"Hard"
Speculative Fiction is firmly grounded in reality, with few fantastic flights of fancy not justified by Science™.
"Soft"
Sci Fi is more flexible on the rules.
The existence of
Faster Than Light Travel generally makes a series "softer"; the more restricted or inconvenient FTL becomes, the "harder" the series feels.
Space Is An Ocean automatically pushes a show into "soft" territory, while
Space Is Noisy makes it feel that way, even if there's a reason.
Real Robots are by definition "harder" than
Super Robots, although neither of them qualify as truly Hard Sci-Fi. TV tends to be softer than movies, which tend to be softer than books. Stories set
Twenty Minutes Into The Future tend to be harder than stories set in
The Future, simply because there's less change from the present-day.
Human Aliens and
Rubber Forehead Aliens are typically "soft";
Absent Aliens and
Starfish Aliens are more "hard" options.
A useful rule of thumb might be derived from Jim Kakalios's rule of "miracle exceptions" in his "Physics of Superheroes" articles -- while many stories require a willing suspension of disbelief, the best ones may require only one leap of faith from an established scientific principle, or just "
one big lie"; the more "exceptions" required, the harder it is to accept the story in real terms. A link to the idea can be found
here
.
Another useful rule of thumb: A character is shown a time machine and asks, "How does it work?" In hard SF the answer will be: "An interesting question. Please have a seat while I bring you up to speed on the latest ideas in quantum theory, after which I will spend a chapter detailing an elaborate, yet plausible-sounding connection between quantum states, the unified field theory, and the means by which the brain stores memory, all tied into theories from both Einstein and Hawking."
In soft SF, the answer to, "How does it work?" will be: "You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and pull that lever."
(Note this is not
universally true; you can skip over the details as long as the basic explanation you give doesn't seem to
conflict with anything you've established so far.)
The
Mundane Manifesto is one attempt to define a set of rules for writing a hard SF story or series, by deliberately forbidding many of the traditional tropes of media Sci-Fi.
"Hardness" is not, however, a simple two-category sorting function, or even a one-dimensional continuum. Many series depart from reality in different ways, and for different reasons. Nevertheless, here's a grossly simplified attempt at a list, from softest to hardest. Don't take it as gospel; just look at the size of the arguments on the discussion page.
This is unlike any other list on the wiki. When adding new items to
this page only, ignore the warning on the edit page to put stuff on the bottom. Instead, put it where it fits on the scale.
Note that this list only tracks
Sci Fi series, which are meant to take reality and diverge from it. Fantasy series need not apply, even though many of the softest
Space Operas have been accused of being just fantasy stories with spaceships and ray guns. Similarly, a series that revolves around a
Black Box is hard to classify until you know what the
Black Box is.
Finally, remember that being "harder" or "softer" does not equate to "better" science fiction, although many writers still take great pains to make their stories harder and it's usually considered better to go with harder aspects if it could be done either way without affecting much. You'll probably recognize far more of the shows and movies in the top half of this list than the bottom.
The name comes from the
Mohs scale of mineral hardness.
Please note: This list is ranked. That means the closer is an item to the top, the softer it is; the closer to the bottom, the harder it is. So, if you know about a really, really hard work of sci-fi, don't place it under "Hardest"; instead, place it right above "Hardest".
Softest
- MST3K -- Stuff happens. Don't think too much how. Characters breathe in space on at least two occasions. Artificially intelligent robots built entirely out of random spare parts. A VW Autobus converted into a spaceship. As the theme song says: "It's just a show. You really should relax."
- Futurama -- Chock full of every single popular science fiction trope, often with intentionally silly Reverse The Polarity style answers to justify them. Only "harder" than MST 3 K because there's no MST 3 K Mantra in the opening.
- Warhammer40000 -- Chainsaw swords, psychic space elves, undead robots, planet-eating bugs, three-hundred-metre-tall millennia-old walking battle cathedrals and vehicles that travel faster because they're painted red (justified). The primary means of FTL is flying through Hell.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy is packed full of all kinds of bizarre nonsense, but the stories are fully aware of how absurd it is, and the reader IS encouraged to think about it.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann -- Run not by the laws of physics, but by the Rule Of Cool.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion -- A lot of the Applied Phlebotinum in this series involves branches of biology and engineering that neither exist in real life nor are ever likely to exist. ("Metaphysical biology," for example -- Doctor Kozo Fuyutsuki's specialty -- is kind of like genetics, only it involves human souls instead of genes.)
- The Lensman novels -- A classic pulp SF series, which originated the trope of Space Police armed with incredibly powerful and flexible weapons. Lensmen had intertialess drives, habitable gas giants (with surfaces you could land on)... basically, it was pretty soft even when the first stories were published (in the 1930s), and since then, the march of science has made hash out of most of its assumptions.
- Freelancer. Space Is An Ocean on its top splendor. The space battles look like World War II air battles, only without the limitation of gravity. And on top of that, the in-game scale is warped enough to have entire planets with a 200 meters atmosphere, and no more than 2 km of diameter. These "softnesses" can be considered Acceptable Breaks From Reality, though, because they actually make the game more playable.
- Star Trek Voyager -- Ship went so fast that it was everywhere in the universe at once and then the crew 'evolved' into lizards? Yow! (Specifically the episode "Threshold", recapped here (but see also Dis Continuity))
- Red Dwarf
- Star Wars
- Doctor Who -- As a Long Runner, however, it's been harder and softer at various points.
- Star Trek The Original Series
- Mass Effect: Would be fairly soft if not for the fact that pretty much everything - FTL, artificial gravity, the weapons, etc - is explained by the existence of Element Zero.
- Charles Stross's Accelerando posits a universe that contains accessible Halting Oracles.
- TheStargate Verse -- Considering the entire premise of the show is that ancient Earth religions were based off of alien snakes that take over your body or little grey men, that Atlantis is really a flying city in another galaxy, and that if you die, you can pop back again good as new after ascending/sleeping in a sarcophagus/being rebuilt by nanobots... it's surprising how hard they can get if they put their minds to it.
- Wing Commander
- The Honor Harrington book series -- Space Is An Ocean, and it can't keep its own physics or anything straight.
- Star Trek The Next Generation
- Super Robot Wars: Original Generation -- Not counting Cybuster.
- Starslip Crisis
- Babylon 5
- Starcraft
- The Warhammer40000 universe that SC is cribbed from gets quite a lot sillier yet most of the time, likely due to the fact that it's really just Warhammer Recycled INSPACE.
- Infinite Ryvius -- While its Space Is An Ocean (quite literally, in fact) - complete with Space Whales - and contains impossible gravity-manipulating Humongous Mecha fights, the series also features relatively realistic Artificial Gravity and remembers to avert such things as Infinite Supplies and Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale.
- Freefall
- Mobile Suit Gundam -- Original series only; the later ones tended to add more fantastic flights of fancy, but the original only had Psychic Powers, Minovsky Particles, and the basic unlikeliness of Humongous Mecha.'
- Max Headroom -- Strongly related to its Twenty Minutes Into The Future premise, though still packed with TV commercials that make people's brains explode.
- A Miracle Of Science
- Schlock Mercenary
- Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri: The Tech Tree expands based on our current understanding of science, the quotes from the in-game characters always make sense, nonsensical Technobabble is almost nonexistent, and a lot of in-game scientific and technological advancements have already been predicted by several writers and scientists. Could have ranked very low in this list if the psychic powers didn't look a bit too much like magic.
- The Uplift series, by David Brin -- Hard science mixed with a lot of Imported Alien Phlebotinum to make one of the 'hardest' of the Space Operas, a sub-genre that is usually very 'soft'.
- Rather than breaking the laws of the universe outright (no Human Aliens here! Er... with one exception), Larry Niven's Known Space stories tend to simply do very unlikely things. An automated colony ship deciding to set up shop on a plateau of habitable land in the upper atmosphere above a Venusian miasma isn't technically impossible, but it is pretty unlikely.
- Firefly - no sound in space (except for inside the ion cloud in The Movie, where the sound has a medium to travel through) and no aliens, and a few other things that seem like the writers actually did do the research (such as how nasty stomach wounds are), but there are some things, such as terraforming, temporary cryonics, and space ships that may or may not be viable 500 years from now -- though all of them seem to have problems. Terraformed worlds all have "quirks" such as unique diseases that crop up, cryonics can cause a bit of a shock if you come out of it too quickly, spaceships break down easily, etc.. The most improbable feature of the world is probably River's apparent telepathy. The ships also move at the speed of plot, with Whedon waffling back and forth as to whether or not they can travel faster than the speed of light. The ships that left Earth took a "generation" at least to get to the system, but that was presumably years before the story takes place.
- Vernor Vinge's The Peace War, The Ungoverned and Marooned in Realtime mostly explore the consequences of a single fictional technology: time-stopping stasis bubbles
- Cowboy Bebop has no Space Friction (except during dog fights), Artificial Gravity, travel outside this solar systems, and debatably has no FTL Travel. The least realistic things are ships that can easily reach escape velocity, terra-forming that appears to use force fields, gates that accelerate ships to what may or may not be FTL, and that this will all happen by the 2070s.
- Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex
- Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End is set Twenty Minutes Into The Future. The most speculative parts concern the existence of certain vulnerabilities in the human brain against information-based attacks.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey -- Unusually among films and TV series with spacefaring, the vacuum of space is actually silent. Oddly enough, this is one of the few cases where the book is softer than the movie, due to going further into the details.
- I, Robot -- The book, not the movie.
- Space Island One
- Star Cops
- The Tintin stories Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon (at least in terms of nuclear energy and space flight).
- The movie also named Destination Moon, with screenplay by Robert Heinlein.
- Patlabor -- What giant, humanoid robots would be like in the real world. All units are awkward to pilot and their abilities are extremely limited. Police-issue labors can brawl with rogue worker mecha but will get utterly trashed by a simple gatling gun. Military labors are few and far between, and common anti-tank weapons are quite effective against them. Pilots need months of training and software assistance to perform well, etc...
- Century City -- The science tried to be hard. The plots, on the other hand...
- The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton -- Scientists spend several hundred pages isolating and examining a lethal organism. The film adaptation also does a pretty good job.
- Strange Days -- A film with one innovation ("playback" of memories via portable superconducting quantum interference devices) and the consequences thereof.
- Gattaca -- The gamete selection technology portrayed in the movie is a reasonable extrapolation from technology that already exists; indeed, the furthest-out thing in the film is a manned expedition to Titan.
- Contact by Carl Sagan -- Scientists spend the first third of the movie struggling to raise money for the SETI program amid sponsoral skepticism. Once they finally find an alien transmission, they spend the second third of the movie deciphering the transmission, considering all the possibilities involved, and applying thoroughly the scientific method, all of that while showing the social impact of knowing that we're not alone. It would rank even lower in the list if the last third was not about building borderline Imported Alien Phlebotinum, but it could be softer, because the setting and the clearly established rules actually make the alien device look rather hard.
- Planetes -- Near-future spaceflight. Its premise is economically infeasible, but the show features detailed orbital mechanics, realistic effects of space on health, and invisible laser beams. INVISIBLE LASER BEAMS.
- Subversion: Just about anything by Greg Egan. Many of his works start from the assumption that, given time, modern science will go the way of Newtonian Physics - a premise that is highly plausible. He gets bonus points by never using it as a cheap excuse for FTL travel.
- Dragonforce
- Arguably soft sci-fi; they never explain how Herman Li can play so fast without the friction catching the fretboard on fire.
Hardest
