Sure, but "hard SF" actually means something. It's always been (since my childhood, at least) the standard term for science fiction that *is* at least somewhat focused on the actual science and technology, and makes at least a reasonable attempt for that to be grounded in the real world.
I think of Dragon's Egg as the canonical hard-SF book, personally: speculative, and pushing the edges of what is known, but written by a physicist, based on realistic physics, and deeply interested in the implications of that science.
That doesn't mean it doesn't involve people, but it means that the science is *important* to the story. In contrast, the science is *almost entirely irrelevant* to the stories in _FTL, Y'all!_ -- it simply postulates an almost-certainly-impossible concept, and runs with it from there. In that, it shares more DNA with fantasy than with hard SF. Great stuff, but different...
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Re: what's hard SF?
Date: 2020-07-11 03:03 pm (UTC)I think of Dragon's Egg as the canonical hard-SF book, personally: speculative, and pushing the edges of what is known, but written by a physicist, based on realistic physics, and deeply interested in the implications of that science.
That doesn't mean it doesn't involve people, but it means that the science is *important* to the story. In contrast, the science is *almost entirely irrelevant* to the stories in _FTL, Y'all!_ -- it simply postulates an almost-certainly-impossible concept, and runs with it from there. In that, it shares more DNA with fantasy than with hard SF. Great stuff, but different...