Hard SF

Jeff Wilson · 29 Nov 2012, 19:26 · from 2012-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:26:30 -0600
Subject: (urth) Hard SF
In-Reply-To: <CAOVrOBcpCAQ67_LyQwET2xtGZrujwhH-mLMzECAk8fe4TvEurA at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAM3O41K34n2F4itYHWAAHmecfePpy_d3hqEQ-iDFEUzkgNBcLg at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAOVrOBcpCAQ67_LyQwET2xtGZrujwhH-mLMzECAk8fe4TvEurA at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3ed2fa6ad32b33dced02d149e3802281.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>

On Thu, November 29, 2012 10:36, nate jarvis wrote:
> Most of the Charles Stross stuff I've read centers around a heist
> (Halting State) or a chase (Iron Sunrise, Saturn's Children) or
> something similar, but I'd still call his stuff hard SF. The
> "hardness" is in the details, and on virtually every page there's a
> line that makes me wanna run to google and see if there's a white
> paper on whatever he's talking about. Stross might not meet the
> definition Antonio proposes, though.

Charlie intentionally writes to different levels of plausibility. Halting
State and Rule 34 are more like slightly futuristic technothrillers, he
complained in his blog that the news kept swiping his plot devices.

Saturn's Children is an example of mundane SF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction
, though the posthuman millieu gives him a bit more wiggle room to have a
Heinlein pastiche and some silent movie melodrama.

Iron Sunrise is a totally whacked implausible setting with time travel,
FTL, space nazis, nova bombs, etc being dealt with by a couple of people
of more modest ability to defy the laws of physics.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net