Hard sci fi and rule of cool

For the sci-fi authors around here, how do you usually deal with the desire for both hard sci fi and rule of cool?

The hard wins out, I'm afraid.

But I always find that it's more interesting to think inside of the box, and make the box look awesome.

Depends on how hard your hard sci-fi is. Where is it on the scale?

Probably the most common situations where you run into problems (aside from now knowing enough physics and engineering) is probably space combat, orbital combat and then of course ground combat. Everybody loves mechs and splashy battles.

Cyber-jacking (virtual reality and direct neural interfaces) wouldn't be anywhere as cool as Johnny Mnemonic or Tron or Lawnmower Man. Hard sci fi tends to work better in non-visual media where you don't need the same sort of flash.

Rule of Cool. Hard sci-fi tends to date pretty quickly as Science Marches On, and sticking to closely to reality can get in the way of narrative and characterization if you get too caught up in it.

It depends what sort of mood I am in really. I loved 2001 for it's all it's attention to detail, but I still have fond memories of the nonsensical headfuck at the end.

People are going to be in disagreement over what counts as 'hard' or not anyway. We have all seen the tedious internet arguments over if Star Trek is more hard than Star Was.

My only advice for a storytelling point of view is just to have a clearly set the tone of your story.

There can be really hard, really cool bits. For instance, assume you avert Reactionless Drive and Inertial Dampening, leading to thrust values limited primarily by human tolerances rather than rocket technology, and use realistic space combat dynamics, meaning that high acceleration is pretty much the king of space combat. In a story bit that I may or may not ever write, I had a community of Proud Warrior Race Guys In Space who lived in big orbital habitats that spun for gravity, who set their usual living G at about 5 Gs so that they could be functional and conscious at thirty (just as someone living in 1 G starts losing usefulness at 6). I like to think that's pretty cool.

edited 25th Jun '11 8:45:48 PM by alethiophile

Wouldn't they be really short?

Quite possibly. They would certainly be stocky and muscular. There may also be a bit of genetic engineering involved. But if short people can fly the spaceships better, then the short people win.

I favour hard SF, which is what stops me from writing a lot of SF - I see far too many plot holes in most standard SF premises.

Your planet's invaded by advanced space-farin' aliens and you hope to form an underground resistance? Sorry, mate, but they hold the high ground and have far better tech toys than the NSA and all the world's intelligence agencies combined - you're screwed before you start. Oh, and they won't be conveniently discussing their plans in English right next to improbably large air ducts, either - assuming you even manage to sneak on board their ships past security that makes the Pentagon, the Oval Office and Fort Knox look like badly-secured garden sheds.

you gotta have blue hair—that's how. [that is, the guys who design 154 clones literally invoke the trope]

also got mob with dressed to kill policy and boss who dresses like he's in the edo period and other shit.

rule of cool is also why 'masculine' styles of ,makeup is popular.

rule of cool in hard sci fi is not difficult to do at all. i find in my case they never conflict.

also neal stephenson writes hard sci fi, but just look at snow crash. shit isdamn unbelievably cool.

hard sci fi and rule of cool seem to be important elements to cyberpunk. which is actually what 154 is. it's inspired by cyberpunk fiction.

and science is already cool. what i learn from history and science increases the possibilities, not limits them.

edited 26th Jun '11 5:53:53 AM by annebeeche

Cyberpunk is very easy to stay with hard SF and still have cool shit happening - a lot of my works revolve around cyberpunk themes because it's very easy to stick with real science and technology yet still make it interesting.

In an alien invasion or a space-faring adventure, however, hard science means that a lot of the cool shit that readers/viewers expect is just not going to happen. Screeds of pages have already been written explaining why the standard conventions of the likes of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Star Wars etc are just plain nonsense - yet that's the sort of "cool" stuff most the audience wants.

I think it really depends on your focus. Speaking of the space faring thing above , you can make it hard fic, as iwth my sci-fi work that aspect is, but there is rule of cool in a lot of stuff. Look in the Awesome Yet Practical trope under real life examples.

Also, anything embedded in classical physics, realtivity, or quantum mechanics that was been tested regularly for the last 80 some years is probably safe from 'science marching on'. Just take everything, materials, energy needed, cost, and human limitations in mind when trying to figure something out. Oh, and also tactics if needed.

I detest the hardest Sci-Fi where nothing is possible narrative wise that can't be backed up with 200 pages of schematics, diagrams, scientist viewpoints and observations.

What's the fun of Sci-Fi if there's no imagination to it? There's a reason why audiences don't require justifications for Faster-Than-Light Travel or Energy Weapons or FTL Radio or sleek looking spaceships conspicuously lacking functional parts like heatsinks. It's part of the genre, expected and people like them.

No matter which one you do, consistency is the most important. Don't have airplanes be super logical and hard, and then have people shrug off a blow to the head that knocked them out for an hour, and are fine and dandy.

I remember i had an issue with super soldiers once, where the women should be able to withstand the kickback of automatic rail guns (which itself is already quite powerful and far beyond today's metallurgy). But then I wondered, they should be able to turn off their super strength lest they accidentally punch a bus and it tears in half when back in civilian areas.

Then there's things that are hard to predict, like how much human to human interaction do people want? People can talk about telecommunications and "not having to meet" with other people, but anybody who has worked in corporate environments where the team is split between continents, it creates a lot of friction. So then I get more leeway with rule of cool. Things like having internet integrated with a person's vision, so the internet sites and everything is interlaid with the real world but then you get lolcat pop ups.

I try to mix both. At the very least, I try not to make things that simply cannot happen. I do venture into unknown regions and scientific ambiguity, but avoid explanations of how they work.

For example, there are these substances known as "anomalous materials" because they should not exist. I would talk about why scientists can't figure them out by explaining how scientists figure other things out. One such anomalous material, Jovium, was used in a superweapon called "Judgement". When used, it causes a gravity well to both amplify in strength and implode, dragging everything trapped in the gravity well to the planet. This was used at a large brown dwarf with large moons that acted as a massive "harbor"; a stealth ship carrying Judgment plunged as far as it could into the brown dwarf. Prior to being completely crushed by the intense pressure, Judgment is activated. All of the space stations, colonized moons, and the orbiting rings of material get dragged into the gas giant's atmosphere, completely destroying everything. Eventually, the sudden addition of large amounts of matter is just enough to make the brown dwarf go nova.

edited 27th Jun '11 11:57:41 AM by Pyroninja42

I'm with Matthew The Raven on his answer. Stay within the box, but make the box cool.

Since you can have coolness in real life, I think it's possible to have fairly accurate sci-fi storytelling that plays within the established rules and still make you go "whoa" when you experience it.

major tom; everytime someone gets in a car in a work of fiction no one goes into an essay/lecture on how cars work.

you can have advanced technology without explaining how it works.

edited 27th Jun '11 1:41:09 PM by annebeeche

I actually find hard science very cool, so it's not a debate with me. I think seeing what you can do with real - or at least theoretical - science is far more fascinating then writing fantasy with lasers and spaceships. It helps that I have slightly different opinions of what "cool" is then many people, and that I'm not writing for any sort of audience.

Edit: There's also the fact that the conventions of soft SF have been done much more often, or at least on a wider public canvas, then hard SF. I remember reading somewhere (though don't quote me on this) that Babylon 5 tried to use more realistic zero-G physics for its human ships because of Rule of Cool - it was something that had been seen much less often then standard Space Is an Ocean-slash-Old-School Dogfighting nonsense and so would be fresher to the audience. Literature, of course, is much more receptive to hard SF, but I still think that trying to write "within the box" has novelty value going for it that you won't see when recycling your standard soft SF tropes.

edited 27th Jun '11 4:04:01 PM by nrjxll

Had SF is cool. Especially if you're bored to death with teleporters, aliens who are less strange than hunter/gatherer tribes on our home planet, and pulp time travel.

But can you be bored with using chainsaw melee weapons in an age of automatic rocket propelled grenade launching guns?

But can you be bored with using chainsaw melee weapons in an age of automatic rocket propelled grenade launching guns?

Yes

The sad fact of the matter is, most "hard" sci-fi eventually winds up being disproved due to the inexorable march of time. Think about it: most of Jules Vernes' stuff was well-grounded in the science of its day, but seems hopelessly antiquated to us smug present-dayers.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to ground your science fiction in actual, y'know, science, but it's important to remember that it's the attitude of "Science is the reason things are different from the regular universe" that distinguishes science fiction from the less awesome genres. H. G. Wells is remembered just as fondly as Verne, even if it was known in his day that the moon probably wasn't hollow.