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Main Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness Discussion
This scale focuses almost solely on physics and technological development.
My question is why?
The biological and biochemical science (realistic Starfish Aliens vs. Human Aliens and No Biochemical Barriers, plausible or implausible planets, etc.), and the social sciences (human societies and economies that are believable from a social science view, or more fantastical in nature) are just as important as physics.
When I see a work which has totally Real Life+ technology, but Rubber Forehead Aliens, No Biochemical Barriers, and fantasy economics, I would not call it a hard science fiction.
Yet aside from asking whether a work features psychic powers, the scale is about technology and physics.
I also agree with some other posters that treating "hardness" like a scoring system is beside the point. Some authors did do the research, but chose to use certain tropes for literary reasons. Some are more interested in social commentary than in a perfectly plausible future. Some are using aliens as proxies for human societies, not as biologically alien entities. Some authors deliberately combine scifi and fantasy concepts.
One big problem with the scale is that near the "softer" extremes—levels 1 or 2—the creator might not be intending to write science fiction in the first place, or doesn't think of it as primarily SF. For example: Ray Bradbury's works are often considered fantasy books whose SF trappings are all but incidental. In this view, even approaching them as SF—whether through the Mohs Scale or otherwise—is kind of missing the point.
Why is Battlestar Galactica on the third level? it just ignores all physics, that doesn't make it physics plus any more than Aniara.
Its a space opera not a sci-fi.At best it should be Science in genre only. Because the only thing sci-fi about it is the setting. Other than that it only deals with unrealistic amounts of melodrama.
I'm not sure if Hitchhiker's should be classified as science in genre only. Just because the "science" is completely ridiculous doesn't mean he doesn't try to explain his nonsense science. In many ways it's a parody of Hard Sci Fi.
I'd say it falls under world of phlebotinum... It makes a better job of explaining how everything works than NGE, that's for certain...
I disagree with Clarke's Third Law, and find citing it as an excuse to not explain how something work no more "Hard" then just saying "Oh it's Magic no explanation needed".
Thing with the Third Law is it doesn't just apply to how Future Technology in a Thousand or a Million years might look to us, it's also linked to a belief that our Technology would look like Magic to a Medieval, Ancient of or Primitive people. To this is absurd, I agree you can make Technology look like magic when your deliberately trying to be deceptive (That's exactly what stage magic is), but the idea then if I time-traveled back to Ancient Rome and fired a Gun they'd assume that was Magic is silly to me, I think even primitive people can see quite quickly that it's clearly a piece of technology, a very advanced Bow and Arrow. In fact one Star Trek The Next Generation episode actually insinuated a Bow and Arrow would seem a god-like power to someone who hadn't seen one before, that the height of absurdity to me.
What I will say, as someone who believes the Very Ancient World was more technologically advanced then we think, that I od believe Technology could become Magik in a myth as it retold over and over again generations after the technology was lost and forgotten, especially if much of that was by pure oral Tradition.
A minor point - but how does the Science Marches On contribute to scale? So far I though that work is evaluated in context so for ex. the 19 c. work on faster-then-light travel (according to Newton) is hard science even if we now think it is unlikely to happen (i.e. our current understanding of physics prohibits this). Then I read the 'note 4' about reclassification of work.
The two most significant problems I've always had with 'Science Fiction Hardness' seem to have reared their heads both on this discussion page and in the general treatment of the article as a whole:
1. The fact that people treat it as a scoring system.
Even though this has been mentioned a few times already, scoring higher for hardness does not affect the quality of a work. The problem there lies with both fans of 'hard' science fiction and public perception in general making it sound like a 'harder' work is inherently superior to a 'softer' work. And when fans of those works encounter that attitude, their direct response is to proclaim the ways the work they like is harder than proposed for some reason they will then explain, with varying degrees of success.
This even results in a bit of unadulterated stupid (I have no kinder word to give to it) where the second paragraph is basically written from the pro-hard perspective of "Hard is better because it (supposedly) takes more effort to write." while the page text ends on the note of "We don't take an opinion on whether or not harder or softer is better." Apparently, we do. We very specifically did a couple paragraphs back when we stated that 'Hard' science-fiction usually shows it's work. (And the dumb thing is that it usually doesn't. Most 'Hard' Sci-Fi specifically written with the intent to be 'hard', especially online, is dreadfully formulaic tripe that replicates the scientific interpretations of whatever much better classic it's basing itself on, including that work's unfortunate scientific mistakes.)
The true problem of the hardness discussion in my eyes, however, is also the biggest here:
2. 'Hardness' seems to be based mostly on 'pure' physics. Not applied physics. Or other scientific fields. Or realism in general.
The topic above this one asks whether the mere presence of FTL changes the hardness rating of a work. The answer is that it does in the eyes of many and that there is no reason for this. Officially a work's 'hardness' is supposed to reflect, or be judged on, it's scientific realism, but in the eyes of many people scientific realism equates to 'strict adherence to pure physics'.
If a work does not contradict 'pure physics' (Directly stated 'rules' of physics, like 'gravity pulls things together' and 'you can't go faster than c.') it can get away with Ass Pull after Ass Pull on physics as it actually applies to the real world.
To give an example of what I mean: Suspended animation is often lauded as one of the 'realistic' and 'hard science' ways to have people travelling to other stars and planets without being geriatric by the time they arrive and it's often used to preserve characters for decades, even centuries while travelling. This opposed to FTL which is 'unrealistic' and 'soft'.
In reality, however, it's merely scientifically improbable that a way to travel faster than light will be discovered in a form applicable to spacecraft. It's scientifically impossible to keep someone in cryonic preservation for such a long time and still revive them. The problem scientist are currently working on is consistency in temperature, because the minute amounts of thawing and refreezing that results from not being able to completely control the temperature in whatever the frozen thing is in causes erosion. Once we fix this, we might be able to preserve biological samples almost indefinitely. Managing this on a space ship is... More problematic, but theoretically possible
The limit to preserving actual living human beings however is mostly determined by free radicals in a person's cells damaging them from the inside with the biological countermeasures to prevent this deactivated by the preservation process. There is no way to remove all the free radicals from a living human without turning them into a dead human, free radicals are needed for cells to work. While freezing does slow this, it doesn't stop it completely and the maximum time possible for a human taking all possible (survivable) precautions is 20 to 30 years.
Free radicals are present in every cell and are created by the body itself as a result of respiration, so it's literally impossible to have someone 'take a treatment' to remove the free radicals from their body or to remove them after freezing, not without making them unrevivable in the process.
This is physics, just as much as 'no going faster than light' is, but because it's physics by way of biology, it gets ignored. As a result, many of the works that employ suspended animation are considered harder than works that use FTL travel, even though by any definition of hard science other than 'Must adhere to what I read on Atomic Rocket' suspended animation through cryonic freezing as it's used in most works (as a replacement for FTL to get to places that it takes more than 50 years to travel to while keeping the crew 'young') is actually 'softer'. Other common areas 'hard' science writers can fudge the rules on if they adhere to 'standard' or 'pure' physics without comment are Biology (certain areas of biology at least), Economics, Sociology, Chemistry, Logistics and Physics.
Yes, physics. Because the point I'm trying to make is that the 'hard science' fandom (and it's very much a fandom that's behind this classification) has several rules it focusses on and which are given undue importance over others.
Could we try to take these elements out of the page? Or else could we rework it to reflect the specific set of selection criteria on which the rating is based rather than pretending that Hardness on this scale is a reflection of the actual scientific realism of a work in general?
Made a few small edits so it looks more neutral. Not all science fiction fans are worried about the science aspect of the story. What is good or bad depends on the reader, and there is absolutely no rule that it has to be dominated with science fact. I, and I know for a fact, others, feel that science should be used as a means to an end, not the other way round, and with few exceptions most of the respected "literary" SF authors after the "Golden Age" are not what most people would generally describe as hard science fiction - Banks, Le Guin, Phil Dick, Vance, Simmons, Wolfe, etc. Of course there are great hard SF writers as well, like Baxter, but for a lot of fans it seems getting the science right, or at least focusing a lot of time explaining the fictional science is more important than telling the story. Of course, there's a difference between deliberately altering the laws of physics and making genuine mistakes, but in the end it still shouldn't matter that much. A story that relies entirely on the strength of it's science probably isn't a very good story to begin with.
Another thing is that, despite the seeming prevalence of "Hard SF only" types (as seen on sites like Amazon), a lot of the major respected SF critics and writers tend to be more neutral about it or even opposed to the harder stuff (see this
and this for examples).
and this for examples).
I'm a bit confused. Does the scale depend solely on how the physics/technology is explained, or are there certain things that automatically bump a work? For example, a work could involve faster than light travel while basing it only on current theories, and yet I get the idea it would be autobumped to hard sci fi (from very hard sci fi) at best.
Mass Effect is listed on the main page under Small Fib, but appears under the example page for Science Plus. I don't know which page is supposed to be more correct, but someone should fix that.
Also, shouldn't Doctor Who show up somewhere? I assume it'd be a 1.
On a scale of 1-10:
Moon: 10
Primer: 10
2001: 9.5 (alien monoliths are not hard science)
Gattaca: 8
Outland: 7 (went for personal realism, but spent little time actually showing their work on the science)
Ghost In The Shell: 6.5
Solaris: 5.5
Firefly: 5 (frequently limited by real-world machinery issues, transit time)
Matrix: 4 (the philosophy was fairly coherent, but the science was silly; human bodies are not a SOURCE of electricity. Ideas of reality being an illusion of perception are scientifically relevant. Once we start introducing underground cities the robots can't find, hoverships they couldn't build, and geothermal power than would have bypassed the machines' need to farm human energy, it softens up far more)
Back To The Future: 3.5 (scores high because they at least attempt to follow rules, and went for a experimenter science-y aesthetic)
Star Wars: 3 (had a realistic, down-to-earth aesthetic, although clearly the FTL, lasers, and The Force are designed to facilitate the desired plot, not science. Great character writing, sure, but it's not science)
Star Trek TNG: 2.5 (sometimes overlaps real science, but science-y things most often function as Phlebotinum, limited by Ridiculously Human Robots though)
Tron: 2
Star Trek TOS: 2
Doctor Who: 1 (not saying it's not fun, but there's no science, every line of the plot is generally Phlebotinum)
The Lost Room: ?? Where do you place fantastic Minovskis? They're largely unrelated to "science".
Hmm... the things I might want to note here:
Good or bad writing is NOT what the Mohs Scale is about, but the orientation of the writing's adherence to science. Bad character design and plot flow do not lower its score, nor does plot excellence raise it. We all love Star Wars- but it's scientifically weak.
Likewise, writing being groundbreaking and original does not boost its hardness over cheaper copycats pulling the same ideas.
Trope execution does matter. If you establish a rule and later ignore it completely- say establish that ships use fuel, then have a ship travel 10x longer than previous fuel-limited trips, never stop for fuel, and simply ignore that it shouldn't be possible- then you're no longer as Hard.
What I'm unsure of is how the aesthetic itself bears on its Mohs score. Star Trek TNG seems absurdly "clean" for a functioning vessel. Star Wars' visible industrial machinery SEEMS harder to me. Firefly's does that well, too. Steampunk is machine-oriented too. These are aesthetic decisions, and maybe they have no bearing on hardness. Steampunk is rarely strongly science-based.
I'm gonna suggest that you can actually list tropes over a range:
Explosions In Space can never score you higher than 5
Ridiculously Human Robots can never score you higher than 4, except maybe old "classic" scifi where convincing nonhuman robots were simply impractical to put on film.
I do think the principle requires reference examples to be established. Mohs scale of mineral hardness did not actually use units, only empirical examples of superior hardness. Thus the scale lacks units, is neither linear nor exponential nor any other mathematical construct, and its rise with every +1 is a very inconsistent increase; the only guarantee is that something that scratches the prototype for one data point will always scratch those of lower number, and once you find the point prototype that scratches the sample, then higher point samples will always scratch it. There is no basis for scoring anything between points, since the scale is not established, one cannot empirically measure "5.3" for example, only "more than 5 and less than 6" and "more than another material I found between 5 and 6" Hmm, Mohs scale of mineral hardness itself is NOT very scientific!
Notable observation: Sequels lose 1-2 pts of hardness in almost every instance where you'e above, like, a four. 2010 being a rare exception. Or is it? The dead-guy-turned-god seems like it should lose 1/2 a point right there. Star Wars lost no hardness because it wasn't hard enough to begin with to make it difficult to write/mass-market a sequel.
Cosman246 added Star Trek The Next Generation to the list of three Physics Plus examples, but I am not familiar enough with the series to know whether it properly falls in that class or World Of Phlebotinum. If it does, it would be great to put it there — but conversely, while we can be pretty flexible about the subpages, we want to be very sure when we put anything down on the main page.
So, to reiterate: Is TNG more properly Physics Plus or World Of Phlebotinum?
Moved this one from between Moon and Planetes.
- Shattered Horizon: An FPS set in space, featuring true zero-G manuevering and combat, inertia, a story that is completely feasible given the timeline (man colonises and mines the moon around 2040) and no sound- while there are battle noises, these are generated by the suit to help with situational awareness. Should the suit be powered down, all you hear is your heartbeat.
- "completely feasible"? Completely feasible when the central plot point of the story is a mining accident that somehow blows off a huge chunk of the moon filling orbit with billions of tons of debris?!
- What about the plethora of Explosions In Space? There's no smoke in space, people! Not the thick cotton-looking smoke you get in an atmosphere!
- Those are just clouds of flash-frozen water vapor - ice.
- It doesn't matter which substance is used, cotton-looking clouds can't happen in a vacuum - that shape is caused by diffusion processes and is entirely dependent upon an interface between the cloud and the surrounding air. In space, it should be a rapidly-dispersing spherical cloud, visible only for a few tenths of second before dissipating.
- Those are just clouds of flash-frozen water vapor - ice.
(Small spoilers!) One body of work that should be mentioned is that be Greg Egan. His first novel was an exploration of the consequences of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, supposing certain individuals could suppress the collapse of the wave function. Others include beings (alien and otherwise - a bit hard to tell as most people/etc have loaded their minds into computers, complete with backups) exploring fundamental physics at the edge of an event horizon, or discovering general relativity empirically just by living inside an asteroid orbiting a back hole.
Somewhere between 6 and 7 for the far distant future stuff? I would put it between 7 and 8, sometimes for the some of his short stories.
Oh and it helps he's published papers in the journal _Classical and quantum gravity_.
Patlabor seems about as hard as scifi can be IMO. I would put it in Next Sunday AD personally, certainly not two whole grades softer as presently happens.
Where would Back To The Future go?
A question for the people with degrees in the sciences, if they wish to answer it.
Theoretically would faster than light travel be possible if the ship was able to traverse a space in which the distances between the two points where reduced. Relativistically speaking, the speed they travel through a different media would not exceed the speed of light, and would also allow the vessels to travel at great speeds. Of course, the vessels in question would appear to travel faster than light, but it's the 40 miles at 20, vs 50 miles at 60 type of question then.
Or say.... sound in water, and sound in air.
Reading the article, what sticks out in my mind is the fact it is still totally hypothetical, and that there is no current way suggested to create, enter or leave such a bubble. Not to mention, as taken from the Wikipedia article.
A paper by José Natário published in 2002 showed that it would be impossible for the ship to send signals to the front of the bubble, meaning that crew members could not control, steer or stop the ship. http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/19/6/308/
There is no real point in having a ship that can travel vast distances if you don't have any control of it. On top of that the liking of it to the Star Trek warp has made more sceptical of the drive as a possible option. While I have little issue with some of the other factors, it is a case of doing research I need to focus in on my uni work.
Thinking about the drive for a moment, it might as well be the Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers, from some of the logical issues I can see reading some of the articles attached to Wikipedia article.
By chance are you familiar with Event Horizon, as I have seen that explaination of a wormhole there.
I don't see the issue with having travel through a different media, in this case there is a space apart from the one we know. We have air and water, and the same pressure force travels very differently through both, so applying that on a larger scale I can't see any issues. Look at old trading routes, they worked on ocean currents, ocean highways if you will, so again why can't they exist in other media?
Look, being honest Leogarg, it looks to me like you want the cake and to eat it as well. You can't have both in this case, as if you apply any form of relativity to it, you need wormholes, other dimensions, and plenty of handwavium or similar, because FTL in the current four dimensional space we occupy means FTL is very difficult to outright impossible. Yet on the other hand you suggest a drive that has serious control issues that would allow FTL travel, with some serious questions raised on my understanding of relativity. In creation of the above idea I tried to be consistent and bring it back to real world, proven theories in physics, which I hope we can both agree is alot more effort than alot of people put in.
There is no real point in having a ship that can travel vast distances if you don't have any control of it. On top of that the liking of it to the Star Trek warp has made more sceptical of the drive as a possible option. While I have little issue with some of the other factors, it is a case of doing research I need to focus in on my uni work.
Thinking about the drive for a moment, it might as well be the Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers, from some of the logical issues I can see reading some of the articles attached to Wikipedia article.
By chance are you familiar with Event Horizon, as I have seen that explaination of a wormhole there.
I don't see the issue with having travel through a different media, in this case there is a space apart from the one we know. We have air and water, and the same pressure force travels very differently through both, so applying that on a larger scale I can't see any issues. Look at old trading routes, they worked on ocean currents, ocean highways if you will, so again why can't they exist in other media?
Look, being honest Leogarg, it looks to me like you want the cake and to eat it as well. You can't have both in this case, as if you apply any form of relativity to it, you need wormholes, other dimensions, and plenty of handwavium or similar, because FTL in the current four dimensional space we occupy means FTL is very difficult to outright impossible. Yet on the other hand you suggest a drive that has serious control issues that would allow FTL travel, with some serious questions raised on my understanding of relativity. In creation of the above idea I tried to be consistent and bring it back to real world, proven theories in physics, which I hope we can both agree is alot more effort than alot of people put in.
Heard of tacking against the wind? I can't see how that forces such as gravity would not have an effect in a denser medium. This is not just normal space, it's a different type of space. I am LIKING its behaviour to an ocean because it is the most effective way to convey the idea to a wide audience. If you don't know the details about how sound works in water, it's hard to visualise exactly what this is like when thinking about it on an astrological scale.
In some forms this is another version of the hyperspace in Babylon 5, because it is a different space, with different rules. It is so happens, that again, I am using an analagy to explain it, and using sound in water versus sound in air, or ocean currents because that is something that is easier to understand than me drawing up a whole frecking manifesto on a fictional world that explains exactly how it works.
At no point does this run into the massive and self-destructive issues that your idea has. It is controllable to a degree, it is something that keeps to the rules of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, though I will be honest and did use a touch of String Theory. At no points do the vessels break the speed of light, they are working in a medium that allows objects within to travel faster than they could in normal space. It just so happens that in this denser version of space that other forces of the universe, ie gravity, are transmitted differently to what they are in normal space. If we can have flows of water or ocean currents, why can't there, on a much larger scale be gravity currents?
Tell me, how many other concepts of hyperspace/FTL even mention the fact the forces would be transmitted differently? The only one I could think of at the moment is Star Wars, for the Kessel Run, because the last thing they wanted to do was run into a black hole or sun. Prove me wrong, and yes, that is a challenge.
If you want to put my idea in those words, then yours is a prayer engine, because there is nothing you can do to control it. That is such a serious issue to the idea I can not take it seriously. You don't say that you can have the cake and eat it, have both at the same time in some form of the quantum entanglement, and then say 'but... you can't control it, or get out of it once you're in it, and.... yeah, can't steer it either, actually it might rip your ship apart if you do anything other than let it keep on going.'
I will say this very simply, ships using this appear to travel faster than light, because they have less distance to travel. In this case, the boat is a hell of a lot faster, because it can use roads that would rip apart cars. Some of the time they will need to tack against the wind, other times they will have a much easier route. Or better yet, think of it as the wormhole being it's own dimension, and that through the drive technology you can access it.
To familiarise yourself with the principle, see attached web link. http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae438.cfm
Question: Superman.
I'm not even talking his powers, or how they're fueled. I'm talking his origin. It never occurred to me, but he was sent to earth (well, "away") as an infant. Krypton is obviously not in our solar system. Possibly not even within our galaxy, I don't know, but it's definitely interstellar travel. Completely controlled by a computer. With an infant on board. Who was still an infant when he arrived.
I don't exactly follow comics, so I don't know how much has been explained, but I'm seeing a 1 or 2. Maybe 3.
Gizensha: I don't believe you're wrong, but I would emphasize that relativity means that "the faster you travel" is not really a well-defined phrase in the way your phrasing suggests — "relativity" literally means "you can recalculate everything as if you were standing perfectly still, and there will be no difference in your ultimate results." I would guess the folks editing The Other Wiki are a bit more informed; the case in question is rather well-known.
A quick note: the presence of two quotes at the top of this page was not a redundancy or an error — these two quotes were chosen to illustrate the two extremes of the sliding scale.
About the quote: I really don't think the James Nicoll is as good as the pair it replaced. It's pretty much exactly the same as the time travel example - a stylistic criterion - while the Clement/Absurd Notions pair contrasts methodologies.
- In really hard SF: "It doesn't. Time travel is impossible." *"
according to current models time travel is possible.
Okay, Avatar is turning into a bit of an Edit War, so I'm going to wait for some replies here before I do anything, but even as it's written, it doesn't seem to belong under "the only difference is the presence of FTL Travel," (emphasis thus) since other problems are called out in the long paragraph, an obvious Edit War battleground. Honestly, it's not meant to be hard. This is "the film [Cameron] wanted to make when [he] was fourteen," and consequently runs off Rule Of Cool. The current paragraph is where it is (having been at the hard end of the lowest category, I think) because of a fan adding the following objections (which a more responsible editor quite sensibly incorporated where appropriate and removed, but only moving it as far as "no FTL" due to the admission that there was FTL):
- Read the manual and you will find out that:
- 1) The venture Star although being 1 km long has a payload of just 300 tons and that's way...
- 2) NO MINING EQUIPMENT WAS CARRIED FROM EARTH. It was all constructed on site the only things carried on the Venture Star's (there are 4 of them) are people and electronics, outbound, and Unobtanium, mediciene and some Na'vi art, inbound. And it's by no means cheap.
- 3) The Na'vi don't have DNA, Pandora life uses some other molecule to store genetic inforamation, it took 20 or so years to manage to mix human DNA and whatever the Na'vi use.
- 4) FTL communication is based on the observed phenomenon of quantum entanglement. But it's not casual, because of the low bandwidth it has priorities assigned to each message, that's way it takes Quaritch 3 months to set up Jake's surgery. Bulk of communication is light speed via laser.
- 5) For all this reasons the Avatat entry is moved to No FTL.
- Read the manual
Do we really need to list video games — and I mean arcade-like, platfrom-jumpy, shoot-them-up games that run on Acceptable Breaks From Reality? I mean, you could make the MST 3 K Mantra section about a million examples long if you included every published computer game that fit there. I think we can take it for granted that most games that involve you double-jumping around platforms blasting bad dudes and collecting stars/crystals/whatever will fit there. Right now we have a Mario game, a Ratchet and Clank game, and, latest, a Metroid game on this list. The latter is placed as being harder than Star Trek, even though it includes points like "enemies die and turn into health and ammo pickups."
I mean, I understand something like Mass Effect, or other games that do make a stab at realism or at least full-blown Space Opera, but do we really need to be told that Super Mario Galaxy isn't particularly hard sci fi?
Maybe make a general note under MST 3 K Mantra: "Most arcade and platform games with a sci-fi theme fit here." Or some such. Exceptions would be more interesting anyway.
Restoring this from the Archives... There doesn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for it, so I don't believe this change will ever actually be made, but I'm gonna throw this out here anyway just out of curiosity as to what other people think.
Basically, I think the current way of ranking this scale is counter-intuitive and includes more categories than is necessary. Do we really need eight or nine categories to tell us how squishy-soft a sci-fi work is? I personally think not, especially considering that these extra categories tend to just confuse things, without really making the distinctions between hard and soft sci-fi any clearer.
In some cases, the categories seem primarily concerned with whether specific types of Applied Phlebotinum are or are not featured in a story, which I think is not at all the best way to sort sci-fi hardness. To see what I mean, look no further than the FTL / No FTL categories. The "No FTL" description even says that the stories there may actually be somewhat softer on the whole than stories in FTL, except for that one single Einsteinian distinction. So, does it really make sense to rank stories by whether they include FTL or not? What if you're comparing a story that includes FTL, but takes a lot of time to justify how it works, and has no other super-science at all, to another work where we only have extremely fast interplanetary travel in tiny spaceships, but with no justification at all as to how this works, and also things like artificial gravity, etc.?
Or, take a look at the Minovsky Particle category. This category doesn't make sense at all. It's supposed to be, according to its description, a category for works with one single, really well-defined deviation from real-life physics, and completely internally consistent fictional physics, and completely hard science in every other way. In practice, however, this category is just used as a place to cram everything a little harder than Imported Alien Phlebotinum and a little softer than FTL, whether it involves one justified break from physics, or a dozen barely-consistent ones. Heck, if you take its description alone, this category should really be lower than FTL, since FTL just by itself would be a break from physics, and it's not always all that well-explored and internally-consistent, and usually comes bundled with other soft stuff as well. And yet, Minovsky Particle is somehow softer than FTL, and full of works that don't match its description at all.
And the last two categories (if not the last three)? Could be merged into one without losing anything at all. The only difference seems to be the presence of space travel. Again, being obsessed with the exact technology involved just confuses the matter. I mean, G.I. Joe is harder than 2001: A Space Odyssey? Just because the latter has space travel? Come on, now.
So basically, the list as it currently exists includes way more categories than needed, the descriptions of these categories are unclear and don't always fit the works in them, and the order of how hard and soft works really are doesn't always fit the order of the categories whose description they fit, because too much attention is paid to things like "FTL" and "Space Travel", rather than the over-all, big-picture hardness or softness of a work.
I think things would be better if we created categories reflecting how much research the author has done, how much attention they pay to internal consistency, and other inherent properties of the work itself, rather than exactly which forms of Applied Phlebotinum are involved. This would be much more useful since our concern at Tv Tropes is really about the nature of works of fiction, rather than how realistic or unrealistic FTL travel and the like might be given real-world physics. This would also allow us to cut down on the number of categories, generally making things clearer. There would also no longer be confusion as to which category should really be harder or softer than which.
So, I propose a scale with the following Four Categories:
1: Rule Of Cool : The author is completely unconcerned with realism or internal consistency. New super-science and Applied Phlebotinum is tossed in whenever the plot demands it. Bellisario's Maxim and the MST 3 K Mantra are in full effect.
2: Magic A Is Magic A : Rule Of Cool still trumps Real Life physics, but now the author is putting some effort into keeping their fictional science and Applied Phlebotinum internally consistent. Technology will do impossible things, but it will do the same impossible things in the same way, and with the same limitations each time, and characters will be aware of, and will need to work within, these limits. The laws of physics are still broken all the time, but the laws of logic are at least mostly respected (though the full logical implications of the Applied Phlebotinum will not always be considered).
3: Minovsky Particle : The rules of physics are broken, but only in limited ways, and only with at least some justification. Technology that is, as far as we know, completely impossible will still appear, but the author will go out of their way to justify its existence, and explore the implications of the fictional science behind it. They will also stick to reality whenever they can, and will generally make the setting seem as realistic as possible.
4: Hard Science Fiction : The rules of physics are not broken. Any Applied Phlebotinum that makes an appearance is carefully extrapolated from existing technology, and never, ever does things that current science tells us should be impossible. The realism of the story is part of its appeal.
So, in category 1., the writer will say: "The Hero using Transporters And Teleporters to get to the other side of the Galaxy in an instant? That's cool and convenient! I'll throw that in!" In 2., the writer will say: "Transporters And Teleporters are cool... But I established in a previous chapter that they have limited range; The Hero can't use them to get to the other side of the Galaxy in an instant, no matter how convenient that would be for the plot." In 3., the writer will say: "Transporters And Teleporters are cool... but unrealistic. I'll put them in, but I'll spend some time explaining how they work, and why they're possible when they seem to contradict present-day science. And since I'm putting them in, I'll try to cut back on other Applied Phlebotinum, because I want to stay at least a little realistic." And in 4. the writer will say, "Transporters And Teleporters are cool... but impossible. They have no place in my story at all, no matter what."
As an example, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy would be in category 1.; most (but not all) Star Trek series would be in 2.; Banks' Culture novels would be in 3. (though perhaps on the softer end); and the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would be in 4 (though the book version would be on the hard end of 3).
And there you go. Four categories are all you need. You don't need eight or nine categories with confusing definitions. You don't need to analyse all the fictional science in the story and see how realistic it is compared to real-life physics. All you need to care about is the author's intent, the effort they've put in (edit: meaning, the effort put into keeping it realistic / internally consistent / doing the research; I don't mean to imply soft sci-fi requires less effort), and the overall feel of the work. And you get a much more intuitive, much less confusing, and much more logical scale as a result.
I wonder if we could make a second Sliding Scale page - Rockwell Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness, perhaps.
Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness, perhaps.
I don't know how to put it to a vote - that would be the usual way.
Incidentally, I just remembered a bit in "The Closely Reasoned Technological Story": The Critical History of Hard Science Fiction:
:
This principle, then, comes first: hard SF is committed to avoiding scientific errors in stories. There are four ways to achieve this: two are noted in "Whirligig World" but are sanctioned only as minor elements in the kind of SF writing he espouses. A third—implicit in some stories by Clement and others later identified as hard SF writers—and a fourth—the subject of Clement's article—lead to the two forms commonly identified as hard SF.
The first way to avoid scientific errors is simply to employ jargon, impressive-sounding doubletalk that acknowledges the seeming implausibility of some device without trying to explain it—what Clement later called the "gobbledygook subclass" of SF (#6 51). In Clement's case, facing the problem of Mesklin's enormous gravity, he says, "Any science fiction author can get around that, of course. Simply invent a gravity screen. No one will mind little details like violation of the law of conservation of energy, or the difference of potential across the screen which will prevent the exchange of anything more concrete than visual signals.... No one but Astounding [sic] readers, that is; and there is my own conscience" (#13 106-107). Clement concedes the method has "obvious advantages"—"the scope of [a writer's] story is not constrained by mere facts; and a vocabulary can serve in place of scientific knowledge" (#6 42).
Clement offers three reasons for avoiding this approach, each involving different SF readers. In "Whirligig World," the problems is that terminology alone will not satisfy knowledgeable readers, who want more scientific substance in what they read. Twenty years later, Clement is more concerned about people who do not regularly read SF: gobbledygook "furnishes ammunition to intellectual snobs who can't admit that science fiction is a legitimate branch of the storyteller's art." The major reason seems to involve only one reader—the writer—as indicated by Clement's reference to his "conscience": the author of hard SF regards the use of obfuscatory jargon as a type of cheating, not doing the work of SF; it does not provide what he later called the necessary "discipline" of the hard SF game (#6 42, 45).
The second way to avoid scientific errors is to speculate in areas where there is little scientific data. Writing Mission of Gravity in 1953, Clement said, "I don't have to describe the life processes [of Mesklinites] in rigorous detail. Anyone who wants me to will have to wait until someone can do the same with our own life form" (#13 113).6 Still, while Clement would venture into vague or questionable science as a small part of his writing, he did not wish to focus a story in such areas: "There may be an afterlife. Telepathy and other psionic manifestations may be real and may some day come under orderly human control. There may be flaws in the laws of thermodynamics, even the first one. It is fun to read stories about such possibilities, but I seem to lack what it takes to write them" (#12 374). Writing about matters where one cannot make scientific errors, like inventing terms to cover scientific uncertainties, presumably does not involve much of a challenge.
The third way to avoid scientific errors is to play it safe: set the story in the near future and feature scientific advances that are either already planned or plausible in light of current scientific and technological knowledge. Such stories, which usually occur in outer space, have always been accepted as hard SF: one of the first works ever associated with the term was A Fall of Moondust, and all writers later identified with hard SF have sometimes written in this vein: Clement, "Fireproof" Clarke, Islands in the Sky; Anderson, "Sunjammer"; and Niven, "The Coldest Place." One could call this microcosmic hard SF—involving small steps into the future to predict small advances; in his own classification of two types of hard SF, writer David Brin calls it "engineering SF" (#30 9). Such works are rarely offered as noteworthy examples of hard SF, and few would argue for the superiority of those works over Mission of Gravity, Rendezvous with Rama, Tau Zero, or Ringworld. Still, since persons known as hard SF writers produce these works, and since these works have been called hard SF, they must be considered part of the subgenre.
The fourth way to avoid scientific errors is to deliberately create the most spectacular and implausible environment or development possible while adhering to all known scientific facts. I call this "world-building" macrocosmic hard SF—involving large leaps into the future to envision large advances and new worlds: Brin's term for it is "scientific SF" (#30 9). This seems the most interesting form and can produce impressive results, like Mesklin and Ringworld. In terms of Clement's game, though, it is a high-risk strategy; in Niven's case, knowledgeable readers noted that a structure like Ringworld could not maintain its position, which required Niven to awkwardly add stabilizing rockets in a sequel, Ringworld Engineers. "Whirligig World" is the first description of the process: writers accumulate and absorb all available scientific information—in this case, information regarding the unseen companion to 61 Cygni—and based on that data carefully develop a detailed picture of the imagined environment, using equations when possible or informed guesswork. Clement says "Whirligig World" is not a "text" on how to create such worlds, "since if the subject is teachable I'd be creating competition and if it isn't I'd be wasting time" (#13 102), but texts later appeared: Anderson's "The Creation of Imaginary Worlds: The World Builder's Handbook and Pocket Companion" and Clement's "The Creation of Imaginary Beings" (both in #7).
3 and 4 are reversed relative to the scale girlyboy proposed, but otherwise the similarities are striking.
Proposal: Bump "FTL Travel" to 4, and add as the new 3 "Time Travel". They're fundamentally connected, but it's possible to have an FTL story in which Time Travel is impossible, so the order is thus.
Thanks, boldingd!
Worth adding also is that the idea of relativity goes all the way back to 1632: Galileo Galilei argued in Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems that experiments carried out belowdecks on a ship at rest and a ship moving at constant speed should produce the same result. He then argued that the same could be said of an Earth moving around the Sun, a claim which led to some disagreement with the Church.
. He then argued that the same could be said of an Earth moving around the Sun, a claim which led to some disagreement with the Church.