I've been giving this a little thought lately:

Can "Hard SF" truly accept "physics breaking" elements?  

Wormholes, hyperspace, dimensional travel, most "energy weapons," "gravitic drive systems," and many other common, sci-fi (SF) elements tend to break (or severely bend) what we know of physics.

Is it truly acceptable to the lover of Hard SF to include these elements, or do they represent an element of "fantasy" slipping in for convenience?

Quote from: VellorianI've been giving this a little thought lately:

Can "Hard SF" truly accept "physics breaking" elements?  

Wormholes, hyperspace, dimensional travel, most "energy weapons," "gravitic drive systems," and many other common, sci-fi (SF) elements tend to break (or severely bend) what we know of physics.

Is it truly acceptable to the lover of Hard SF to include these elements, or do they represent an element of "fantasy" slipping in for convenience?

Yes, SF can have those elements in it and still be Hard SF.

IMO, bending the laws of physics (sometimes breaking them) is what makes Sci-Fi what it is. Without the bending the laws we really are just talking about our own mundane world, which isn't nearly as entertaining to read.

There are those out there that kick anything out the Hard SF list that isn't complete scientificaly correct. For me that makes for a boring story.

Tech in Hard SF should have some basis in science, even if it bends a rule or three.

Good question.  Perhaps it would depend on the plausibility of the matter.  For example, wormholes (which, unless I'm wrong, has yet to be fit into relativity theory) might seem a lot less plausible to the modern science set than, say, basic energy weaponry, and both of those might be percieved on different levels of possibility, say from the Oort Cloud or Nemesis--stuff we theorize about, but do yet have any absolute evidence for.  A lot of Hard SciFi seems to pick up on the "new hotness" of the day, whatever pet theory or projected next step of human development is, so at the very least, you could say the unproven is admissible.  I think having at least one foot planted on plausible or science or theory would be a good rule of thumb.

A friend of mine back east has a "break one rule rule," which states that SF can include one blatant fantasy-science element and he'll still be comfortable calling it hard SF providing everything else is Kosher. He's your basic white-guy tech-head who does complex electronicky things for a living, but despite that he's goodhearted underneath.

My own observation is that hard SF is rigorous about the hard sciences but often amusingly unencumbered by plausibility when it comes to human motive and behavior ...

I think its a matter of degrees. The more effort (and success in those efforts...) that a work of fiction, setting, etc., expends in making its fabrications seem plausible, the harder it is. Hard is a relative term.

I considered Traveller hard when it came out, because it followed some rather simple principles that other SF games that came out for years after its induction ignored... like newtonian motion, realistic travel time, attention to details like stellar types etc. But some errors crept through that, now that I am aware of them (frex, no Traveller world with a size of 4- should have an atmosphere over 1) gall me. I still consider Traveller hard SF, the intent was there.

I think that the "hard line" on what is SF started to perturb these labels. Anti-fans of Star Trek and Star Wars started to create definitions of SF that would label these shows, fairly or not, as something other than SF. Unfortunately, this sort of thinking has crept into modern net fandom conversations.

I consider things to be hard SF if they display a fairly competant effort to explain their fabrications. As examples:

• Reactionless drives are usually considered the gooiest of SF, but space operatic SF games use them routinely. I would call these SF normally. But if you used the explanation similar to the one Robert Forward gave in his book Indistinguishable from Magic, I'd gladly let it slide. I would be more grumpy about such a classification if I have to retcon it in myself.
  
• I recently started reading Helios Rising for dawning star. It describes life in the inner system worlds with casual ease, not explaining how they cool immense cavernous habitats and orbital stations, apparently under the presumption that an underground habitat would be safe from the blistering heat. Even a little effort on explaining how actual cooling was acheived, such as mirror like surfaces on the space station, would have gone a long way in me beleiving it.
  

Quote from: S. John RossA friend of mine back east has a "break one rule rule," which states that SF can include one blatant fantasy-science element and he'll still be comfortable calling it hard SF providing everything else is Kosher.

I believe that rules was first noted by Ben Bova in his book "How to write Science Fiction", but I'm willing to be corrected

Quote from: Hastur T. FannonI believe that rules was first noted by Ben Bova in his book "How to write Science Fiction", but I'm willing to be corrected

I seem to remember an editor of some SF short story rag chiding one of the writers to "limit it to one patent implausibility per story." It could have been Bova, as he's done some editing.

Acceptability is in the eyes of the beholder. Some fans have a rather rigid, tightly drawn line which is very exclusionary. Other fans are more flexible. Still others have a rigid line which circunscribes a larger area.

The median or generally held definition has tightened considerably over time. The old definition of "Hard SF" was inclusive - Anything which cared about the science and took pains to be as accurate as possible given the necessities of the plot. Now it is exclusionary - Nothing which violates any commonly held assumptions about physics as we currently understand it. Many people who are not conversant with current SF critical thinking do not know this or refuse to accept it, which is fine, since they are not writing SF criticism.

All this does make it hard to communicate, though. Traveller was once thought Hard, now it's considered Space Opera. Some people balk at that, others can't believe it was ever any different - and it has a lot to with the age of the beholder. Now, Transhuman Space is considered Hard, but after that, things get messy. In my opinion, there is a vast spectrum of SF Hardness, and it would be best to reflect that rather than using a single unqualified adjective.

-mice

Quote from: VellorianI've been giving this a little thought lately:

Can "Hard SF" truly accept "physics breaking" elements?  

Wormholes, hyperspace, dimensional travel, most "energy weapons," "gravitic drive systems," and many other common, sci-fi (SF) elements tend to break (or severely bend) what we know of physics.

Quatum physics tends to severely bend what Newton knew of physics, in fact it bent what we knew of physics well into last century. Theoretical physics is on the borderlands of SF. I tend myself to think of the "Fiction" in SF as a qualifier for the "Science".  If it reads any less speculative than a pop book by Stephen Hawkins than as far as I'm concerned it isn't Hard SF because it isn't even SF.

IMO "Hard" is really just more of a description about how plausible/probable the reader feels it is. With the mixture of objective and subjective opinion that that implies. Now the border between SF and Fantasy for me really comes down to how the author tries to explain it. Which is why, for example, the whole of the Cthulthu Mythos exists in fantasy and SF. Because different stories come at the same thing from different angles.

EDIT It is also why I happen to think that Shadowrun flirts with not being Fantasy at all. Because there are implied hints that it's magic is really just very poorly understood aspects to physical law. Look at the strictures that it places on what magic can and cannot do.

Quote from: blakkieBecause different stories come at the same thing from different angles.

Insert your own "Non-Euclidean" joke here

I've been toying with ideas on creating a space campaign that takes a drastically different view of physical law.  Pretty much completely discounting all of Relativity and the "gravitational" view of the universe in favor of the "electromagnetic" view of the universe.

Has anyone looked at THIS?

Or THIS

In a nutshell, these are electrical engineers who claim they can better predict what the universe is doing, what it looks like and how it behaves using electromagnetic principles, with the claim that "gravity is too weak of a mechanic to explain the behavior of the universe" (paraphrase).

At this point, is it still "Hard SF," while using different physical laws?

I think so, as a lot of what we thought we knew about the universe turns out to be wrong or incomplete. For instance, no one has yet unified gravity, electromagneticism, strong atomic force and weak atomic force, so we don't know some major issues about how the universe works.

Therefore it's possible a future model of physics might be more complete and allow things we'd call 'impossible' today.

As to wormholes, in physics they're called "Einstein Rosen bridges" and supposedly do exist at at least the quantum level, so they're not impossible.

earlier this year scientists created "artificial gravity' for the first time using a snipping superconductor, the effect was incredibly weak, less than a millionth of earth's gravity, but it was also 10^20 times more powerful than current physics had predicted.

There's a lot we don't know about physics, so as we find out more we may find that things we think of as impossible are in fact not.

Quote from: flyingmiceTraveller was once thought Hard, now it's considered Space Opera. Some people balk at that, others can't believe it was ever any different - and it has a lot to with the age of the beholder.

As I read what you wrote, I was thinking back to my gaming experience and I think there's also a factor of how the GM/gaming group interpret the setting.

I've played Traveller with a GM who was so "hard science" that we had to spend several hours working out the details of entering the atmosphere of the planet we were visiting.

A few months later, I played Traveller with a different GM who said, "Okay, you land on the planet..."

Another game that is often accused of being "too military" is Twilight: 2000.  I've had many different experiences with it, but the two extremes that come to mind are the time I played it with a former Navy Seal GM in an extremely rigid manner versus the time we played where the character with the greatest combat experience was the Farmer who'd been in the reserves.

All this to say that I see your point and think it's extremely valid.  

Quote from: VellorianAnother game that is often accused of being "too military" is Twilight: 2000.  I've had many different experiences with it [...]

Yeah. I've had quite the rollercoaster relationship with T2K based on who I was gaming with at the time ... My own ideal version is the one summed up (I think) by the adcopy ... that bit about everything breaking down and you're own your own now. To me, that's an awesome setup for some believably-skilled PC-types to have a world of adventure around them. Cool for PC-level drama, too, since a lot of the PCs will very reasonably want to desperately cling to the structures they depended on. Good stuff to chew over while laying down a little rock and roll ...

I've played with groups who do it that way, and I've also played it with groups who make it like living a military drill ... No character drama, no you're-on-your-own ... Just a pure mission-based military exercise where the breakdown of the world is but a minor glitch in the fuel supply chain Just Recon, basically, but with a better (IMO) system.

But that's one of the things that rocks about it, I guess ... that it can be so many games to so many gamers.

On a design level, I live in fear of similar variety in Fly From Evil fandom when I at last free the game into the world ... I'm purely a pulp-melodrama hardboiled gamer, but I know there will be fans who will see it as a godsend for more serious, procedural-type crime-drama (and it does provide a lot of resources for that stuff, since I like to cherrypick) ... but I panic, because I know I'll have no idea what to say to those people ...

As a SF buff, I think overly slavish focusing on REAL physics is actually detrimental to a good story.  When I read a book set thousands of years in the future, with alien races running around (or merely leaving ruins) it doesn't make much sense for the technology to be pretty much stuck at 'today except in space'.  

So Hard it's passed Hard and gone back into it's own realm of Soft Sci-Fi, the 'progress stops at near current levels, and no one has yet ot overcome them' fantasy. Not much different that the SpellJammer level of space fiction really.