My "hard sf" Star Wars theory

[AmrlKJaneway]

My first thought = Well, Ok, then.

My second thought = Why is it necessary to try to convert/justify/rationalize Star Wars as a hard science fiction setting just because you like hard science fiction? I really like OA and other hard SF stories and settings - but I also really like the Culture novels by Ian Banks, the Dresden Files storied by Jim Butcher, and the Nightside stories by Simon Green. Not to mention the Lord of the Rings books by Tolkien. None of these are hard science fiction, nor do they make any attempt or pretense to be. But I like them anyway because I like them.

As one of our members observed some years ago, there seems to be this reflex in many circles to interpret 'hard SF' to mean that those who like it are looking down on any other from of the SF genre. While there are no doubt some people who do take that approach or at least use that rhetoric (including some of the founding and early members of the OAUP), I would say that that isn't the case for most people (certainly not the current management of OA) and that it really isn't necessary or useful to take that approach or viewpoint (either that hard SF is 'superior' or that people who like hard SF think it/they are 'superior').

My third thought = Since there is no single objective standard for what constitutes 'hard' SF, (believe me, we've looked) to say that something is or isn't hard SF after the fact is tricky, at least if all you're basing it on is the tech that is seen there. Certainly it can be fun to 'reverse engineer' the tech seen in a given film/book/game to see if it can be made to work in the real world with real physics. OA does that a lot. But unless the story makes it clear that it actually is using the 'reverse engineered' method in question, I don't know that it works to definitively say that it is doing so and therefore label the story as 'hard SF' because of that. But as I said in my first thought regarding anyone who wants to do this - Well, Ok, then.

My final thought = I don't really agree with your reasoning on this re Star Wars, but also figure it's your business to decide whatever you want about this. Unless you wanted to debate the point for fun, and we could be confident that such a debate wouldn't descend into acrimony, then I again refer back to my first thought

My 2c worth,

Todd

It was al just for fun. Just random stuff I'd thought about for years now, that I wanted to share. And the uncertain definition of hard sf is why I used quotation marks! Lol.