This reminds me of a scene in "A Fire Upon the Deep" (1992) where they're on a video call with someone on another spaceship; but something seems a bit "off". Then someone notices that the actual bitrate they're getting from the other vessel is tiny -- far lower than they should be getting given the conditions -- and so most of what they're seeing on their own screens isn't actual video feed, but their local computer's reconstruction.
Was that the same book that had the concept of (paraphrasing using modern terminology) doing interstellar communications by sending back and forth LLMs trained on the people who wanted to talk, prompted to try and get a good business deal or whatever?
Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.
It’s certainly true that Vinge doesn’t spend much time on the engineering details, but I find him unusually clear on “imagine if we had this kind of impossible-now technology, but the rest of what we know about physics remained, how would people behave?”
He was, after all, a physics professor.
Rainbow’s End is much clearer on this than his distant future stuff, of course.
> Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.
That award goes to Greg Egan who has full list of citations on his website for each of his novels, as well as a list of mathematicians and physicists he requested help from.
If you want to read books that occasionally delve into pages of equations, Greg Egan is the author for you! (Seriously though, really good books, and the implications of his "what-ifs" are pretty damn cool)
Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks with modern physics/science. As such even just FTL is soft, let alone everything else that doesn’t fit.
> Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks with modern physics/science
Maybe it's not productive to quibble about definitions like this, but FWIW I don't agree with this criteria. I would argue Greg Egan's work, for example, is just about the "hardest" sci-fi there is, and yet much of that work takes place in universes that are entirely unlike our own.
Personally, I think what makes for "hard" sci-fi is that the rules of the universe are well-laid-out and consistent, and that the story springs (at least in some significant part) out of the consequences of those rules. That may mean a story set in the "future", where we have new technology or discover new physics, or "alternate universe" sci-fi like Egan's.
If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter. It’s one of those definitions that allows anything and ultimately only feels fine because you’re adding some other criteria.
In defense of hard science fiction, it’s a meaningful category to talk about even if it’s not something you personally care about. People often want to weaken it but that just opens a door for a new category say “scientific science fiction” and we are back to square one.
Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they can’t just magically solve all issues can be fun. Hand waving the singularly as some religious event can also make interesting stories but so is considering how chaos theory limits what computation can actually achieve.
> If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter.
Greg Egan's law changes are on the level of "I consulted with a bunch of theoretical physics professors and asked them what the implication of tweaking this one fundamental constant would be, then I spent years meticulously crafting a world that takes into account those implications, and I had others physics professors check over my work to make sure it was within the bounds of actuality, and then I wrote a story about characters in this new world."
> Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they can’t just magically solve all issues can be fun.
Greg Egan actually has a great book about this! Permutation City. CPU cycles aren't unlimited, and there are tons of ethical problems being confronted with the entire "simulate a person" thing.
Harry Potter isnt typically considered scifi because it doesn't critically examine its own premise and because the rules of the universe are yoked to the needs of the plot.
> the rules of the universe are yoked to the needs of the plot
It’s common for the rules of the universe to be adapted to fit the plot of random Star Trek episodes.
HP is not considered science fiction because of the trappings of the story. People use spells and enchanted objects for telekinesis, teleportation, and time travel not psychic abilities and technology to do the same things.
> critically examine its own premise
A great deal of science fiction doesn’t do that while plenty of fantasy does.
> If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter
the laws of the universe in Harry Potter are so fickle and ever changing with the plot line that to me, it can only be considered soft. compare with Egan who takes a given cosmology and then works 100% within that world. that's hard.
That’s not a question about the underlying rules of a fictional work but your perception of how they are created. It’s possible to have a completely well defined fantasy setting with exact rules without the reader being aware of what those rules are or even knowing it’s using well defined rules.
Consider The Martian, early versions where posted online and the author changed what resources the character had to work with at the beginning. So what feels like a creative solution to limited resources was really giving the character exactly what they needed after a solution was found. Only examining a work we can’t distinguish ‘soft’ physics updated as the plot demands from a story based around fixed rules.
You seem to confuse the creative process with the final product. The rules can change during the creative process. It's the final product that I judge as a reader - I won't bother going over the inconsistencies in Harry Potter here, it's been done ad nauseam elsewhere. The physics doesn't change over the course of the story of the Martian.
What you view as inconsistencies are based around assumptions for how the underlying rules work and what happened that don’t necessarily apply.
One of the more interesting science fiction short stories I read seemed to have very inconsistent time travel, but on closer reading you find the two different methods involved had two different sets of rules. It’s easy to say something is inconsistent, but any possible story has a corresponding set of rules that work.
It’s rather similar to considering what characters may have been lying in a story.
It’s a classic definition. Soft/hard science fiction has two meanings either the topic is focused on hard sciences (physics) vs soft sciences (sociology) or “It can also refer to science fiction which prioritizes human emotions over scientific accuracy or plausibility.[1]”
So it’s not universal but is an accepted definition that any deviation from the possible or probable (for example, including faster-than-light travel or paranormal powers) to be a mark of "softness."
Popular science fiction is generally extremely soft, but occasionally you get stuff like The Cold Equations where the plot is driven by real world constraints. Even then it included FTL so a purest would call it soft.
A friend of mine and I both read it about the same time and discussed it afterwards. I thought it was pretty good, he thought it was not that great. What we agreed on was that in spite of there being many fantastic aspects to the book, on the whole it failed to be an awesome novel.
Definitely worth giving it a try if you're a programmer, just for the fact that it's written by another programmer: the opening scene where they find a bunch of rules written down and just follow them reminds me of ACPI; the discussion of public-key cryptography and shipping drives full of one-time-pad around the galaxy; the "compression scheme" with the video.
I agree that it was good but not particularly great. A Deepness in the Sky, however, is fantastic -- similar in many aspects but just flat out better all around.
It uses technological differences as key plot and setting components not just space as sea, so it is sci fi but it is improbable in many ways so yea “soft” sci fi or more speculative fiction
I think I agree both books were good and "A Deepness In The Sky" was better, but I would warn everyone that I thought both books used dramatic irony (showing us that characters were evil while hiding this from main characters) to hold attention to a degree that I kind of hated. And in "A Deepness In The Sky" sexual violence was used repeatedly to illustrate how evil the main characters were. I found it unnecessarily and a bit in poor taste.
On the other hand I think both books developed ideas wonderfully and there are bits of them I keep coming back to, even if I'll probably never reread them
