these words in Steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be hard sci-fi
This comment is a 10/10. A real diamond in the rough, you could say.
that's why I'm into ductile sci fi
@@The_Blazelighterthis is perfect
The what scale
My favorite sci fi are retracted scientific papers
real and true
This got me lol
*Irreproducible Results* was a great magazine. I dunno if they still publish.
We love cold fusion
Terrance Howard
It's simple: hard scifi is when space travel is massively inconvenient, yet everyone is doing it.
Sleeper ships here I come! I love when space travel takes so long that any characters we would relate to would be long dead before the protagonist reaches anywhere.
Warhammer ??
@@hectorrodriguezgonzalez8938Warhammer is Science Fantasy
@@talosine2963 yes I know, but it fits the description , that's the joke
@@AAhmou
Sleeper ships are for meat bags. The most relatable characters are incomprehensible intelligences who transmit themselves with lasers.
it isn’t “hard sci fi” unless it comes from the hard region of france, otherwise it’s simply “sparkling sci fi”
*Sparkling Fiction
Sparkling Sci-Fi at least has to be from a bordering region.
"Uhmm, actchuall-ay, Hard is in austria, at the shore of lake Constance. Clearly you are not into science fiction, this is basic knowledge, you normie." *sniffs back snot*
And only as long as it's in hard cover, not paperback, or, Aristotle Forbid, E-book!
hard region of Pennius
Was this s Wayne world reference?
If your sci-fi remains hard for more than 4 hours, consult a space opera novelist.
😂😂😂
This is literally good advice.
"I'm incapable of relating to a character unless their IQ is at least as high as I perceive mine to be".
Yes, that accurately sums the type of pretentious people this video is satirizing
Or Sheldon Cooper
Into Darkness, Reasons to Be Cheerful, and Wang's Carpets are all ridiculously good Egan stories and I really don't care what anyone thinks of me for trying to get that out there. I put a million dollars on that man.
I always found that mindset hilarious because the character I relate to the most in all of fiction is Eren Jaeger, and he's a hot-headed, emotionally immature teenager who's own recklessness gets others killed. (Hell the other main characters even say he's that last person they would have wanted to have the powers he has, and the only value he has is in that power lol).
Well i mean there's a difference between how you define words vs what you enjoy in a novel. For example, if I DID enjoy sci-fi, although to be honest I'm not a fan of sci-fi or fantasy when it comes to novels, prefer that stuff in my dnd and video games, but i mean i used to read eragon and stuff years back>
ANYWAYS lets say i did want a "Hard sci-fi" recommendation and someone comes at me with Martian.
I'm gonna feel like they have wasted a huge amount of my time with that recommendation and im gonna thoroughly annoyed like, that's not what i wanted
Yknow? Is that so pretentious to like, have a preference and desire for other people to understand what that preference means?
I just find people recommend me things A LOT and I don't like it, I don't like it at all.
The only character I relate to is the joker, his IQ(Insanity Quotient) is almost as high as mine.
“So how does the warp drive work?”
“Quite well, thank you.”
"What does the engine run on?"
"Very efficiently, indeed."
The correct answer
Been some time since I laughed this hard
Expanse reader?
"How does the Epstein drive work?"
"Very well. Efficiently."
-Q&A at the back of my copy of Leviathan Wakes.
Lol the string theory joke, that's beautiful
Is the joke that string theory is fiction since it's all theoretical ? If not kindly explain the joke to this pleb 😅
@@neofluxmachina
It's more that String Theory has been losing favor among the scientific community because it's all wrong... I guess. Apparently it's more fiction than actual physics.
Don't quote me on it. I've seen a lot of people way smarter than me calling for the death of String Theory.
@@neofluxmachina Basically string theory isn't even actually scientific. It's purely hypothetical and nothing else. Not only that but it's a hypothesis that, while cool, is generally believed to basically just be a bunch of scientific sounding ideas that make no sense in reality.
Essentially, it's like a sci fi explanation for the theory of everything, at least right now. Because as it is, it makes really good lore for a fictional world, but an actual scientific theory? Not so much.
My favorite takedown of string theory is the book "Not Even Wrong". The oversimplified point of the book is that string theory isn't testable so therefore it is "Not Even Wrong"
As someone who spent way too long researching string theory for a sci fi novel only to simultaneously lose faith in both the fiction premise and the irl theory, I felt that in my S O U L.
Hardest sci fi possible is just writing what you think you’ll be doing in your research lab next week
That's Science in the Capital.
That’s science non-fiction at that point.
@@saladv6069it's non-fiction once you do it
That's actually just a schedule, also known as a lie.
@@lloydgushcertainly a science-fiction
Turns out that the hardest scifi was fantasy all along
Hard fantasy exists. Really, hardness is an attribute of speculative fiction in general. As long as you have good worldbuilding and consistent rules for how the world works, it doesn't matter whether you call those rules "physics" or "magic".
@@DanielLCarrierme and the boys on our way to break our teeth on crunchy magic systems.
But Fantasy and Sci Fi are the same genre just split into different categories to sell more books
If you mean The Elder Scrolls, yes.
@@ShinCharaIf you mean the Souls franchise, yes.
@@mistuh69420They are not the same genre. The defining difference is that one is the genre in which anything goes, while the other is based on scientific theory, the consequences of which merely _seem_ fantastic. They used to be grouped together because booksellers couldn't tell the difference. With robots, spaceships, computer networks, and in-vitro fertilisation having become mundane reality, the difference is now obvious in retrospect. (And fantasy sells better. Look at Harry Potter for example. There is a saying that every equation in a book halves its sales, which seems to be supported by hard science text books not selling as well as romance novels, but it is certainly not true for sci fi.)
Solution, write a fantasy novel with hard magic about realistic space exploration. Boom. Hard sci fi.
Mistborn era 4
@Jack Barlow lmao I came here to write this exact post. Currently rereading stormlight and excited to get back to mistborn
@@carterwalters5915 Era 2 is excellent. There are tons of cheeky nods to Era 1, but nothing that seems out of place for the worldbuilding
So basically... Cosmere
@@Astropuppers Yes, but also somewhat a story I'm currently writing.
I just want authors not to abuse FTL, not ignore energy and AI while making the characters behave plausibly for whatever world they are in.
Do you still have a story if all those things are true, though? I know of an upcoming video game, Immortal Gates of Pyre, that the dev claims is realistic. It's an rts with tons of planned factions fighting each other. Thing is, several of these factions have utterly awful methods of maintaining social cohesion. There's a republic that has using the military as one of its checks and balances. There's a biotech religion with a literal physical god chewing on a mountain, that apparently doesn't care if her prophets start ripping out each others' hearts instead of their enemies. I can see a point here; the dev wanted a ton of different matchups that were suitably dramatic. Thing is, such a system has the characters suddenly forgetting political lessons about keeping the team together, so that the gameplay can be more one to one with the lore. That and it seems pretty unlikely that all the factions' leaders are suddenly at each others' throats and none of them have a sane disagreement resolvement policy. But it sounds pretty fun, and isn't that the point of most fiction?
Ftl or interstellar travel is foundational to any grand sci fi narrative that isn't extremely limited in scope.
Also you don't know anything about energy or AI. Nothing at all. So stop pretending you do know anything about it. It's silly
I say you should read foundation series if you havent already.
The FTL thing also bothers me greatly. It should be perfectly possible to site a sci-fi novel of epic scale inside the solar system without FTL, within a dyson swarm or the beginnings of one. Also the focus on settling on planets over space stations probably don't make sense over a large timescale, and the low numbers of population in sci-fi also irks me. Even Asimov got that part strangely wrong, giving the population of the ecumenopolis capital planet of the galactic empire a staggering 30 billion inhabitants... when we in the 21st century are closing in on 10 whilst most of the planets surface is still free from urban sprawl...
What does FTL mean?
I was hoping the last guy, after explaining why his more complicated book was real hard sci-fi, was going to turn and say something like, "Oh, the Martian is pretty good too."
"That one would actually count"
I'm dead. The shade toward string theory xD
“Unless their IQ is as high as I perceive mine to be” 🤣
I arrived to the same conclution but with fantasy novels.
"The most fantasy you can do, is create a whole new language that has evolved solely in the world of your novel"
That and you have to make it really different from your native language to count and have tons of everyday words to fill it out. So if you're an English native make it have genders, and the more the better. Best look up that IPA alphabet!
@@adams13245 a friend of friends i saw once who is studying linguistics told me how he was tasked with analyzing an obscure language where verbs never inflect at all, but all the other words in the sentence have different endings depending on the tense/aspect/mood of the verb... reality is stranger than fiction especially when it comes to languages
Damn, sounds like someone has read quite a lot of Tolkien
Rosenfelder is ready for you
You jest but it seems like everyone has their own conlang these days lmao
"I do have a String Theory textbook as well."
_"Okay, that done does actually count..."_
I laughed harder than i should have.
Ed Witten has disliked your comment
2:22 I LOVE the detail that he says "as high as I _perceive_ mine to be" instead of just "as high as mine".
"I have a string theory textbook" "ok, that one would actually counts." *instant sub*
rewatching star-trek is the only correct conclusion
star trek? you mean the show where they come up with a blatantly ridiculous pseudoscientific concept every episode that never gets mentioned or expanded upon ever again?
@@tux1468Just like real life! Where's my petrol car with lasers for spark plugs? Clean (ish), green (ish) and retrofittable!
@@tux1468 science is overrated even in his own area. Science can't prove nothing
@@tux1468 Bro the entire video went over your head
stargate is better than startrek anyday
Was this just a joke about Egan's Clockwork Rocket? You know the first book of the Orthogonal series.
The one where he essentially invents a new coherent theory of physics just so he can tell an interesting story.
I've never heard of this book, but I just looked it up, and oh boy, now I think I'm gonna have to read it. Sounds super interesting.
@@genericallyentertaining as long as you enjoy something written from the perspective of a plant-alien-thing who lives in a universe with arse-backwards physics.
Personally, I loved it.
@@FelixMeister Makes the two of us
@@genericallyentertainingDon't forget to read the textbook on the physics that is on his website.
Haven't read it, but looking over his website, I suspect he got the idea for the 'Orthogonal' physics while writing Incandecence.
Meanwhile, in the background:
"I HAVE GLUED A CHAINSAW TO A SWORD! FOR THE EMPEROR!!!"
Army of Darkness should qualify as hard sci-fi - so hard in fact, we still do not have the science to understand it.
nothing more annoying than "you sweet summer child"
From the famously realistic historical politics simulator A Song of Fire and Ice. I remember when the zombies fought the dragons at the fall of the Ottoman Empire
@@ralalbatross facts
dang, was gonna write a "sweet summer child" joke about how the LHC doesn't close, I'm assuming they work in shifts, but remembered the time I was called a sweet summer child and still haven't gotten over it. I mean in what context could they have mistaken my comments. I didn't even assume facts like this time, but spoke from decades of experience, in which I used that exact phrase. Does a couple more decades of experience cause such a huge paradigm shift in your perception of reality drastically changing to the point I couldn't even imagine yet. That, or they were a troll, bot, or kid. Probably a trolling-bot-kid centuries old, yet still in its infancy, slowly roaming the web plucking human hearts like strings on a harp to shape their view of reality... wait, thats a good idea for a hard scifi novel, if only I could come up with
Thank you for the string theory joke. XD
-You can't have the sci without the fi and still call it sci-fi
(...)
-I have a string theory textbook
-ok, that one would actually count
LMAO
I once encountered (but didn't read) a sci-fi series (_Orthogonal_, by Greg Egan) whose premise is "what if space-time used the Riemann Metric instead of the Lorentz Metric", and this produces a universe where many of the equations of basic physics go backwards. (e.g. time contracts rather than dilating at high speeds, and more generally the difference between timelike and spacelike world-lines is a local convention rather than a universal one).
The story is told from the point of view of inhabitants of the world so it's not immediately clear what is going on. Fortunately there is a whole load of pages on the author's own website to explain it.
Greg Egan makes some weird ass science fiction but Quarantine is genuinely just a fun detective sci fi.
_Quarantine_ is definitely the most accessible.
The peak of hard sci-fi is of course Eliezer's _fanfic_ of Greg Egan's _Permutation City,_ in which he invents a novel ontology of existence that technically crosses over _every computable universe._
Okay but saying that no hard sci fi can technically be considered hard sci fi if it includes both quantum mechanics and general relativity is actually such a killer comeback 😅
The assumption behind far future hard sci fi is that any theory which successfully combines those two disparate concepts relies on novel physics anyway.
It's fairly similar to the idea of alchemy in a lot of magical novels. This idea that chemistry is some kind of spell is enduring so it gets reused in physics and biology depending on your take on things.
I personally really like that take so it works with me
@@ralalbatrossI suppose it's not impossible that the quantum world and the, uh... I don't know, macro world? Both straight up do just follow different rules. It would explain some things.
@@catpoke9557 The real problem is: Why does gravity only impact big things? That makes no sense. There is not a jump in which the macro world goes to the quantum world. Molecules, can quantum tunnel. The world seems to be continuous. So even if gravity is independent from the rest, when does it becomes independent?
Edit: gravity does affect small things, but we don't know how it affects particles in a non collapsed state. My bad, I am stupid.
@@vidal9747 Gravity affects small things as well. Gravity doesn't just tug on an object, it tugs on the very particles the object is made of.
That said, it is true that we currently don't have a theory that fully integrates with quantum theory. I don't understand it myself but apparently there's some kind of conflict between the two, or something.
@@vidal9747What if there's a world above us and to that world WE'RE ITS Quantum World! Like a jump between tiers large enough to rival that one fucked up space civilization tiering system's. On an unrelated note I am super high rn.
I want the reverse of this:
“YOU CALL THAT SOFT SCI-FI?!? GOOD SIR THEY EXPLAIN HOW THEIR LIGHT SPEED TRAVEL WORKS FOR A WHOLE PARAGRAPH, IT DOESN’T DESERVE SUCH A TITLE! I PREFER THE SCREEN PLAY FOR THE JETSONS. “
“WHAT A POOR EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE IF YOU WANT SOME TRUE SOFT SCI-FI YOU SHOULD READ THIS:”
“…. this is just The Hobbit”
To be designated hard scifi, it has to be at least 8% alcohol per volume.
Fan: "Is there a way to overcome Heisenberg´s Uncertainty Principle to be able to know a particle´s position and location at the same time?"
Brando Sando: "RAFO"
Trying to figure out what "hard science fiction" even means is one of my favourite conversation topics with other sci-fi nerds because there's no real answer. Can FTL travel be considered "hard" if it's applied rigorously within the book? How about using real theories, but misusing them? Endless arguments! I don't even need another person, I can argue about this topic among myself...
You can write hard sci fi in a world where negative energy densities exists and happily jump in your alcubierre bubbles in all their causality breaching glory.
What hard sci fi means to most people is 'I can imagine NASA doing it'. Most of the time they have no idea what NASA actually does
Trust me. If we discovered negative mass densities in CERN tomorrow NASA would spend the next few days breaking open the bubbly while they dusted off all their warp drive blueprints from the JPLs future drives programmes. Every few years the casimir effect creeps back into the public consciousness too and that keeps getting creepier every time it does. Now we have all kinds of non homogeneous cosmology going on and things are moving quickly again so life is interesting once more :)
Surely as the hardness ascends it just reaches contemporary fiction as then it only features technology we have now and there is no speculation.
I think it pretty much just means that whatever they do has some sort of real life explanation out there somewhere. Like there's a few theories on how faster than light travel could be done. But there's not a chance that every intelligent species outside of Earth looks like a slightly modified human. The only way, in that case, for something to be hard sci fi but include only humanoid aliens, would be if maybe the aliens all evolved from humans or were forced by humans to change shape through GMO or something. That's just one example of something that, without any explanation, makes a sci fi feel more like a fantasy.
The hardest sifi is a book set in thr modern time
The Mohs scale of scifi hardness.
FTL but everything else is perfect would be a 4 or 4.5.
The Martian is about a 5, and real life is a 6.
Star Wars is a 1, for reference.
Hard scifi is when you need water as reaction mass and also radiation shielding
Science Fantasy is when you use a "Decanter of Endless Water" to solve 90 percent of the problems with spaceflight. 😂
This is basically power scalers in a alternative universe
Science Fiction is the Monster to Mary Shelley as Frankenstein
Screw it, I'm going back to Doctor Who novels. Time-traveling box goes Vworp-Vworp
For what it’s worth I found Schild’s Ladder to be a pretty humane book on some level because the ending always leaves me with a feeling of regret for all of the experiences they missed while chasing the science. Or maybe I’m mixing it up a bit with Diaspora. Both great books in any case, even without much undergrad in my case
Great video but maybe the last guy should have been holding The Road to Reality 😂
Aww, now I wish I'd thought of throwing in The Road to Reality, lol. That would have been perfect.
Yeah, I've also wasted much time reading so-called hard science fiction, including Poul Anderson's, Ben Bova's and Arthur C. Clarke's. Usually the characters are mere Lego men, and it's a huge mistake to believe that The Martian is well researched -- it's actually crammed with blunders. Admitted, some of those novels do work well as superficial entertainment, but one should rather ditch that reading fetish and get a life!
@@justincase4937 🤓
@@justincase4937 lead us away from our reading addictions, enlightened one
Diaspora is one of my favorite books! Ive never seen someone else mention it before. You certainly can appreciate it without an undergrad, I did as a highschooler (ah read your comment better, niether of us have the undergrad lol)
the next day in the news: quantum mechanics and newtonian dynamics have just been unified by three up and coming novelists who just wanted a better framework for their new fantasy novel "einstein was wrong"
give it 10 years that quantum physics textbook will probably count as sci-fi lol
"You can't have science fiction without the fiction!"
"I hate to admit it, but he has a point."
Lol.
"im gonna go watch star trek..."
This one hits hard.
We have the same kind of people in historical reenactment. I friend of mine saw a woman totally losing her crap, because the lid on a kettle at the fireplace was from the 15th and not 14th century. She refused to cook with or eat something from that kettle.
This is where RUclips cut off: "friend of mine saw a woman totally ..."
I mentally responded "maybe, but I doubt anybody in these comments has, for days"
@@zimriel that's why he said a friend saw her.
I've never seen such a disagreeable crowd become friends so fast.
So grateful for the Greg Egan shout out I'm reading it now thanks to you.
when he pulls out the textbook god damn, genius
I stopped saying I like hard scifi specifically because it seems to attract the sort of reddit try hards who read one Wikipedia page explaining the book and now act like they earned a PhD. I just want the spaceship to be build able, damn it.
The string theory joke was brilliant, in so many dimensions.
“As high as I perceive mine to be” lol
Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy was my first brush with "hard" sci-fi, and later I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Frankly, I prefer space operas. Repackage me some Shakespeare with a dash of Days of our Lives and give me some pew pews. The Expanse is about as hard as I like it, now.
I've had hard sci-fi described to me as being "any story in which technical minutiae is given greater importance than anything else."
wow, that sounds like the most boring, useless, waste of writing i have ever heard. no wonder only the most pretentious assholes enjoy it!
@stm7810 Harry Potter isn't even close to what I'm describing, lol. For one, hard sci-fi has to be sci-fi in the first place. More importantly, though, basically no focus is given to the inner workings of magic in Harry Potter. We're told what spells do and how they're cast, but we aren't given any details beyond that. Harry Potter is pretty much the opposite of a hard magic system, we have the details relevant to the plot, and nothing else.
The fantasy version of this is :
You **HAVE** to at MINIMUM simulate the entire Solar sytem. Tectonic plates, Movement and the geological makeup of the rock which is mentioned in chapter 2383 of the main book Chapter 4, Appendix 87, Footnote 987. The evolution of all its major creatures; from bacteria, to sentient life. The cultural, technological, and linguistic growth of said sentient life. Oh, and dont forget the magic system which, to undestand, requires reading the 437 page seperate book, down to every footnote, and the footnotes in said footnote.
If your plate tectonics isn't plausible, are you even a fantasy writer? (Don't tell Tolkien I said that.)
😅I put a bibliography in my first novel No Lack of Sunshine. Needless to say, I got a few comments that it was a bit dense. However I got a good comment saying the detail helped the realism.
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter"!
Ah! I'll have to check this book out.
I always thought that sci-fi books should come with references. I don't know why they don't.
@@davidwuhrer6704 There is quite a bit of research that makes for good fodder for sci-fi. Mine was about moral machines, and imagined a robot trying to raise a baby and teach it 'right' from wrong. It was my debut, and lags a bit, but there is a moral machinery project out there IRL.
My God, this is so niche. I did not think this would exist, I thought people like me are extremely rare to have anyone care to make an entertaining RUclips channel on. You have my sub, sir.
Impressive. Very nice. Let’s see Paul Anderson’s hard sci-fi novel.
This is a great video, I love how far you take the concept.
Man, the discussion here is like part two of the video. The amount of hair splitting, the know it all tone, it’s marvellous.
I'm here at 1:05 realizing there's more than half of the video remaining and I'm on the edge of my seat wondering what could possibly come after Egan...
As soon as they started in on the difference between science and science-fiction, my first thought was "if this doesnt lead into a joke about string theory I'm going to be deeply disappointed"
You're not a real gatekeeper if you don't look down on people who gatekeep other people as well.
Martian was pretty awesome. Artemis less so. And currently 300+ pages into Project Hail Mary is really interesting :) I'm probably gonna finish it this year ;)
the only person who can say "child" is a dragon
Schild's Ladder does start with an explanation of a pretty good candidate for a theory of everything...
Right!? I heard that bit and thought "well, you kinda just circled back to Schild's Ladder (or Diaspora), didn't you?" Though more on-point would be Egan's Orthogonal trilogy, which I was half-expecting to be brought up since the word "orthogonal" had just been used a couple lines earlier.
Hard Sci-Fi is reading the time sheet of the average chem/bio lab worker.
A FUCKING GREG EGAN REFERENCE you are my hero!!!!
I haven't actually read him, but I hear him mentioned a lot in hard sci-fi discussions, so I figured I'd throw that in. Despite what this video might imply, I do enjoy hard sci-fi when it's done well, so I may check him out some day.
@@genericallyentertaining I honestly don't think you'll be disappointed. The 'hardness' of his settings isn't the point. He uses it as a background to tell stories about people, societies, and their development.
He just happens to base everything on scarily rigorous maths.
This feels like when metalheads argue over what constitutes as metal lol
Ok but here me out: Feynman's Lectures on Physics are unironically a good read. And it's actually open access and meant to be be a freshman course, so anyone with a high school diploma has all prerequisite knowledge.
Just let me enjoy space, I don’t wanna fight
"It has a literal equation on the cover" - FYI, there is no equation on the cover. An equation needs an equals sign.
I’m convinced Greg Egan is just a time traveller from the future.
I really enjoyed seeing man carry 'The Martian.' Maybe man should change his username to 'Man Carrying The Martian.'
Wait a minute I just realized something. We all judge sci-fi on how "realistic" it is based on our current day understanding of physics, but is it really "realistic" to assume that those hundreds or thousands of years in the future we'll have the exactly the same understanding of physics that we do today? What if one day we discover it is perfectly possible to travel FTL, or that gravity can be easily controlled, or that stars are actually full of water?
2:04 best joke in the video 😂
The hardest science fiction is that which gets the least science wrong. Therefore Mrs. Dalloway is harder science fiction than any of these novels.
the terror i felt when i replayed half life 2 and started realising they didnt make up many words
No, but seriously, the best thing about Half Life is how all the chapter titles and music tracks are named after real physics stuff. Like "CP Violation" is such an amazing double entendre; same with "Surface Tension." Half Life is so real for that.
@@genericallyentertainingHL2 references string theory (Calabi Yau Manifold) and zero-point energy (the lowest possible energy a quantum system can have). I never realised they were real terms until relatively recently lol
I think i needed this. Im an aspiring scientist and sci-fi writer both, and i love hard SF and you managed to fit a tension that ive been struggling with forever into a quick sketch XD. Incidentally I love all the books (the fiction ones, i don't read textbooks for pleasure 😂) mentioned and also Star Trek ❤
At least people read The Martian.
Hard sci-fi is really just any sci-fi that makes you hard.
Legit didnt even know hard sci-fi was a subgenre that existed
It doesn’t. It is term used by pretentious tossers to make them seem very high brow.
Hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi (most readers don't even care about the distinction; but there is a school of authors who care strongly about plausibility and want to be set apart from scientifically implausible "science fiction"), but Chinese science fiction has six sub-genres (not all of which might qualify as science fiction at all).
It’s sort of a mess to dive into, because what counts as hard varies wildly from person to person. This video is honestly only slightly exaggerated. It really can get that petty.
The Martian is fairly well regarded as hard sci-fi because it relies on real world physics to ground the world. The Expanse is widely considered hard sci-fi because, although there are breaks from reality in places, those breaks are mostly understandable and explainable within the context of the world.
Something like Star Wars is definitely on the softer side, almost to the point of being science fantasy. While some attention is paid to the laws of the universe, there’s little to no effort to adhere to any sort of realism. Space wizards and laser swords exist alongside spaceships and planet killers. Star Trek is a little more plausible, but it’s infamous for pulling out random strings of technobabble as the plot demands.
Then you have borderline cases like Dune, where the science is given as much consideration as the fiction, but elements of mysticism are also present. Hammer’s Slammers would be another borderline example. Certain elements of the world are only given cursory explanations, just enough to justify the tech base, but the author paid a great deal of attention to realism in the details he thought were most important. Line of sight energy weapons with enough power to vaporize small mountains are hand waved just enough to be plausible, but the tanks are thought out well enough that the US Army considers them a benchmark for creating the ultimate fighting vehicle.
My advice? Read what you love and let the pedants argue over the details. It’s not worth the headache to draw a line in the sand because no matter where you draw it, there’s always an exception.
@@gatling216 What laws of the universe doesn't Star Wars disregard?
Star Wars is not science fiction, it is pure fantasy. It is a fairy-tail set in space. (And contrary to what most people think, outer space is not fiction.)
There is no such thing as "science fantasy". Literature is fundamentally split into text books and fiction. Actual science is on the text book side. Fiction based on science is on the fiction side. Fiction not based on science is also on the fiction side, but not under science fiction. Fantasy as a genre first existed in music, as something that seems to describe something, but doesn't.
Dune does not dabble in mysticism. Frank Herbert tried to make everything scientifically plausible, extrapolating then-current trends, with the inevitable effect that things seem mystical if not examined closely. The future sight, for example, seems like occultist magicks, but Herbert explains that it is basically statistics done unconsciously by the highly trained mind using techniques developed over the course of over twenty millennia, enhanced by mind-expanding drugs resembling LSD (but of course much more sophisticated). Religion plays an important part in the story, but not as something hinting at or revealing a hidden works beyond actual reality (like the deities in D&D), but as a cultural artefact and a tool of political control.
Like with Star Trek, many of the scientific hypotheses in the story have been discarded by scientific progress. Polywater? Not a thing after all (although homeopathy still claims otherwise). Genetic memory? Not a thing either (although the Assassin's Creed franchise is still propagating the meme), the actual explanation is much simpler. Faster than light travel? Oddly, ST:TOS works fine without it, but TNG onwards doesn't. Dune, of course, relies on it. And there is the Alcubierre drive (for Star Trek) and the Einstein-Rosen bridge (for Dune), so the idea of FTL is not entirely discarded yet.
Dune is soft science fiction though because it dabbles in geology (Herbert was a geologist), biology, psychology, and political science, all of which are soft sciences. It doesn't even try to bother to explain any of the physics, or even the meteorology. (There has been a paper recently, showing that while the planet Arrakis is meteorologically plausible, it wouldn't have polar ice caps as Herbert said: Not enough water in the atmosphere.)
(For some reason I feel the urge to say "He's not Herbert; we reach.")
Coming back to outer space not being fiction: To the uninitiated, fantasy and science fiction seem alike, both describing exotic locations and events with no resemblance to everyday life. So at a glance the difference seems to be that the one has deep space and lasers, and the other has elves and demons. Star Wars has space biplanes and laser swords. It is understandable that people are confused. Although it is puzzling how many believe the ISS to be somewhere in Ohio.
William Shatner was surprised that someone was talking to him from space on the Star Trek sub-Reddit. It's just a TV series, it's all made up! How can space, of all things, be real‽
This was quite entertaining, intellectually informed, and rather witty, my good fellow.
0:30 I think tau is proper time, this equation would be reciprocal of Loretz's factor gamma
I like how each guy keeps one up(ing) each other and at the end they all agree and the first guy just watches star trek
The string theory line is GOLDEN. Nobody takes string theory seriously, least of all actual physicists.
Bro throwing real shade at string theorists😂
I've had this conversation so many times I couldn't finish watching it.
Can we maybe say it's hard scifi if the author honestly believes it could happen in the future.
Pyramids weren't built by aliens, but they will be
That's John Clute's definition, except his is not restricted to the future.
My problem with that is that anything is plausible to someone who is not scientifically literate. Urban fantasy is plausible to some of the authors.
@@davidwuhrer6704 Well then that definition has to be narrowed down to "plausible to those that are scientifically literate"
Yup, pretty much will vary from person to person, but when you have a guy who calls Star trek "realistic" and another that plays children of a dead earth 3 hours a day in the same room hilarity is bound to ensue.
Lol in every single argument about this I've ever seen online, I've only ever seen Tau Zero come up as a viable option presented by the gatekeepers (oh and maybe Children of Ruin more recently)
I remember a review that said Children of Time didn't count as hard sci fi because it had cryo sleep that worked too well. The idea was that even the best cryo sleep can only greatly slow aging, not stop it. Which, sure, I can see that (though the article didn't go in depth on the mechanics of what was causing the aging, which seemed rather "Take our word for it.") Thing is, with how much sci fi feels they practically have to use ftl I feel we can cut Children of Time some slack. It feels like there's a idea that only sci fi that can be argued to be "true to life" can be said to be quality, which is incredibly limiting. That and any look at a society more than a year or two into the future (let alone dozens of hundreds or God forbid, thousands.) is going to have differences simply due to the massive number of factors that go into determining the future. As one of the sci fi nerds in Generic Ent.'s video said, isn't quality of a work orthogonal to scientific rigidness?
Another thing is that I've noticed a lot of people complaining about utterly unrealistic works (like Star Wars) not being "realistic" in certain highly specific ways. They'll say the Empire should use real military tactics, but ignore that, in space, land bound military tactics are likely to get you killed. One of the biggest ones is the ranges people square off at; I've heard from Issac Arthur that, due to space being a near vacuum, fights will probably happen at ranges where you can't see the enemy ship with the naked eye. Which would massively change Star Wars as the usual hotshot fighter pilot would be killed off by the utterly realistic point defense before he could get close enough to see the enemy vessel. Yet these loud mouth know it all say that they want Star Wars to be realistic, then leave out foundational parts of space combat. It's ego stroking for nerds, since they don't know, or care about the massive distances of (possible) IRL space combat, they ignore that and coast on the audience's lack of care or knowledge for the same. Nevermind that Star Wars was never realistic to begin with. Why the nitpicking and long winded rants? If I had to guess, it's ego. The people going crazy about realism often come off as emotionally stunted man children who think they have to prove their intellectual superiority in order to be good enough. Which sounds pretty similar to the sorts of people who think only hard sci fi counts as quality. It's not based on actual care for realism, but on childish ego mania.
@@adams13245See also "Sacred Cow Shipyards".
I've always thought that Star Wars looks like WW2 because electronic guidance and countermeasures have been raised to such perfection in that world (a world that's had FTL longer than we've had domesticated horses) that having a "squishy" piloting a comparatively simplistic and "dumb" ship is the only way to even get near the enemy. Anything electronically-guided (or worse, sending a signal back to the ship that launched it) will be instantly "hacked" and turned back on the attacker, or just destroyed. As for point defence, any "active" detection methods, much like sonar on a submarine, just scream out "HERE I AM!". Much better to have onboard guns aimed by people, even if they miss!
this is what it feels like when i read book reviews on goodreads.
And then there's me who pivots in the other director and wants to see more Science Fantasy. Combine Sci-Fi and space settings with more fantastical elements like Magic and such. Basically the Sci-Fi verison of "Fuck it, we ball!" I know a lot of people would say Star Wars, but I wanna throw Xenoblade Chronicles into the ring.
Pretty much any YA book who claims to be scifi is fantasy.
For this I would say Phantasy star screams magic and sci Fi.
Seeing your thumbnail in recommendation, I thought you're Maximilian Dood and the video is 12+ years old.
Just to be pretentious, as a mathematician, the Dirac delta is not a real function. It is a distribution. (Or a measure in a certain context.) :P
I had a course about science in science fiction; the professor was exactly like these folks. I’m very, very glad that I dropped that class after he referred to the concept of human colonization of any place other than *possibly* Luna as ‘magical thinking that insults science itself’.
Subbed for that String Theory joke lmao
Love the jab at string theory since its still the go-to-theory for main stream audiences.
Cryptonomicon is hard sci fy. But to be honest, didnt the genre started after a grumpy fanboy complaines to Larry Nieven that Ringworld had the physics all wrong and Nieven wrote a sequel fixing It?
The hardest sci-fi is gooning because its always on the edge
My favorite hard science fiction are the old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comics in the back of the Sunday newspaper. *Ssssiiiiippppp* ahhhh, yeaup. Now that there will put a strain on the old noggin, I tell you what.
I just laughed out loud at the string theory joke then realised I am an insufferable nerd
I love the idea of the skit that all these college-educated people don't understand what no true Scotsman is
“as I perceive mine to be”
That textbook moment was 😂
The string theory textbook joke is the best