How hard is that sci-fi?
October 17th, 2010 at 8:00 am (Books)
Many have heard of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. But did you know that there’s a similar scale for how “hard” a given piece of science fiction is?
Friedrich Mohs anchored his scale with talc (softest, 1) and diamond (hardest, 10). Students of Mineralogy are usually taught to assign hardness based on which of the standard 10 minerals mark the new one, and which don’t. There is also a device called a sclerometer (I’ve never seen one) which employs a diamond head and determines how much pressure is needed to create a visible scratch, or alternatively uses a fixed amount of pressure and measures the width of the resulting scratch.
But now, there is also a scale of science fiction hardness! This page also includes examples of movies that fit at every level of the scale, which ranges from 0 (Barbarella, MST3K, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) to 8 (Real Life). If I were to rate the last few books we read in my sci-fi book club, I’d choose (note the caveat that harder doesn’t equal better!):
- The Handmaid’s Tale: about 7.5, but is this really sci-fi? Technology isn’t really a player, except as an evil shadow lurking in the past.
- The Shockwave Rider: a 7; no FTL or broken laws of physics, and eerily prescient about today’s (and tomorrow’s) computer networks.
- The Atrocity Archives: about 2. There’s no actual space flight, but there are demon-spawned gates to permit travel to other planets (and universes?), with some handwavy handling of pressure differentials and energy conservation. Physics is pretty much entirely broken by the integration with pentagrams and the occult. But hey, it’s fun!
- Bones of the Earth: right about a 1. Not only does time travel exist, but there’s also a “paradox detector” (never explained).
- Metatropolis: varied, but about a 7 once you take today and add in various bits of technology and virtual reality overlays. All reasonable extrapolations, without any laws of physics being broken.
- The Demolished Man: about a 4, if you consider telepathy to be breaking a law of physics. Tenser, said the tensor!
The sci-fi hardness scale page also puts Contact, Avatar, and Ender’s Game at a 3, and Rainbows End and Cryptonomicon at a 5. I’d put Anathem at a 5, too.
How hard is your sci-fi?
jim said,
October 17, 2010 at 9:34 am
This is great! Thanks.
Tyestin said,
October 17, 2010 at 11:38 am
Oh no…
Now I’m going to be trapped reading page after page on tvtropes for the next few hours.
Scott said,
October 18, 2010 at 10:59 am
I have a guess where most of the stuff I read would fall…;-)
Remind me to tell you some time about my zero-reaction mass drive that almost works (the disconnect is obscure enough that most non-physicists will miss it, I think). It’s “hard” enough that I wouldn’t feel dirty at all publishing it as a primary mechanic in a SF novel (which I plan to do one of these decades).
Terran said,
October 19, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Nifty!
I guess I’m happy reading across the spectrum, but it really depends on how the author treats it. I can accept magical tech and flagrant violations of physics-as-we-know-it, so long as the author treats it as magic. But when authors treat their favorite magic as if it were hard tech, that’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. So I’m happy with the Force in Star Wars, but as soon as Lucas tried to “justify” it in terms of “mitichlorians” (i.e., bogons), it became stupid. And I find most of the technobabble on the various Star Trek franchises incredibly grating. Come on, guys, just say “IJD” and go on with life!
I find it interesting that this spectrum is all about physics, and almost entirely about FTL. What about hardness on, say, bio-engineering/gene tinkering/body sculpting axes? Not to mention computer science hardness! (If your plot involves sequentially and independently breaking each digit of a code, you get a 0 on the CS hardness scale. ;-)
I’m really curious about Scott’s reactionless drive. :-)