A reader posted a question in The Fix's forum about my last article.  He said, "I'm also curious about something you said about the market . . . that editors feel they're not seeing as much hard SF as they like, which was something I wouldn't have expected. Does that mean they're seeing a lot more soft SF than they can use? Or that the appetite for hard SF has expanded?"

Good questions.  I think that there is more "soft" SF than they can use.  The "they" in that sentence is mostly Asimov's and Analog.  I'm not sure whether Gordan Van Gelder wishes more hard science fiction crosses his desk.  I've heard observations from several editors that they get a lot of similar-looking, post-apocalyptic depressing stuff, for example.  I don't know if the market for hard SF has expanded, but they've said they're not seeing enough to fill the market as well as they would like.

The weird thing is that the "hard" science fiction story hardly ever has anything more than a paragraph or two that is particularly hard in it.  I mean, when is the last time you (or anyone else) read a story that was filled with equations or cutting edge science theory?  Hard science fiction is almost never explicitly more complex than the Sunday New York Times.  There might be a lot of hard science thinking behind the story, but not very much in the story.  If there is, the story is too boring for an editor to buy.  What readers want in the science is just enough of it to make the setting clear and to set up the plot.  Once that is established, the writer needs to get out of the way and put the science on the back burner.  Readers are more interested in the experience of or the effect of the science, not the explanation of it.

If that's the case, then, a careful writer who is not a scientist, but is willing to do the research, can write hard science fiction.  It's just that there aren't very many writers (it appears) who have both qualities.

I also think there's a lot of hand waving in science fiction stories that apes a legitimate "hard" science fiction.  Nanotechnology stories, for example, strike me this way, where nanotech becomes the new magic.  Everything is possible because nanotech makes it so.  There are also a lot of technobabble stories where the characters say things that sound scientific, like, "We'll be safe as soon as our string theory integers break down the DNA barriers in the boolian logic," but anyone who knows anything just laughs at this kind of stuff.

By the way, I don't want to sound like I'm belittling the effort and insight it takes to write hard science fiction.  Writing a SF story isn't just a matter of latching onto an interesting concept from a pop science book.  You have to be thinking about the impacts of technology, its repercussions, to do it well.  I think writing good science fiction takes a very, very particular (and maybe peculiar) mind set.  The writer's "what if" generator has to be fiendishly efficient.  To write a really good science fiction story, the writer has to strike a balance between the human story (which has to be interesting enough to keep us involved) and the SF idea, which has to be cool on its own level.  Sometimes the idea becomes even more interesting than the people, like Larry Niven's "Becalmed in Hell," although I liked the people in that story too.

Can you folks think of examples of "hard" science fiction that might supplement this discussion?  I really like Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, which is just swimming in science knowledge, and I like the paragraph of hard science in James Patrick Kelly's "Think Like a Dinosaur."  What other stories or novels forefront the science?