Hard Science Fiction - What’s so hard about it?

I’ve been giving away the Kindle version of my book for free all week. I was really pleased that my book started making several of Amazon’s free Top 100 lists, and reached #4 on the Hard Science Fiction list. They have dozens of sub-genres just for sci-fi. Besides Hard Science Fiction the other two lists that I regularly showed up in the top 20 were, Science Fiction Action, and Dystopian Science Fiction. (As a total side note, there is a lot of romance/erotic fiction in almost all of the subgenres lists on Amazon and I find it somewhat childishly ironic that Hard Science Fiction was one of the categories that did not. (Yes, I’m immature.))

Sci-Fi Action seems pretty straightforward. Most people know what Dystopian fiction is. But a lot of people asked me what Hard Science Fiction was.

The traditionally accepted definition of Hard Science Fiction is that it’s a category of sci-fi characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. Now that “concern” can leave a lot of wiggle room. Some people like Andy Weir and Neal Stephenson, are very concerned. Some people find their books can be overwhelming with the amount of science fact in their science fiction. Other people like William Gibson, while concerned with the accuracy of their science, are more concerned with the possibilities of what science could do, not what it can do. By that I mean when William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his book Burning Chrome, and imagined a digital alternate reality well before Facebook rebranded as Meta, he wasn’t concerned with how that would happen exactly. Contract that with Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, where humanity has to escape to space for a few thousand years, by the time you finish reading that you feel like you could build and pilot a spacecraft.

In both cases, I think it’s the possibilities of science and the logic that need to make sense and the fidelity of the science fact is negotiable.

I personally fall more into the William Gibson camp in my own writing.