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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

> The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction

I believe the hardest sci-fi is called "non-fiction". There is a "scale" for this, anyway:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...

I'd say something like "For all mankind" also lands in the Sci-Fi genre, and there REALLY has been nothing physically impossible (yet), though the nuclear engine is borderline

It's hard to imagine "The Martian" or "For all mankind" to NOT be in the category of "science fiction"; they're certainly not fantasies. Maybe "For all mankind" belongs in "historical fiction" but it's edging towards being too recent for that. I don't think they're "just fiction" because grouping them in with, say "100 years of solitude" or "ulysses", or even "the client" doesn't seem quite right either.

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Admittedly calling the Martian not sci-fi is a bit of a hot take, but I’ll defend it. To me sci-fi is speculative fiction. That is, take a counter factual or hypothetical and run with it, explore the consequences of the idea.

The Martian supposes we send some human missions to Mars like we probably will in a decade or two, and lays out the steps a crewman takes to survive being left behind. There’s not really an idea there to explore other than what might be done in an engineering planning meeting.

I might call it eng-fi instead of sci-fi.

You're running on a very narrow difference between science and engineering:

> That is, take a ... hypothetical and run with it, explore the consequences of the idea.

How is The Martian not:

- hypothetical: Astronaut gets stranded on Mars

- consequences: Steps to survive, survivor and rescue crew decisions and emotions.

You're right, it's a fine line. I think it falls on the engineering side of the line because the hypothetical and the consequences in the Martian are pretty mundane when you remove the setting and price tags. Imagine the same story but about a character abandoned at McMurdo Station in the present day. It would be a largely similar story with largely similar consequences. I think you might agree that it wouldn't be sci-fi.

The world isn't really any different for the hypothetical of Watney getting stranded on mars. It's just an event that happens. A hypothetical like -what if Mars were already inhabited by aliens or -what if we could launch items to space for less than $.10/kg using X technology would be more on the sci-fi side of hypotheticals to me. The latter because it would open up the question of how the world would develop differently, even though it's just a simple question of technology.

Edit: I should make it clear I loved The Martian, I'm just making the argument it could be called not sci-fi.

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