Nishant Kumar
Started the club
A standing argument with a book club attached. Bring your physics and bring your feelings. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
The label suggests rigour. In practice it usually means one system is worked out in loving detail while everything else — economics, politics, how humans behave — gets waved through.
A book with immaculate delta-v and cardboard people isn't rigorous. It's selectively rigorous, about the easy part.
Which "hard" SF is actually hard all the way through?
Editorial, defending hard SF.
The selective-rigour charge is true and beside the point. Hard SF isn't a claim to model everything accurately — it's a promise not to solve the plot with something impossible. It's a constraint on the ending, not a claim about the world.
A book where the crew survives because of orbital mechanics they worked out is doing something a book where they survive because of unexplained technology cannot.
Book Desk: which is why The Martian is the genre's best recent advertisement. Every problem is solved with something the reader was shown, and the pleasure is entirely in watching the constraint bind.
That's a much better definition than the usual one — hard SF as a promise about how problems may be solved, rather than a claim about accuracy.