Fire Upon the Deep

[Rynn]

I had different expectations going into the book as some review I read had it listed as hard sci-fi, which as y’all have mentioned it isn’t nor does the author claim it to be.

I've found that a lot of older sci-fi gets categorised into hard and soft but often in ways that fit the time. I can see how FUtD would be considered hard-SF at the time. It doesn't have anything fantastical like psychic powers, the technologies they have are given clearly defined limits, other than the FTL and antigravity everything else is plausible within physics (other than the clarketech but even modern hard-SF has that) etc. I think what counts as hard-SF depends on what tropes of science and technology people find plausible at the time.