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Can't wait to read China Miéville's first foray into hard space opera? Neither can we. So we're thrilled that the first chapter is already available for free online, at Pan MacMillan UK's site. More »
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Alastair Reynolds has a PhD in astronomy and has a background in space science — but the Terminal World author doesn't like to use the term "hard science fiction" to describe his work. Talking to Locus Magazine, he explains: More »
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Is Lois McMaster Bujold really a hard science-fiction author? Her work doesn't appear, at first glance, to revolve around scientific concepts. But, suggests one blogger, that's just because she's rather more subtle about writing about hard science than some authors. More »
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If cleanliness is next to godliness, then I can't help but think God must like 1980's Hugo-winning novel, The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke — even if it's all about getting in His face. More »
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James P. Hogan, author of Inherit The Stars and 30 other hard science fiction novels, passed away yesterday. He talked in a 2004 interview about how 2001: A Space Odyssey made him a science fiction author... because it frustrated him. More »
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Pyr's Lou Anders breaks it down for you in an awesome new interview over at Redstone Science Fiction. Will "sword and planet" novels make a comeback? Why is steampunk eating hard SF's lunch? What's science fiction's answer to Harry Potter? More »
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In science fiction, people often confuse narrative realism with "hard," or scientifically-accurate, storytelling. But in fact, hard science fiction is one of the most unrealistic subgenres of SF. More »
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Is science fiction keeping ordinary people from understanding real science? Many science writers seem to think so. Science blogging conference Science09 decided to survey science bloggers about their feelings on science fiction, and the results were surprisingly negative. At the very least, science experts don't seem to think scifi is promoting scientific literacy — and it may actually be making people more clueless, rather than less. More »
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Click to viewWhy do so many books labeled "hard science fiction" actually contain technology that works pretty much like magic in a fantasy novel? Hard science fiction is supposed to be the branch of SF that's rigorously scientific, and doesn't gloss over difficult problems like faster-than-light travel. Larry Niven's Ringworld series, with its long passages on how you'd engineer a giant space structure, is often held up as a prime example of hard SF that works. And yet most lists of hard SF include authors like Frank Herbert, whose Dune series about giant worms who create a substance that allows people to "fold space" with their minds is many things — but not so much based in science. At the same time, hard SF is often defined very narrowly, not including cutting-edge sciences like biology or nanotech. It's as if most definitions of hard SF were written back in the 1950s and not rethought much since. That's why we've got a list of ten books that we think are redefining hard SF for the twenty-first century. More »
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I've always thought the term "hard science fiction" referred to stories or novels where the science was important to the story, and which strove for absolute scientific and technical accuracy. But now it turns out I was wrong, and actually "hard SF" refers to stories about personal growth, along the lines of the Hero's Journey. At least that's what John Clute claims in his introduction to a new reissue of a 1974 Christopher Priest novel, The Inverted World. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=387690&view=rss&microfeed=true Mike Brotherton, author of the novel Spider Star released last month from Tor, proudly calls himself a hard science fiction writer. And now he's sharing the secret of his hardness with you. Brotherton just posted a really interesting, provocative list of general-audience books about space and astrobiology that he consults before writing anything. He lists everything from the well-regarded astrobiology book Life Everywhere, to the lesser-known classic Sex in Space. If you're interested in the real science behind aliens and space travel, you'll want to check out Brotherton's bookshelf. [Mike Brotherton via Biology in Science Fiction] More »
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