[Gatac]

Maybe I exagerated my language a bit; a completely rigorous scientific essay masquerading as story is surely not my goal in having "hard" science fiction. Perhaps I need to re-explain once more:

Hard sci-fi takes the scientific phenomenon first and then extrapolates the story around it. For example, "The Forever War" uses relativistic time shifts as central plot point, allowing the soldiers (travelling from war to war at near c) to keep fighting while hundreds of years pass on Earth.

Soft sci-fi, on the other hand, has a story first and then pretties it up with tidbits of science, or a science-y flavor. Taking Trek as the "Wagon train to the stars", the main issue is exploration and finding new things. How that is done (warp drive) is completely secondary - you could just as well have most of the stories take place if you had the crew, say, in medieval Eurasia dealing with various ethnic groups and cultures. The science is rarely central to the plot.

Truth is, I'm still not satisfied with my words here. It's a tough line to draw, and surely many basically "soft" stories incoorporate "hard" elements from time to time. At that point, however, one could ask whether the science is treated seriously (i.e. Bab 5 Starfuries use Newtonian physics and don't handle like WW2 dogfighters) or merely as plot contrivance (witness Trek's many attempts at portraying time differentials).

Gatac

Gatac