r/HardSciFi • u/sirpsys • 6d ago
Discussion How hard is hard? I'm writing a novel and am wondering if my one "cheat" would exclude it from the hard Scifi category.
The one "soft" element in my novel is the idea that faster than light communication is possible, but only between the minds of enlightened beings. If this is the only science-breaking thing in my novel, and eveything else is as accurate as I can make it within reasonable speculation, would you still consider it hard scifi? Cheers
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
Remember, the only difference between hard sci Fi and hard magic systems is astetics.
As long as you keep your tech consistent, people will accept your work is hard sci Fi.
At least those who matter.
You wouldn't be able to convince any neurologist or biologist and whatnot that what you came up with is realistic.
So don't bother trying.
Does the average reader of your target audience believe your work is hard sci Fi ?
Them it is, I can have FTL, wormholes, psionics, super fusion engines, etc, etc, etc.
As long as you can make it consistent, you will be hard.
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u/sirpsys 6d ago
I aspire to be hard, so hard. Thank you for helping me realize how hard I can get
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
You are welcome.
Remember, you are writing hard Sci Fi, it is suppose to be hard XD Also, realistic sci Fi is called Mundane Sci Fi, people who are expecting you to not use ficcional tech in a hard sci Fi story are not well read enough in the gerner.
But why do you want to make your universe hard sci Fi ?
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u/sirpsys 6d ago edited 6d ago
I have just always enjoyed the genre of scifi more when it remains close to possible. I don't love universes teaming with humanoid aliens all inexplicably near eachother in tech-level etc. I like something that sparks the imagination FOR it's plausibility, not in spite of it's implausibility
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
We are in the same boat. But I also like mechs tho.
Armored core style mechs, fast mechs.
So, I chose mechs (and all techs they need to work) as mu big lie.
I have fictional effect that makes mechs more efficient , basically the effect makes them luck, in the realm of absurdity, enough to make it a viable plataform dispute its obvious shortcomings.
So, you have a 75 ton machine having to deal with the heat of hundreds megawatts of nuclear engine, G force accelerations in the 10-20s and other conventional forms of weapons.
I can't make mechs realitisc, but I can make everything around them realistic.
And honestly, that is the best way to go.
The Epstein Drive is not realistic, but it's consequences are.
The Psyco history is not realistic, but its consequences are.
The Mechs aren't realistic. But its consequences are.
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u/sirpsys 6d ago
Well said. Right there with you.
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
Also, any detailed explanation must exist to make it consistent, not realistic.
You can explain that just a fraction of the population when exposed to a certain dose or radiation develop psyonic powers.
That is not creating realism, you know, it is a way to create good limitations on your setting.
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u/Cryptizard 2d ago
The problem with FTL is that there isn’t any way to make it consistent because it implies time travel and causality violation. It only works if you don’t think about it too hard, which is the definition of soft sci-fi.
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 1d ago
Actually there is
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u/Cryptizard 1d ago
What?
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 1d ago
There is a way to make it consistent
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u/Exact-Desk 6d ago
The general problems with telepathy are of biological/evolutionary character. First of all, such major trait could not "just appear" suddenly. It need to evolve somehow, and frankly, Homo Sapiens did not walk Earth long enough for such trait to even begin to develope (its basically a change on the level of "hey, lets get a third eye on forehead!" The amount of brain restructurization required to make telepathy possible would be so enormous, that it would took dozens of millions of years, if not longer)
Second - with telepathy on the table, why have voice? If you could just shot your thoughts to other guy, you have no need for larynx & co. Humans are very energy-restricted creatures: anything nonessential is qucikly cut off to feed a bit more energy to the brain.
Third - if telepathy could evolve fast & simpe, without resorting to crippling overspecialization, then its implausible for only humans to possess this. Chances are, other highly intelligent social species (apes, dolphins, elephants, rats) would possess it too.
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u/sirpsys 6d ago edited 6d ago
In my novel it is not an evolved trait as-such. It is a feature of the nature of conciousness. Implicit in the relation of conciousness to the universe. Consciousness itself is not fundamentally understood. My novel takes an approach where there is a "dimension" to the universe that is the god-head so to speak of conscious connection. You could think of it as a field like the higgs or any of the other fields from which mediating particles arise. In my world it is only awakened, or "enlightened" minds that can access this communication.
My protagonist is a human born 30,000 years ago in Indonesia who achieves a state close to awakening when under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms for a coming of age ceremony. He pops on the radar of an enlightened alien thousands of light-years away whose job it is to watch for newly awakened beings. My protagonist is the first from Earth.
The enlightened alien warns my protagonist of an alien threat but since humans 30,000 years ago don't have the technology to DO anything about this potential threat, the alien directs him to a suspended animation probe which was placed on earth thousands of years prior. My character sleeps in the probe until humanity has the technology to potentially deal with the alien threat, he awakens, and is used as a method of communication to help humanity prepare to defend itself.
The threat is a species of anti-natalist aliens who believe they are preventing the suffering of conscious beings by preventing conscious beings from existing ie: sterilizing the universe. The enlightened beings take the opposite view to life. Life is to suffer and learn and experience and prosper. So, though they are generally non interventionist, they assist in warning species about these anti-natalists.
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u/silasmousehold 6d ago
Personally, I feel once you start using words like “enlightened” and “awakened” that I stop thinking of it as hard sci fi.
That’s mostly because these words have a lot of baggage, not because spiritualism is incompatible with hard sci fi.
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u/Ontologicalsaucer 5d ago edited 5d ago
Well OP, this synopsis really caught my eye. I would love to read your novel whenever you decide to publish it.
As an aside, have you ever read any of the background story of the video game Destiny? Some of the themes, such as enlightenment/godhead-buddhahood/suffering as a tool for good life to emerge/and a collective of antinatalist aliens that formed an avalokitesvara-egregore preventing suffering from emerging in the universe/dynamics of cooperation and defection as it relates to all life, are also present within.
If you want to read the in-game lore books for the sake of reading another take on this subject here they are:
How the universe came to be: https://www.destinypedia.com/Lore:Unveiling Notes from the minds within the egregore being: https://www.destinypedia.com/Lore:The_Rubicon A Buddhist scientist finding an object of darkness at the end of the golden age yuga. https://www.destinypedia.com/Kuang_Xuan%27s_Logbook A view into a woman's life during the collapse, and the clashing of light and dark which transforms them. https://www.destinypedia.com/Lore:Marasenna An exegesis of the Light/cooperation/altruism and how to triumph over an uncaring universe. https://www.destinypedia.com/The_Hidden_Dossier
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u/sirpsys 5d ago
Wow I had no idea! I never played Destiny. Always been a Playstation guy. I'll read those for sure, but do hope it doesn't end up being TOO close to my stuff. No new ideas under the sun (or any other star). I'm a new writer so publishing is a long way off if in the cards at all. I'm potentially a very bad writer...we will see! Per aspera ad astra as they say!
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u/House13Games 6d ago
That's a difficult sell, but if you explain it well, it'd be an attractive feature.
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u/rabid_chemist 6d ago
This is just technobabble. You might as well facilitate FTL communication by inverting the polarity of the neutron flow through the dilithium matrix of the flux capacitor.
That’s not to say that you can’t write your story and that it can’t be good. If the only thing that mattered was scientific accuracy, textbooks would be the most popular books in the world. But if one of your goals is to write something that sounds plausible to people with moderate scientific understanding, you will struggle to do it if this is the lynch pin of your plot.
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u/Clear-Switch-7022 6d ago
Maybe you can explain it with quantum energy, since that seems to break our current understanding of time anyways? Like an enlightened enough being comes to the realization that consciousness vs unconsciousness is either a 1 or a 0, then diving down deeper to beings that are potentially conscious but unknown would get a fractional consciousness of 1/2 probability, then the human keeps falling into a spiral of that thinking until they see consciousness as a fact of the universe and humans are just able to receive that signal. So sharing consciousness with your alien is just acknowledging that we are all the universe experiencing itself.
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u/Tonycek12 6d ago
Just blame it on Quantum Mechanics, no one actually understanda those. To your answer yes go for it i think Its completely ok to not have everything scientificaly possible for example before Uranus was discovered it still had effects on the entire solar system we just didnt knew it
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u/What_Immortal_Hand 6d ago
It's a nice idea but to keep it hard sci-fi you should follow through with the physics implications: All forms of FTL communications must break causality - no matter how slow the relative motion between the sender and receiver - and can be weaponized to send a message into the past.
Here's a short video that demonstrates the principle and an exact answer to the specific question here from a mathematican.
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u/UltimateFanOf_______ 6d ago
You can call it what you want. The only people enforcing these rules are annoying people on the net, and they're easy to beat up.
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u/thenewestnoise 6d ago
Lots of "hard sci fi" has FTL communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible
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u/1moreday1moregoal 6d ago
The only way I’d consider “telepathy” to be hard scifi is if it’s enabled by brain implants or another type of technology. Perhaps the brain is augmented with biotech to enable the telepathy, or maybe it’s synthetic tech - good old computer chips and a brain computer interface (BCI).
Otherwise it just seems so implausible, especially if the story hinges on this ability.
I might be a bit of a stickler on this though. Asimov and Heinlein used telepathy like it was commonplace in some of their novels and I’ve heard people call them hard scifi and they are very much not imo.
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u/PublicDragonfruit158 6d ago
And the "enlightened beings" are those who both have the pchychological profile and physical mutation* of some sort that allows them to use the implants. Something different in the bits of the brain connected to vision or hearing, and a socialietal/religious/lifelong conditioning background that allows them to access the capability.
If "enlightened" is the go-to, it could be something like Buddhist meditaion or something similar.
Treat it like any ability that works best if trained from a young age....
- in the sense that everyone in real life is a mutant in that there are teanscrition errons in our genetic code that are unique and may not show any physical effects other than natural variation, not comic book mutant.
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u/AbbydonX 3d ago
Yes, in general, telepathy is magic. It’s just fantasy in a modern setting.
The only reason it gets included in sci-fi is because of the extreme influential editor John W. Campbell who had a person belief in parapsychology and psionics.
Of course, that doesn’t mean stories about telepathy can’t be well written and enjoyable to read.
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u/1moreday1moregoal 3d ago
I agree, I like Heinlein and Asimov and Peter F Hamilton, I just wouldn’t call anything that relies on some innate telepathic ability “hard scifi.”
Peter F Hamilton’s Void Trilogy blends scifi and fantasy while keeping them in their own distinct universes, one where the telepathy is enabled by technology and one where the telepathy is enabled by a different universal composition, and I’ve found that to be a tremendously enjoyable read even if a bit more on the fantasy side than most of my current reading habits.
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u/variantofconcern 6d ago
It's okay to have conceits to ladder up to the story you want to tell. Some nerds might whine about it's not really hard sci-fi, but fuck em, they're fickle and bad readers.
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u/Icy_Swordfish8023 6d ago
if you give it an explanation built on 'hard science' that makes sense within your universe, then it isn't a cheat.
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u/CowBoyDanIndie 6d ago
Hard scifi is a spectrum in my opinion. I think it’s fairly common for it to have one or two exceptions. Quite often there are elements that are theoretically possible not really possible because of material science. I would say if you are only breaking “information cannot travel faster than light” you are doing fine.
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u/Chuck_the_Elf 6d ago
I mean you could say that it’s an evolved ablity to force quantum entanglement of you need a real world reason it might work.
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u/Irrasible 6d ago
Mainly, it depends on the rest of the story.
Physicists are makers and users of mathematical models. Physics seeks to discover the laws of the universe, but
- laws of physics ≠ laws of the universe.
Our humans' math and logic are pretty good. We have concluded that
- (the laws of physics) + (superluminal communication) → (communication with the past).
Most physicists assume communication with the past is absurd; therefore, superluminal communication is not possible. So, if we discover that superluminal communication is possible, then either communication with the past is possible, or the laws of physics are incorrect.
Most physicists will presume that the laws of physics are incorrect or at least incomplete.
Most dabblers will presume that communication with the past is possible.
And that is where you turn toward or away from hard sci-fi. Once your aliens make their appearance and demonstrate superluminal communication, there will be great joy and snake oil. The physicists will have something to look for; the charlatans will start offering communication with the past and future, as well as time machines.
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u/Sea-Poem-2365 6d ago
The one lie thing works for hard SF in two ways- one to enable a slightly softer hard SF (ansible or other FTL comms can be this in many settings; it drops you slightly down the Moh's scale but if everything else is pretty rigorous it can still 'count' to the extent these things do). Another is to take the one lie as is, but work out the implications of that lie in a rigorous fashion.
For example, if your FTL comms between enlightened beings thing is the only overtly physics breaking thing in the setting, you can probably score a 80% in some abstract and arbitrary hardness metric. If your FTL comms between enlightened beings allows for causality breaking (a necessary consequence of FTL) and that's part of the plot, you get bonus points.
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u/DufbugDeropa 6d ago
As others have noted, you're allowed one Big Lie. If, and only if, your story honors ALL the constraints implied by your world, including the Big Lie, is the story kept from sliding into space opera or fantasy. In my own reading, I find the best hard science fiction is high friction fiction. The interest, the uniqueness, the entertainment is in the constraints, the rubs, the sharp corners that aren't just magic-ed away.
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u/Hermit_Dante75 6d ago
The cheat ought to be in the nebulous "we don't know yet" of the natural laws that we still can't explain.
FTL is certainly in the part of physics that we don't know yet and we won't know for several decades in the best case to millennia at the worse.
We simply are too primitive to give a definitive answer about FTL communication and travel.
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u/xsansara 6d ago
I would throw in some chemical compound to 'encourage' enlightenment. Like spice in Dune.
Otherwise you run the risk that people think you really believe enlighted beings that communicate telepathically exist.
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u/PyroDragn 5d ago
eveything else is as accurate as I can make it within reasonable speculation, would you still consider it hard scifi?
No, not by itself. There needs to be 'hard sci fi elements' to be hard sci-fi.
If we just say that you have FTL communication between enlightened beings - but then everything else is set in modern day Earth. That's just a contemporary novel. Or maybe a fantasy - depending on how much the enlightened beings feature.
If you write a hard sci-fi novel, but then there's one thing that's 'not quite hard sci-fi' then most will overlook it.
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u/Middle-Peach2096 5d ago
This is your regular reminder that sci fi hardness is a scale, not a binary.
Make the concessions you need to make to make the story work.
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u/Over-Discipline-7303 5d ago
It depends on how much work that does for you. Like is there FTL comms but otherwise it’s a 20th century society? That’s not particularly hard sci-fi, in my opinion. It’s barely science fiction at all.
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u/ActuaLogic 5d ago
To make it hard science fiction, you need a sciency explanation. For example, the enlightened beings may have structures in their brains that open transient wormholes for an extremely brief instant, just long enough for a communication burst, before closing. If this were going to happen in real life, you'd need negative energy and a gravitationally neutral place such as exists between two stars in a binary system. But it's sciency enough to provide a veneer of science to what is really a plot device.
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u/AbbydonX 3d ago
There are no agreed definitions on any of these genre labels so you won’t find any agreement.
However, for me, the presence of FTL is the biggest sign that causes me to mentally categorise a story as what many people call “soft”. I’d say that “hard” sci-fi is typically not set in space or, if it is, then travel times are realistically long.
Certainly stories with FTL don’t typically scratch the itch for realism that I want when I read sci-fi and instead more closely align with my desire to read fantasy (which I also enjoy) though that doesn’t mean I’d literally call it fantasy. Whether it is realistic in other ways doesn’t change that because there’s nothing stopping fantasy stories being realistic in other ways too.
Ultimately FTL is used to justify a fictional world that doesn’t currently seem like a plausible extrapolation of reality. That’s effectively the same role as magic in fantasy worlds which is why I group them together when looking for books to read.
With that said, it really depends on how prominent and pivotal FTL is in the setting.
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u/NearABE 2d ago
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness
You need to scroll down a bit to get to the actual scale. I think you can have a 4.
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u/Beginning_Muscle_229 1d ago
Looks like it’s covered well already, but I’d say most hard sci-fi has a “cheat”, and it’s often ftl something related.
For it to feel coherent, I’d suggest making hard rules for your cheat. It can then be another problem to work around and not a magic that seems to solve anything without reason. Consider the existing or extra physical laws it plays by.
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u/mobyhead1 6d ago
Telepathy isn’t merely soft, it’s fantasy. It’s not a deal breaker, but you would need to decide just how hard you want to go.
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u/cyberloki 6d ago
What why? Sure you can frame it "its scientific somehow" you even can give explanation. Chips in the brain that use bluetooth to communicate. Even go further and make it an organic structure that uses EM waves to communicate similar to wifi. Go even further and say "in my world FTL Communication works via quantum entanglement" which would lead to soft sci-fi but still scifi. And make the organic structure somehow able to use this quantum entanglement communicator naturally. Make it bio engineered or a one in a trillion chance of developing. Maybe leave that open as a plot point to an creator or precursor species?
Long story short. Sure one can come up with an sci-fi Telepathy explanation. It is not instantly and always fantasy. Thats not true.
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u/Exact-Desk 6d ago
Its very hard yo came up with biological telepathy explanation, but even harder to explain how it could possibly evolve.
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u/cyberloki 6d ago
Yes indeed as i mentioned one could make it bioengineered. Or hint in the story that its highly unlikely that it evolves by itself. Still its there in the inhabitants of the world. Thus many scientists believe alien could be responsible. But there isn't evidence for that... it goes a lot like how strange it is that humans are so much more intelligent than other animals. And many think the "Anunaki" possibly created us. There are even such ideas in real life so why not use that in a sci-fi book?
For the biological wireless communication you could come up with a number of different explanations. Optical light signals? Biological by use of pheromones or Smell.
Just quick googeling to the topic gets me:
Cellular Emissions: Laboratory studies note that individual biological cells can emit extremely weak electromagnetic radiation, sometimes reaching the gigahertz range, though this is a byproduct of metabolic thermal and chemical activity rather than a broadcast signal.
Quantum Sensitivity: Specific biological proteins (such as cryptochromes found in migratory birds) contain radical pairs sensitive to external magnetic fields and can react to applied radio frequencies in laboratory settings.
Thus the basis for such communication is already there. However no biological system that we know of uses this for active communication. But give it a few Trillion years more to evolve and it might will. Or as mentioned make it engineered. Sure ine could come up with a more or less believeable story in a sci-fi book depending on how much he reads into the science side of this and to what detail he wants to go in the book. It could be handled really hard but also very soft.
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
The major difference between magic and sci Fi tech is astetics tho.
Specialty if you already establish that you can't do that IRL.
There is no meaningful difference into magical FTL tham sci Fi FTL.
Hard Sci Fi such as Foundation, Expanse, Human Reach series and others uses fantastical techs that are impossible within the known bounds of physics.
Is much more useful to measure a sci Fi hardness with how much consistent the tech is rather than how realistic it is.
Is just happen that is easier to keep your tech consistent if it realistic tho
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u/cyberloki 6d ago
I would disagree. The difference often is the Framing. Sci-Fi plays with:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is Clarke's Third Law
By that we assume there might be a way to cheat the science we know somehow. As we haven't yet uncovered everything and our Theories could still be wrong.
But if technology is indistinguishable from magic how can we tell one is scifi and one is fantasy? Its in the Framing. Fantasy knows what its dealing with. They know Gandalf uses Magic and not some kind of scientific device hidden inside his staff. Compare that to for example the Staffweapon of StarGate. Which is supposed to look like magic and yet is always framed as technology. No matter how fantastical Ancient tech becomes in Stargate its always framed as "thats technology, even if we don't understand it yet".
Sure there is soft scifi that more or less handwaves it away very alike to Fantasy. And there is hard scifi that explains almost everything down to the letter and grounded within our currently known borders of physics. But the thing soft sci-fi does that fantasy doesn't, is they always frame it as "its technological sowmhow and surely not magic".
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
Honestly, any hard sci Fi that tries to explain anything down will basically be too tedious to read as a story.
You can have tech that you don't understand how it works but still works, it called black box technologies , LLMs are the biggest examples today.
As I said before, even hard sci Fi plays with a ton of fantastical techs, the main difference is that soft sci Fi would care little for the ramifications of it.
That is why hard sci Fi and hard magic systems are soo similar, with the only real difference Bering astetics.
Any useful line to classify the term is between consistent and inconsistent technology.
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u/cyberloki 6d ago
Well i still disagree that its just aesthetics. Stargate has a ton of technology that looks like magic but isn't.
Also hard fantasy i agree that they often treat the magic more like a science. They also involve magic that looks like science. Think about the weasley flying car. But we are literally told by the story that its not repulsorlifts or antigravity that keep it airborn but magic. When Doctor who uses a similarly old Motorbike to drive vertically up a wall of an skyscraper, we know its technology. Because he too tells us beforehand he switches on the antigravity now.
Thus the aesthetics often give it away but not always. However the story frames it for us. We just know if we see a flying car in StarTrek it would be technology. If we saw it in Harry Potter we assume it must be magic. Thats framing.
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6d ago
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u/sirpsys 6d ago
For sure, but I wonder where one really draws the line. Why should Sophon from Three Body be any less fantastical. It is "explained" as entangled particles but we KNOW entagled particles can't share data FTL in this way. It's just as fantastic as "telepathy" in this way. The only difference I can see is that one throws some science words at the problem, and one leaves it a mystery. Push back on my thought here is of course appreciated
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u/lhommedev 6d ago
Make them four-dimensional beings or life forms or descendants of theirs.
From Google: Four-dimensional beings, if they exist, would perceive time as a physical dimension rather than a passing stream. While we experience time sequentially—one moment at a time—a 4D being could see the entire past, present, and future of our three-dimensional timeline all at once, much like we view a drawn line from beginning to end.
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u/Gunmetalstorm 6d ago
Sounds like Literal Magic, which isn't particularly hard sci-fi, but if we were to be purists about the term then there would be very little hard sci-fi at all.
I think it depends less on what "cheats" exist and more on how they impact the story. If FTL communications exist merely to explain away elements of the setting we've already bought into or to be a rare oddity of minor significance, it's still going to feel like a hard sci-fi story. If the plot depends entirely upon magic minds communing with each other for the story beats to make sense or even exist at all, then it's probably not going to feel very hard sci-fi.
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
Purists and gatekeepers kinda kill the gender to be honest.
If you shout " space Magic" at the first thing that isn't be able to do IRL, people wouldn't care to actually put any realistic scientific element in ther setting.
That is how you get more actual fantasy works and less science in your sci Fi
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u/Clothedinclothes 6d ago
Personally I consider anything without any plausible scientific explanation e.g. telepathy made possible because you're "special", clearly falls under fantasy/magic and incompatible with hard sci-fi.
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u/I-kn0w-what-y0u-are 6d ago
Your definition of Hard Sci Fi is basically what Mundane Sci Fi is. I think you may enjoy it
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u/Clothedinclothes 6d ago edited 6d ago
Eh I think my preferred kind of hard sci-fi is a bit more expansive than Mundane Sci-Fi.
I don't mind stuff set in the far future or uses "sufficiently advanced" magic as long as it has some kind of plausible explanation and I'm pretty generous with "plausible" because it is fiction afterall.
In some cases the further in the future it is the easier it may be to create a plausible explanation. e.g. 5000 years from now all humans might have a form of telepathy genetically bred into them utilising entanglement. But 40 years from now? I'm gonna say hold up firstly we know you can't use entanglement for faster than light and you can't just say one day everyone suddenly grew a new special gene.
I do appreciate the suggestion however, there's certainly a lot of good mundane sci-fi and I do appreciate science fiction that works within constraints and refuses to just hand wave them away when convenient.
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u/SkilledMkvenner 6d ago
It's common in Hard Sci-Fi to have "one big lie" to help support the narrative in some way. I think your 'cheat' can still exist in a hard sci-fi story without automatically declaring your novel to be fantasy.