Re: (ReacTor) Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"?

David Duffy <davidd02@tpg.com.au> wrote:

James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"?
 
Hard SF has never been a unified subgenre. Here are five overlapping
varieties of story to which the label applies...
 
https://reactormag.com/defining-our-terms-what-do-we-mean-by-hard-sf/

 
"deliberately fudges the science...my least favorite flavor"
 
I don't mind some of these, as they are literally fictions about science,
but they have to be in the right spirit. One example I can think of
is when the Autarch in tCotA explains how a mass of antimatter iron
negates the weight of the flyer, [...]

That's a terrible example, as even in 2011, Villata (arxiv:1103.4937) was writing:

"On the other hand, the idea of antigravity is as old as the discovery of antimatter, and
some authors have argued on the possibility that the gravitational mass of antimatter is neg-
ative (e.g. [10,12???15]), which would imply that matter and antimatter repel each other (but
are both self-attractive). In other cases, it is proposed that antimatter is gravitationally self-
repulsive (e.g. [16, 17]) [...] Since the discovery of the accelerated
expansion of the Universe in 1998 (e.g. [18, 19]), some kind of
gravitational repulsion is one of the favorite candidate..."

So, it's more like _here there be dragons_

Cheers, David Duffy.