Although, it's you, so I would have expected no less :-)

What?

I like space opera, but my experience is that science has never been that important. Plausible-sounding explanations, but it's awfully difficult to make a scientifically-justifiable world much unlike ours. Next year, or next decade? Sure. For the science anyway, maybe not so much the culture. There might be a major breakthrough of some sort that will change things radically in the near-term, but that by itself is good story fodder, and the consequences would logically follow (at least in fiction). Over longer periods, there are more likely to be multiple major changes, with cumulative effects, and the science gets much harder to predict.

"You're willing to pay him a thousand dollars a night just for singing? Why, you can get a phonograph record of Minnie the Moocher for 75 cents. And for a buck and a quarter, you can get Minnie."

Does that apply to other areas? If their food gets better, than ours gets worse? (oops, might be a bad example)

If there is a flaw in this argument, perhaps, it's that a lot of the authors Scalzi namechecks (with the possible exception of Elizabeth Moon) don't shift the same number of copies, so are less well-known. With that in mind, and given that the Guardian is ostensibly a UK paper, the angle of the piece is not all that surprising, or dare I say it, unfair.

Please don't hit me...

If so, he's being remarkably unclear about it.

Also, while I could live a long and happy life without ever hearing again about "hard" versus "soft" SF, to the extent that the terms are useful at all, they don't mean "SF with plausible science" versus "SF with implausible science." "Soft" SF has tended to mean "SF that isn't rooted in the technical plausibility of its worldbuilding." Of course, that has led to a lot of stupidity, not least the fact that, at the end of the day, we tend to call stories "hard SF" when they contain lots of people standing around and (in Teresa's words) "talking tough about engineering," even if their actual futures are built on utterly implausible premises. While stories built on biology or economics get tossed into the "soft SF" bin, particularly when their bylines are identifiably female. I didn't actually like Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home*, but why do we habitually refer to series about future space navies as "hard SF" but not that particular novel with its exhaustive detail based in real anthropology? Answer, because for the purposes of thinking about "science" fiction and "hard" science fiction, some sciences are more scientifically sciency than others.

--
* I like lots of le Guin, just not that one so much.

I thought the correct spelling was wales, as in the Middle English word walen, to raise wheals.

On the whole, I like Stuart Jeffries as a writer, he's one of the Guardian's feature writers, and writes in the informal style that characterises the section of the newspaper he writes in.

He should have mentioned Alan Moore though :-)

Now that's a John M. Ford Western.

"I thought the correct spelling was wales, as in the Middle English word walen, to raise wheals."

My first reaction when I saw that clause was, Um, that can't be right. It's got to be wales away, right? So, I looked it up in my handy Oxford Abridged. "whale: verb [trans.] informal / beat, hit : ... ORIGIN late 18th cent.: variant of wale ." Dammit.

Once again, I'm reminded that the goddamn 18th century has somehow established a colony in my mind, and it persists despite my aggressive efforts at extirpation. I don't have any idea how they got there. I just want them gone.

Die, you bastards, die die die!

Die, you bastards, die die die!

There's your problem, right there. It HAS been dying this whole time, but of consumption ... and as any opera-goer knows, that can take long enough to bury your adult grandchildren.

Try cholera next time. :->

And maybe also because the plausibly extrapolated artificial intelligence in Always Coming Home is not a threat, nor a villain, nor going to save the world, or at least the protagonist and her friends. Many people's models of sf (and/or of computers) don't have room for an AI that is clearly more intelligent than humans, and the dominant lifeform in the solar system, and not all that interested in us, but willing to serve as a combination library and telephone system. Spacecraft and nuclear plants, and none of it for (or against) humans.

If genre fiction is worth covering at all, do it properly or don't bother.

The reason you missed those things is that the book is mostly about people. The Kesh don't find the City of Mind all that important. (And perhaps vice versa.)

Baxter's Manifold Time was strikingly hard SF on Moh's scale (warning, entering tvtropes.org is almost as time-consumingly engaging as Making Light comment threads) as it gave two independent ways of surviving the heat death of the universe that are compatible with current Physics knowledge.

PNH's analogy reminds me irresistibly of "A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine" - the parody musical that had a weird copyright suit from the Marx's heirs about using their personas

This irrestistibly reminds me of the German Philosophers v. Greek Philosophers Football Match in "Monty Python".

Though I also have a tendency to muddle it with compsci terminology: hard(ware) being stuff you can kick vs. soft(ware) which you can't, my personal distinction is that 'hard' SF is where the extrapolation is plausible* given current knowledge, and so can include the so-called soft sciences like anthropology.

*Plausibility is a separate discussion.

Trek science

Would that make Jeffries totally tubular?

Why's Cory Doctorow in that sentence?

Maybe it's because he's a Londoner...

If so, he's being remarkably unclear about it

Well, yes, but if he means it the other way, he's being unclear about it as well. I still don't think 'scientifically unsupported near futures' needs to mean that all near futures are scientifically unsupported, any more than 'pink elephants' means that all elephants are pink.

(I personally love Always Coming Home, but not as much as I love The Telling.)

ETA: Oh, Matthew beat me to it. Still, it can count as another anecdata point.

Still a very watchable movie.

#26 ::: BSD
when used in that manner "Hard" means "Masculine" and "Soft" means "Feminine"

#38 ::: dave
Or as one might say, Hard SF is where the author forgot the Sociology [or Anthropology, or Psychology...]; Soft SF is where they forgot the Physics [Chemistry, Biology...]

With a tip of the hat to PNH's side light "Modern Business-talk, Accurately Explained" I think we should swap out definitions. All of these "hard" vs "soft" definitions are acurate, but they're unfortunate. I prefer their synonyms as defined in a panel discussion I heard a few years back. "Crunchy" vs. "Squishy".

In Crunchy SF, things blow up. In Squishy SF, people blow up. In Good SF the science is as accurate as the story is entertaining.

As for the "Hard" and "Soft" of it all, I think it goes back to academia. The hard sciences are things requiring tools and/or things that go (or can be made to go) "ka-BOOM". The soft sciences are the study of why people want to make (or have made) things go "ka-BOOM." How the individuals of either gender align with the "ka-BOOM" factor is an exercise for the imagination (and Title IX in a smallish part of the world).

Garibaldi: No boom?
Sinclair: No boom.
Susan Ivanova: No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. What? Look, somebody's gotta have some damn perspective around here! Boom. Sooner or later…boom!

Fragano Ledgister @ 48.
Excellent! I look forward to the ka-BOOMage. I read about a dinner party where d'Hondt teamed up with Murphy and his Laws -- Bujold's A Civil Campaign.

As for far-future SF, those usually have a nice soft caramel fantasy center with a chocolaty technology shell. They're only hard SF in the sense that someday, maybe by sheer coincidence, we might have a society and/or technology that resembles the incidental details but again, that's not the point.

I consider Star Trek to be pure soft sci-fi - the "Treknobabble" is nothing more than a bit of flavoring over a pile of technology that doesn't make the slightest attempt at justifying itself. Compare this to what I consider to be the best hard sci-fi story I've ever read - Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy. The "science" that really makes it "hard sci-fi" is not just physics and engineering, but also biology, and geology, and social sciences, and economics, and so many of the little things that have to go into making a world livable. The scientific leaps are optimistic at times, to put it mildly, but it never veers in the direction of the fantastic the way Star Trek's technology does.

For the record, I consider Star Wars to be sci-fi-flavored fantasy. The spaceships and blasters are window-dressing on a swords-and-sorcery tale. The best example of this is how badly things went when Lucas attempted an explanation of how the magic system worked. The setting just doesn't support that level of inspection, and he would have been far better off continuing to shroud the Force in mystery and superstition than trying to justify it.

"Soft" SF, to me, isn't the opposite of hard SF, but rather an indication of a character oriented focus rather than world-oriented.

Interestingly, that makes John Wyndham's work both hard and soft - there's usually only one otherworldly element (triffids, lichens that slow the aging process); but then the story is all about how a society reacts to it.

All that time fixing up coding errors and I forget to check numbers. Sigh. Maybe I should have just given number range or names.

I think everyone would agree that Banks's Culture books are space opera. They aren't what most people would call hard sf (to the extent that that term has any useful meaning), and they are very explicitly not far future unless your idea of the far future is somewhere between AD 1267 and AD 1985.

Last year, local author Ian Tregellis read an excerpt from his novel about British warlocks vs Nazi supermen. Tregellis works at Sandia Lab, if I remember correctly, and such credentials had someone (who probably thought that physicist types never make things up) what that mysterious element was that he used to justify some of the superpowers. He revealed that it was composed of... gasp... Pure Plot.

(As far the novel's title, he didn't have one by then. Patrick might know since he edited the novel.)

So I could write Good SF with startling inaccurate science as long as I made it really really boring*? Or would it just mean that no one would read it long enough to notice my scientific errors?

* This is probably within my literary and scientific abilities.

And then the Universe ended.
Nobody noticed because they had all dozed off.

(And of course you're right about the "far-future" aspect as well; one of the things I like about Banks is that "human" means something different to the Culture than it does to us.)

Serge, I love that answer from Tregellis. Plausibility is all well and good, but Pure Plot will keep the story engine going when everything else has run out.

"Captain! The plotonium reactor cannae take it anymore!"
"Scotty, I need that prose now!"

This blog post by Charlie Stross (or this one a year later) is an example -- although he was in fact suggesting that American SF writers were avoiding the future in general, including near-future SF!

The curious thing about John Scalzi's reply is that, as far as I can tell, all of the writers he cites really are predominantly military SF writers, while none of the writers that Jeffries mentions seem to be. Now, I can certainly see "military SF" as being a kind of subset of space opera, but the question would then be: are there many prominent/successful American SF writers who are currently writing non-military far-future SF?

Vernor Vinge, Lois McMaster Bujold, Greg Bear, John Barnes, Larry Niven? (Or, wait, isn't Greg Bear Australian?)

--Gentlemen, I'd like to introduce a guy from Limeyland who'll be joining us this year at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Stephen Baxter, this is Greg; Stephen Baxter, this is Greg; Stephen Baxter, this is Greg.
-- Is your name not Greg then?
--No, it's Stephen, actually.
--That's going to cause a little confusion.
--Mind if we call you Greg to keep things simple?

(I would maybe add C.J. Cherryh, Wil McCarthy, and Tobias Buckell...)

Juan or Eva?

It's obvious why you'd exclude Charlie from such a list - his work includes things like Halting State (set in the near future with only-lightly-fuzzy technology) and the Merchant Princes (set in contemporary time with indistinguishable-from-magic science), and therefore it's Seriously Off Message for Jeffries, as well as Accelerando and Singularity Sky (farther future.)

Unless you were referring to Little Britain rather than Great Britain

I have to spell EVERYTHING out.

#39 I don't think Cory has British citizenship yet, but he does live in London and grok the culture, especially with Alice's influence; I'm technically British but have been in California 11 years now and feel like London has diverged from my timeline.

#52 I loved Charlie Stross's recent post where he complains about the bankers out-innovating his predictions of future scams.

City at the End of Time, which must now go on my list of Things to Buy Sometime Soon..

I finished reading it yesterday, and recommend you put it near the top of the list if you like Bear's more futuristic work.

Reading it just after finishing Stross' "Palimpsest", I started thinking there ought to be something called "metaphysical fiction", whose main element is not one or more of the sciences, but some concept of metaphysics or about the meanings behind the universe. The classic examples would be:

The Amber books - I call this metaphysical fantasy because it's whole cloth; no cosmologists were harmed in its creation.

"Star Maker" - metaphysical sf: Stapleton tried to include as much of contemporary physics and cosmology as he could.

"The Library of Babel" and lots of other stories by Borges. I call these metaphysical speculative fiction, for want of a better name. Often when I read Borges I have the feeling I'm reading well-accepted scientific papers from a very alternate world.

(I liked it, by the way. Yes, it's pulp, but I think it's fairly GOOD pulp.)

--Dave

Thanks for the recommendation! (I was not very impressed by Darwin's Radio, and the fact that Bear had mainly seemed to be writing one or another kind of contemporary technothriller from then on made me lose interest in him for a while.)

Re "metaphysical fiction" -- yes, that's an interesting category. I had a rather similar reaction when I first started reading Borges -- that it was something akin to science fiction, but using philosophy rather than science as the speculative starting point.

I might add some of Greg Egan's stuff to your list, particularly Permutation City. And John M. Ford's brilliant novella "Fugue State" comes to mind as well.

Would Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series (particularly The Urth of the New Sun) qualify?

I agree, I like Bear's far-future work a lot better than the thrillers he's been writing lately. It was "Songs of Earth and Power" (metaphysical fantasy) that hooked me on him, and then "Eon", "Eternity", and "Legacy" (the first two are metaphysical sf with considerable handwavium) kept me going. The only recent book I liked a lot was "Dead Line", which isn't a thriller, it's a horror story.

Several of Egan's novels fit the metaphysical sf label pretty well, "Schild's Ladder" as well as "Permutation City". Also a large part of what Rudy Rucker writes is either metaphysical sf or something even weirder still.

It is my understanding that "The Hand of Kahless" is also "The Final Reflection", bundled with another Klingon-related novel by a different author, with no new material.

(If anybody here knows differently, I would appreciate an opportunity to improve my understanding.)