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Continuing my earlier post,
Thinking about it some more, these are my definitions.
Hard SF is stories where you you buy into the authors extrapolation/explanations.
Soft SF is where you the science is relevant but not crtitcal.
Fantasy is where you can't buy into it.
The last point turns a lot of what some people call hard sf into bad fantasy, as far as I am concerned. A good(?) example would be Von Neumans War. My problem being the speed of growth of the machines and the energy source needed to drive the machines. Note that I feel that this is a symptom of all fiction involving nanotechnology.
Anyway, using these definitions pushes most of my recommendations to the border between hard and soft with the Liaden universe (Sharon Lee and Steve Miller) very much on the soft side. And I would put Heinlein on the soft side too, so this is not a condemnation.
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