However I don’t think hard sci-fi has ever been strictly limited to known physics. It just requires consistency with it.
Greg Egan is one of the OGs of hard sci-fi, and a lot of his work is borderline psychedelic in how far he takes speculative-yet-consistent physics.
There are plenty of physically consistent “FTL” mechanisms in the family of “bend spacetime” that don’t violate c and have not been disproven.
That's not quite right. There are FTL ships in the Hainish books, but they carry no passengers because living things cannot survive FTL travel.
Take her Earthsea series (which was very loosely adapted as a Studio Ghibli movie). It's much slower paced than modern fantasy. Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here), and it almost reads more like an extended fairy tale.
But when you start reading it you can see how it influenced so much modern stuff (eg. she was telling stories about going off to wizard school decades before Harry Potter existed) and both the story and the writing itself are both so well crafted that (in many ways) no one who's come after has managed to surpass it.
If you like either sci-fi or fantasy, do yourself a favor and read some of the amazing writing this titan of an author created.
The hard/soft axis is fuzzy. The extreme of hard is "known physics only" and generally modest technical leaps or changes (e.g. solarpunk imagines known physics but a very different technical vocabulary for how it's used).
The extreme of soft becomes fantasy with sci-fi veneer, like Star Wars.
Fiction is art. It's all valid. It just depends on the style you're going for and what kind of story you're trying to tell.
I like hard SF because I'm an engineer, but I also think there's not a lot of well written hard SF in terms of prose style and character development. I wish there was more.
Interesting, I always thought that the modern interpretation is that hard sci-fi is "rooted in science" or close to it. The ansible (i.e. FTL communication) is, to our current knowledge, not possible. But it is such a useful plot device that it could be viewed as "close enough".
I understand the opposite of hard sci-fi to be the hand wavy "magic" stuff like photon torpedoes, teleportation, phasers, hyperspace, and so on.
daishi55•40m ago
Sounded pretty reasonable to me anyway.
Jtsummers•38m ago
It's the original title, she labeled it a rant herself.
EDIT: The person I replied to has significantly edited their comment since my original reply so my comment now appears as a non sequitur. This is why I quote people, or wait a couple hours to reply once I know they're the sort to do this kind of thing.
daishi55•16m ago
trescenzi•30m ago