The fiction of the Future, Past, and Present.

I have been an avid science fiction aficionado since around my early to mid-teens. What inspired me to start reading science fiction was the one and only fact that, somehow, I came upon the name of Isaac Asimov. As Asimov had himself said in one of his interviews that people would come up to him and ask whether Asimov was his real surname, I was similarly intrigued with his exotic-sounding name. So I got my hand into one of his books; I cannot remember which one, maybe I, Robot, but I was hooked. Thus began my journey into the wonderful world of science fiction.

I am well aware that many do not consider science fiction to be worth reading at all; it has been considered pulp fiction for too long. But for me, the ability to write good hard science fiction is one of the hallmarks of a great author. Many will ask me, why?

To answer this question, we need to delve a little deeper into the science aspect of science fiction. Science fiction is, as the name suggests, stories based on scientific or pseudo-scientific concepts. It can be broadly classified into two sub-genres, hard science fiction and soft science fiction. Hard science fiction deals with mostly stories based on or around established scientific principles. Soft science fiction differs from its hard counterpart in the primary aspect that the scientific concepts are generally not in the limelight in the soft sub-genre, the emphasis mainly being on the characters in the story and the scientific underpinnings exist primarily to provide a stage for the story.

A great example of hard science fiction is A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke. The story is a simple one, a lunar rover carrying tourists is untraceable and lies buried under moondust after a rare occurrence of a moonquake. The story follows the rescue efforts by the other moon inhabitants and the survival strategies of the people trapped in the shuttle. Real-life phenomena such as convection currents, radio communications take center stage in this short story and how they are employed by the author to create a riveting story.

On the other hand, Asimov’s Foundation series may be one of the greatest examples of soft science fiction. The series deals with the scenario in the future where the galaxy-wide galactic empire is on the brink of collapse, and a scientist discovers a new mathematical model of human society, psychohistory, which can make predictions of the future of human society and thus suggest the means to control and direct them by our actions in the present. This knowledge is used to create organizations named Foundations, which is supposed to limit the span of the Dark Age till a new galactic empire rises again.

Of course, this does not mean that hard science fiction is all humdrum and does not contain any references to exciting things such as aliens, faster than light travel or time travel. Mostly, the premise of hard science fiction is predicated on one of these being possible and easy to access, and the story develops from then onwards using other laws of science such as evolution, gravity, or any other phenomena or theory that we generally know and which exist in our very own physical world. But mostly, as sci-fi readers will be well aware, stories in sci-fi deals with how the characters deal with the challenges or opportunities presented by these phenomena.

Now to come back to my original statement that writing good hard science fiction is very difficult and defines a great author. I consider it to be so because there is no easy way out once you are dealing with scientific concepts. The writers of hard science fiction have knowingly accepted the challenge and the limits that dealing with hard sci-fi imposes. They cannot say halfway into his story, say dealing with gravity, that it is getting bothersome to constantly deal with the limits that the existence of gravity imposes on my story, let me make it disappear. It instantly spells the doom of the story, and what he has to show for his exertions is a half-finished work that is unsalvageable. It can be compared to handing a person a pile of bricks, and asking them to construct a palace out of these bricks only, nothing more or less.

The sense of wonder and awe that a well-written sci-fi story can convey is one of the unadulterated pleasures that human intellect can experience. To be truthful, who among has not daydreamed. I ask, why not devote some of that time daydreaming about travelling among the stars, about senary star systems which somehow spell the fall of civilization every two thousand years, about an infantry grunt fighting aliens that look like insects, about humans exploring a non-solar system artificial object that is crossing our very own solar systems, about ships sailing under the oceans and countless other such scenarios.

P.S. Each of the scenarios mentioned in the concluding paragraph belongs to insanely popular sci-fi stories. Read them if you are intrigued.