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Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness

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alt title(s): Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness; ptitlekov7423el8ye
Mind you, anything written by Doc Smith tends to be rather light on plausibility. You know what "hard science fiction" is, right? Well, Smith's work is so soft it squishes.
— "Ward", rec.games.frp.gurps, 5/1/2002

"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. All of these examples, of course, have loads of exceptions.

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.)

Some writers of hard Science Fiction write about areas where they already know a great deal of science fact and/or research the science behind the stories.

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.

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 harder is not always a good thing. Some authors try so hard to make a story realistic they forget plot and characterization, and others may try to justify their occasional break from reality with technobabble, although the most famous example's on the soft end. Thus, neither side is truly better than the other, and which side you prefer depends on personal taste and where a person's Willing Suspension Of Disbelief lies.

The name comes from the Mohs scale of mineral hardness.

This site contains more of this type of classification, if you are interested (note, that, comparing that site to this page's grouping, series that appears in Minovsky Particle section and below can be considered to be at least hard, though not always).

Please note: This list is ranked. That means Soft stuff goes on top, and Hard stuff goes on the bottom. Softer items are closer to the top, while Harder items are further away towards the bottom. So, if you know about a really, really hard work of sci-fi, don't place it under "Hardest"; instead, place it at the very bottom of the list, right above "Hardest".
Softest : The MST 3 K Mantra is your Survival Mantra. Your Mileage May Vary as to how soft these marshmallows are.

  • 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 Microbus 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.

  • The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Packed full of all kinds of bizarre nonsense (one example — the fastest mode of travel through the universe is by bistro. Yes. Bistro. As in "place you eat in" or "second most overworked word in food marketing after new "), but the stories are fully aware of how absurd it is, and the reader is encouraged to think about it.

  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The universe is not run not by the laws of physics, but by the Rule Of Cool. While the show remains *relatively* non-screwing with physics in the first arcs, the latter one more than makes up for it.

  • Getter Robo: being pretty much Gurren Lagann's Spiritual Grandaddy, it's pretty much just as unscientifically ludicrous and run by Rule Of Cool (hell, Spiral Energy's a giant Expy of Getter Rays). The only reason why it's "harder" is we have yet to see Ryoma kill a giant robot using a pair of sunglasses.

  • Digimon: Kids traveling with data-based lifeforms from a parallel universe founded Earth's Communications network. If it the explanation didn't involve technology, most seasons would be considered pure fantasy. Digimon Tamers is slightly a little more harder, but not by much.

  • 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.)

  • EarthBound: Psychic powers, zombies, a living tent, mind-controlled sentient animals, a dog possessed by a member of the dev team, a cult that worships the color blue, an idol that makes people greedy and an Azathoth clone as a Big Bad. And the sequel is even weirder.

  • Kingdom Hearts: Extremely condensed universe, yet each planet is somehow represented as a distant star. Faster than light travel, deflector shields, tiny Single Biome Planets, Asteroid Thickets, a Space Whale, do-anything computers (including an Inside A Computer System sequence), and the softest of mad science.

  • Command And Conquer Red Alert series: It starts off with Einstein traveling back in time to assassinate Hitler. By the time we're finished, we have dolphin commandos, psychically-controlled giant squid, electricity-draining UFOs, psychic soldiers that set people on fire with their minds, cloning machines, teleporting commandos who erase their targets from space-time, and bear paratroopers.
    • Lampshaded when in in the Red Alert 2 mission "Fallout", where after being given control of dolphins to fight mind-controlled squids, Lieutenant Eva, asks "What's next, killer whales?"

  • Transformers: Okay, so there are these impossibly ancient space robots, right? And they come to Earth in search of energy, right? And to disguise themselves, they turn into cars and trucks and guns and stuff, right? And the cars have realistic engines and passenger compartments and tires and everything, even though it's actually a giant outer space robot. Oh, and some of them can shrink down from giant space robot size to tape deck sized. And some of them are entire living cities and planets and stuff. Throw in a bunch of coked-out 80s kiddie TV writers who are just in it for the cash, and you've got a recipe for insanity.

  • Warhammer 40000: Chainsaw swords, psychic spacemen, elves in space, orcs in space, undead robots, planet-eating bugs, three-hundred-metre-tall millennia-old walking battle cathedrals, soul-eating space stations and vehicles that travel faster because they're painted red (justified). The primary means of FTL is flying through Hell. In 40k, Rule Of Cool is physics.
    • Note that, although the Rule Of Cool constitutes the entirety of physics in the 40k universe, the universe itself tends to become more realistic the more detailed you get. This is why, in a setting where deamons from Hell battle power-armour-clad supersoldier knights with chainsaw swords, most cargo and trade traffic happens by sublight craft. Yes, even interstellar traffic.
    • Notably, Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale is one trope usually averted by 40K. This is a vast galaxy, with myriads of different worlds and cultures even just within the Imperium. The background to 40K is rather...extensive, and possesses an absurd level of detail. Depending on the writer, 40K can swing wildly from soft to hard and back again. The above descriptions may sound utterly absurd, but taken in context and in-universe they make perfect sense.
    • Also, inertialess drive for the space-mummy robots, powered by their perpetual motion machines. Because physics can go elsewhere, we're having fun.

  • 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, and arguably, the whole Space Opera genre. Lensmen had intertialess drives, habitable gas giants (with surfaces you could land on)... 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.

  • Suzumiya Haruhi. The series has already enough problems with Science Fiction Versus Fantasy. Vaguely defined Applied Phlebotinum doesn't help! At least the Time Travel is clearly elaborated.
    • Haruhi is entirely consistent; it's just that its "one big lie" is bigger than most.

  • Freelancer: Space Is An Ocean in 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.

  • Farscape: Generally let the needs of the plot come first while known science could take a flying leap for all it cared. Sort of lampshaded in "I Shrink Therefore I Am" when Sikozu starts pointing out all of the reasons being shrunk to one one-hundredth your normal size shouldn't work and Rygel tells her that he's learned to accept the universe as it comes and not worry about what he thinks he knows.

  • Star Wars: Magic is present, though it is not called magic. Coruscant violates the laws of Thermodynamics and would be horrifically difficult to sustain. The Death Star runs on Applied Phlebotinum and the Rule Of Cool. Lightsabers. Dramatic Sound In Space. Old School Dogfighting. Etc.
    • The Force aside, the Star Wars movies suggest a galactic scale. (This Troper admits ignorance of anything but the movies.) Dooku's casual discussion of thousands of star systems in Aot C supports the ANH novelization's "millions of star systems" in the Empire. Commercial interplanetary travel incurs as much difficulty as air travel today. You can go from one side of the galaxy to another in a week. The second Death Star was constructed as much as it was in six months in secret, with the materials provided by one shipping company and assembled on site, suggesting an industrial capacity that... "dwarfs" does not begin to cover this. In short, Corsucant is benign compared to the scale they already operate at. (incomprehensibly huge =/= soft; The Force+Unobtainium Building Materials+Unobtainium Power == soft)

  • Red Dwarf: Hard to place because, as a comedy, it naturally has many absurd elements, but the Absent Aliens, the fact that it takes time to go places, the way robots are treated and (in earlier series) soft light holograms make it seem a lot harder than most. The novels are harder.

  • Doctor Who: Varies, being harder and softer at certain points in its extremely long run. The whole Timey Wimey Ball that's part of its premise tends to soften it.

  • Star Trek XI: Arguably the softest Trek yet, except perhaps for certain episodes of Voyager. Just a small sample of how soft it is: It contains Time Travel by flying through a black hole. Black. Holes. Don't. Go. Anywhere. They're extremely dense objects in space with an immensely strong gravitational field, not some sort of actual hole you can go through. Had they used Wormholes, they might have at least been able to cheat a bit, but they use Black Holes.
    • On the other hand there is a limited amount of No Sound In Space.
      • But only a limited amount (it goes by the Rule Of Drama). There is still some sound in space, which is a break from reality.

  • Star Trek The Original Series: Debatable though, many aspects of the show were pretty hard sci-fi when it was created, and only seem strange now after decades of science. Though the setting is stranger than other Star Trek shows, the ships and the technology are much more grounded.

  • Ratchet And Clank: Almost every entry in the series has an item which can turn enemies (including entirely non-organic robots) into a chicken/sheep/duck/pig/cow/penguin in seconds. So Yeah.

Imported Alien Phlebotinum: There are technologies that break the laws of physics, but we don't have any real idea how they work, or they are dependent on a resource that apparently appeases some higher power.

  • The Stargate 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. StargateSG-1 got softer as it progressed, letting mystical concepts like Life Energy, Ascention, Evolutionary Levels and the power of belief take center stage. It also loses points for having each show's Omnidisciplinary Scientist actually figure out how to mass produce much of the Phlebotinum. Just In Time for the SGC to Save The Day. Over and over again.

  • Andromeda: Tries to be harder than Star Trek. Set farther in the future, and teleporters, interstellar radio (they use couriers to deliver mail), and holodecks (they use virtual reality instead) are all still impossible. Rather than hand phasers, they use small tracking bullets, or if they're desparate, plasma bursts, though they can only fire a few shots of those. Also, their main weapons are small missiles traveling near the speed of light that hit with their kinetic energy. Trouble is, a lot less stuff is actually explained, meaning you usually have to take their word for it or make something up yourself whenever they use technology.

  • Command And Conquer Tiberium series: Uses only one form of real Applied Phlebotinum, in the form of the titular Tiberium, but Tiberium itself has all manner of weird properties. By the third installment, though, the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens arrive with all manner of odd and physics-bending technology.

  • HP Lovecraft, by his own admission, preferred to "supplement reality rather than contradict it." His fiction takes a serious look at humanity's true place in the universe, and is full of Extradimensional beings, Starfish Aliens, and scarily plausible explanations; there's no use of Aliens Speaking English or Rubber Forehead Aliens unless they're played for horror (since neither trope should naturally occur). Lovecraft stories also provide scientific-ish sounding rationales for merfolk, time travel, and the effects of witchcraft (it's really math).

  • 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'.

  • The Halo; some of the technology used by the UNSC is upgraded real-world tech or technology based off predicted future developments, like railguns and AIs. The primary form of FTL are extremely dangerous and unpredictable "Slipspace" drives. Things get a lot weirder with time-and-space-bending Forerunner technology, which is made worse by the comparative weirdness of their tech and flatly refusing to explain how anything works.

  • Macross: Plenty of Humongous Mecha, No Sense Of Scale and ships that pack more than their own weight in missiles. On the other hand, space combat scenes are not particularly fanciful and there are realistic depictions of zero gravity environments, decompression and the like.

  • Babylon 5: No Space Friction, the Starfuries are a particularly sensible fighter designed for space, Artificial gravity is a prized technology beyond the means of humans and has a significant impact on the maneuverability of ships, whereas many others need to simulate gravity via rotating sections in the ships or space stations. Objects destroyed in space most decidedly do leave debris behind, at least as much as the CGI effects of the mid-90s could portray. FTL travel exists, but is but no means easy — Hyperspace is decidedly different from normal space and hard to maneuver in, and only large ships can access it on their own power without Jumpgates. JMS loves all kinds of aliens, and they run the gamut from Human Aliens and Rubber Forehead Aliens (implied to be the result of genetic tampering rather than natural evolution) to full-blown Starfish Aliens, all with their distinct customs and religions, and biology is treated fairly logically (there are two cases of Half Human Hybrid occuring, and both are the result of one parent using Applied Phlebotinum to make themselves compatible with the other species), diseases cannot cross species without distinct biological similarities and obtaining medical information and blood supplies of all the different species is an important point for the station's doctor. There are no Translator Microbes either; learning other species' language is important at many points in the series and many aliens retain a distinct accent when speaking English. While Translator devices exist, they are also fairly realistic — of visible size, tailor-made for a specific language rather than universal, and they translate in a flat, dull monotone. However, Sound In Space, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and Psychic Powers do exist. The biggest problem are probably that JMS wouldn't know about scales if you hit him on the head with a lightyear long yardstick, and the Explosive Instrumentation make any savvy viewer cringe. Some of this may be Executive Meddling, though.

Minovsky Particle: The laws of physics are broken in a specifically declared way. Expect hundred-page dissertations on fictional physics and consistent internal rules.

  • Anne McCaffrey's Talent series was, for the most part, a rather hard Sci-Fi. She supplied understandable ways in which psi powers might manifest and how they worked. Since psi powers were primarily limited by how much energy a human being could create, being able to gestalt with an electrical generator to supplement one's psi makes sense. Also, screw using any sort of advanced technology for FTL travel or communications, let's use our psi's!! Although, the series did begin to head a bit more towards the "softer" side with the more aliens contacted (a grand total of two species), but she also did a fairly good job with them as well. One was insectoid, one was...vaguely humanoid. The energy requirements also tended to go out the window as each generation got more powerful and had less and less reliance on generators.

  • 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. Would be smack in the middle of "Unobtainium" if the Psychic Powers didn't look a bit too much like magic.

  • Mobile Suit Gundam: UC 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 (which it goes to great length to justify).

  • Infinite Ryvius: While its Space Is An Ocean (quite literally, in fact), complete with Space Whales, and contains Phlebotinum-based 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.

  • Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series: Has no FTL travel but does contain several superscience technologies, e.g. the Conjoiner near-lightspeed drive, space/time manipulating weaponry, messages from the future to the past (also the basis for FTL messaging). There is a form of FTL travel present, but it tends to get one's civilization eaten by the Inhibitors; realistic Cosmic Horrors.

  • The works of H. Beam Piper: Uller Uprising opens with an essay explaining the silicon-based Ullerans. There are no death rays, just bullets. Nuclear power is used. There's no full-on explanation of FTL, but when he gives a detail (such as gadolinium being key, or it including time dilation), he doesn't contradict it. (The Paratime series, on the other hand, is quite soft, right down to giving reincarnation a free pass in one story; granted, that was a case of Writer On Board).

  • A Miracle Of Science: Everything that's used is explained via modern theory, with the exception of a few staples such as FTL and Deflector Shields — which is only used by a sect of Sufficiently Advanced humans. Fairly impressive for a series based around mad scientists running amok.

  • Jerry Pournelle's Co Dominium Shared Universe: Military Science Fiction hard enough to chip teeth. It has a Portal Network and a Force Field designed by Dan Alderson, a Real Life celebrated scientist at JPL. Two books co-authored with Larry Niven introduce a species of distinctly non-Human Aliens, but they are sublimely well-constructed and everything else — everything, is real, proven technology. Pournelle even counted on Science Marching On, justifying it with Medieval Stasis enforced by the namesake Obstructive Bureaucracy.

  • Both the Night's Dawn and Commonwealth books by Peter F. Hamilton. FTL is done by the use of ZTT (Zero Temporal Transit) drives, which work by a well-explained principle based on wormholes, and stasis technology based on the same effect takes the place of Human Popsicles. In every other respect, very, very hard indeed, subverting the vast majority of the Space Does Not Work That Way tropes and just plain avoiding the rest; no dogfights in space, explosive decompression is only occasionally dealt with, and is done so with great accuracy, and space is far more like...well, space, than it is like an ocean.

  • The Honor Harrington book series: Space Is An Ocean, but the series demonstrates admirable internal consistency, relies on essentially only one piece of "new" technology (gravity control methods), mostly merely extending other pieces of current technology (medical science, nuclear fusion containment, lasers). Additionally, space combat is very three-dimensional and ship-to-ship engagements are often fought from fractional light-second distances (contrast the traditional Star Trek Starship Standoff).

  • Mass Effect: Its only fictional element is perhaps the Trope Codifier for the Minovsky Particle: Element Zero, a form of Unobtainium which defines every use of sci-fi technology. Quite realistically, something as important as eezo and the mass effect fields it generates fundamentally influences every aspect of society, meaning Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better even with man-portable Deflector Shields, and people born with the stuff in their systems can manipulate gravity. The programmers definitely have a great Sense Of Scale, as you traverse the galaxy via the Portal Network even with your mass effect drive. All the aliens speak English because of ubiquitous computers and translation software. The Rubber Forehead Aliens are in fact the most alien, with truly Bizarre Alien Biology. Everything else in the setting reflects realistic science, including accurate geography, geology, astrology, physics, alien biology, computing, and military tactics and strategy. Think of it as Planetes with a squishy eezo center, like a Everlasting Gobstopper.

  • 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.

  • Larry Niven's Known Space stories: No Human Aliens here! Er... with one exception, and the humans 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 is not technically impossible, but it is pretty unlikely. The FTL, Artificial Gravity, Psychic Powers, stasis fields and other Wondertech keep this from being rock-hard scifi, but the astronomy is very solid. Niven gets uber bonus points for having obsessively Shown His Work.

  • Eve Online: FTL speeds are possible, but only applicable within a single solar system. As far as players are concerned, bridging the massive space that separates solar systems requires advanced stargate technology or highly costly specialized equipment that costs even more to use because of fuel limitations. The latter method requires a ship or particular structure already be in the system, while the stargate network was built by absolutely massive ships traveling between systems at roughly .3c. Weapons are fairly realistic, employing relatively justifiable laser technology, magnetic railcannons, missiles, and even good old fashion bang-you're-dead projectile weaponry. The universe is ridiculously huge, much like actual space, with over 7000 unique solar systems, though it falls short of the following category because, as New Eden's space is based on fluid physics and has the viscosity of firm gelatin, ships have a "Top speed" and decelerate once the engines turn off.

FTL Travel: The only departure from reality is that we've finally outsmarted Einstein — at the very least to send messages.

  • Starship Operators has FTL travel (called warp drive, no less) and inertial dampeners but is otherwise very hard.

  • C.J.Cherryh's Hell Burner books. FTL travel does exist, but usually happens to someone else. The peculiar nature of near-light-speed combat is very seriously considered, as are the dangers of space, the nature of large-scale construction projects, and the proper procedures for pressure suit maintenance.

  • Contact by Carl Sagan: Scientists spend the first third of the book struggling to raise money for the SETI program amid sponsoral skepticism. Once they finally find an alien transmission, they spend the second third deciphering the transmission, considering all the possibilities involved, and thoroughly applying the scientific method, all the 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.

  • Freefall: Tends to limit itself to 'theoretically possible but difficult' technologies, such as genetically enhanced sapient animals, terraforming, AI and cryogenics. Even artificial gravity is absent (as the name suggests), and though the Dangerous and Very Expensive(D.A.V.E.) Drive enables interstellar voyages measured in days, it is explicitly not Casual — Planet Jean was colonized by Generation Ships.

  • Robert L. Forward's Timemaster: probably one of the few hard science fiction stories you'll ever encounter that has Time Travel at the core of the plot. The only iffy element is a substance with a negative rest mass: although such a material has never been observed, several mainstream theories of physics predict its existence.

  • Blue Planet: A semi-hard SF RPG. FTL travel only through wormholes. The biotechnology is very soft in places, and gilled mammals have certain thermodynamic issues.

  • Charles Stross's Accelerando series: An Einsteinian universe without FTL but with traversable wormholes, with some handwaving of uploading and computronium. The characters speculate about distant aliens performing a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, and the eventually-weakly-godlike-robot-cat claims to have a Halting Oracle, but that might be intimidation.

  • Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish Cycle novels: There is no FTL travel, although there is FTL communication using the Ansible. Travel between stars involves nearly-as-fast-as-light ships, and comes with "realistic" time dilation effects. Very little super-technology is discussed beyond this, except for some hints about genetically engineered species. Nearly — human aliens appear, but a major plot point is that they all share a common ancestor with us; so essentially, they are literally human aliens. On the other hand, the novels tend to focus on people and societies, so relatively little space is dedicated to describing how technology actually works. Telepathy also makes an occasional appearance, though it is discarded in later novels (Le Guin wrote that essentially, she did away with it because Science Marches On — telepathy seemed more plausible when she was writing the earlier works).

No FTL: Perhaps slightly softer than the above, but the physicists will forgive a lot for appeasing their Einstein-worship. Ken Burnside has a particularly scathing rant to that end.

  • 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, Artificial Gravity 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 or "black rock" failures, 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, and even the characters aren't sure they believe it. 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 — it's eventually revealed that it's all in one (fairly large) solar system, so given that ships travel between planets in a timeframe of days or weeks, travel is definitely subluminal, if still fairly fast. The ships that left Earth took a "generation" at least to get to the system, but that was presumably generations before the story takes place.

  • Alien and its sequels. Spaceships have slow FTL travel, during which the crew lie in cryogenic sleep for months or even years. The many discovered planets that they go by numbers, but almost none of them are naturally inhabitable.

  • Cowboy Bebop: Has no Space Friction (except during dog fights), Artificial Gravity, travel outside this solar systems, and debateably has no FTL Travel. The least realistic thing is the Portal Network, which was only included to keep travel time between planets down — but is explicitly not faster than light. It takes place in an Alternate History where we had a Space Age instead of a Cold War, and developed efficient spaceplanes and Terraforming(and those things on Mars that look like Deflector Shields? Air curtains.). Much like Firefly above, a more improbable element is that they could terraform most planets and moons of a solar system to habitability.

  • Max Headroom: Strongly related to its Twenty Minutes Into The Future premise, though still spiced with the occasional TV commercial that makes people's brains explode. Which may be a comedic exaggeration of a Reverse Funny Aneurysm; certain TV shows have been known to trigger grand mal seizures.

  • The works of Greg Egan: Tend to include in-depth discussions of physics, maths, computer science and biochemistry in a non-Techno Babble way, and many start from the assumption that, given time, modern science will go the way of Newtonian Physics. He gets bonus points by never using this as a cheap excuse for FTL travel.

Unobtainium: Comprised solely of theoretical yet plausible elements. NO FTL in any way, shape or form.

  • Robert L. Forward's Rocheworld setting was quite hard (it should be, he's a physicist). The only major implausibilities in the first book are alien life and a life-prolonging drug. Points are lost to Sequelitis; In the third and later books, the science softens to mush, including finding native coffee beans on the moon of a gas giant circling a red dwarf.

  • Ben Bova's Grand Tour novels: Perfectly credible spaceflight-within-the-Solar-System stories. The only Phlebotinum is nanotechnology, which is at least theoretically possible. Some extraterrestrial life features, but it is plausibly primitive.

  • Allen Steele's Near Space series. Spaceflight-within-the-Solar-System stories with no Phlebotinum at all, except in the farthest-future setting, A King of Infinite Space, which features reversible cryosuspension and a class of humans genetically engineered to function in space.

  • Century City: The science tried to be hard. The plots, on the other hand...

  • 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 (and given an entire world population of geniuses, it's not much of a stretch).

  • Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End: Set Twenty Minutes Into The Future. The most speculative parts concern the existence of certain vulnerabilities in the human brain against information-based attacks.

  • Strange Days: A film with one innovation ("playback" of memories via portable superconducting quantum interference devices) and the consequences thereof.

  • 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, and so on.

  • The works of the dearly departed Michael Crichton. He frequently showed his work about plausible technology as it becomes workable and just before It Got Worse; usually because arrogant humans insist on Tempting Fate. Once he acquired a degree of Protection From Editors, he took advantage of that to move into more controversial territory.

  • The works of Thomas Pynchon. Mr. Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell before WWII, and you can tell.
    • Mr Pynchon studied engineering physics in the '50s, and studied WWII in the '60s, and it shows. There is, however, an unexplained oddity that calls Causality Itself at the core of Gravity's Rainbow.

  • GURPS Transhuman Space: So far possibly the hardest SF RPG released, no FTL whatsoever. Biotech is harder than Blue Planet, but still somewhat soft in places. The AI (and especially "uploading") are speculative at best.

Next Sunday AD: The only thing unrealistic is that it hasn't happened — yet. The only way to grade these is by their age. Newer means harder; one can always tell when Science Marches On.

  • The movie Destination Moon; written by Robert Heinlein with assistance from that worthy's many, many friends in the United States Armed Forces.

  • The Tintin stories Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. The print medium enables Hergé to better display the colossal engineering needed to develop interplanetary spaceflight. Though science has marched on considerably since it was written, at the time it was practically a student's primer on both nuclear energy and spaceflight.

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Unusually among films and TV series with space travel, 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. The iconic monolith is ill-defined, but never really breaks any physical laws.

  • Planetes: Commercial spaceflight less than a century in the future and almost completely limited to the Earth Sphere itself. Detailed orbital mechanics, realistic effects of space on health, dependency theory, diapers under spacesuits, and invisible laser beams. INVISIBLE LASER BEAMS. Even the gratuitous In Space Everyone Can See Your Face is justified as mere thematic close-ups on the characters' faces — with their faceplates down. Its premise — the collection of space garbage to prevent multimillion-dollar spacecraft from being scrapped by screws — is economically unfeasible, but this is actually a major plot point — though the job is essential to commercial space travel, the fact that nobody can find a way to make money off it means that it's done by office drones with gear older than they are.

  • Moonlight Mile: Planetes with raunchy sex. Helium 3 fusion becomes viable; the Space Race has begun anew. What Do You Mean Its Not Political?

  • Real Life: A Shared Universe which spawned its own genre, known as "The Documentary". Real Life has spawned much imitation, and comes close to the hardest end of the scale, but Reality Is Unrealistic.

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