Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffR
Broadly speaking the genre is Hard SF. But as usual, while it is easy to give examples of books that belong to the genre, is can be a hard to pin down an exact definition. Roughly: stories based on plausible speculation from known facts, high degree of scientific accuracy, often with an emphasis on ideas from the the physical (hard) sciences, engineering and mathematics.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
A very different definition of Hard SF is an SF story in which, if you took away the science part, the story would be compromised. The science part doesn't have to be physical science - see the linguistics in China Mieville's Embassytown, or the anthropology (for want of a better word) in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Soft SF is then a different type of story - mystery/detective, romance, family saga, etc - that happens to be told in a SFnal setting (in space, another planet, postapocalyptic earth, etc).
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Yep. The definition can get very fuzzy....just as physics does at the limits.
Just had an 'involved' discussion among writers on another forum about the 'blurring' of boundaries, initially between Fantasy and Science Fiction, but really between all genres which I'm seeing more and more of in the mainstream these days. Marketers love to categorize things, but I don't think that's necessarily a good thing for some writers.