I really liked the story, and enjoyed the ride, but as a fan of 'hard SF' such as the Expanse or the Mars trilogy, this book left me somewhat dissatisfied.
I've read the Expanse btw and it wasn't particularly more "hard" or any less made-up than anything else. I don't remember whether I've read the Mars trilogy.
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[1] http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-te...
In the interest of full disclosure I'm a total trekkie. I even like ST:E (a lot).
That said, I see more and more that people are accepting an alternative definition of hard science fiction, which is simply a way of distinguishing science fiction that does not involve outright magic from the fantasy/sf that does.
It’s kind of like saying the scale goes from just telling a story set on a space ship to writing a dissertation on long-haul space flight’s effects on human behaviors, which might have a narrative through line.
I am not really sure I even like the premise of this usage of hard/soft sci-fi, I am much more prone to use the possible/impossible technology type of scale when discussing ‘hardness’ of sci-fi, but I don’t get to dictate the usage of language.
Conversely, the soft end of sci-fi has a lot more authors with little to no familiarity with the relevant sciences, and even less care for them.
There are obviously exceptions to this "new hardness scale", but I think overall the two scales give almost identical readings in practice. And personally, I'm not against the new scale either, because it aligns with what I personally care about. That is, I want to read sci-fi that's hard on this new scale. I like my sci-fi to be about science, technology, social dynamics, and everything other than individuals and their emotional journeys and petty conflicts. There's enough of that in every other genre, not to mention, in real life itself.
The question is already not the right one to ask. Many technologies he thinks up flat out oppose our current understanding of physics, therefor there is no adequate explanation for them in any case.
Just to drill this point in a bit more because people often don't understand this: It's not just a case of "maybe we will discover new physics in the future that make this possible and the author writes in a sort of gap of our understanding", like good hard scifi authors, but more along the lines of "the author doesn't understand physics and this fantasy technology they dream up relies on apples falling up instead of down when you throw them".
99.9% of the time when any author writes something that is FTL-related for example, this is the case. It's really just a few authors who bend the rules in reasonable ways enough and then introduce good enough restrictions so it can be believably handwaved away.
A lot of physics related descriptions in the Trisolarian books are also wildly innacurate and based on an extremely superficial laymans understanding of physics. That section where they house a black hole in that one custom facility for example, ugh.
Pity that they cancelled that show as soon as it was getting interesting.
Look up lists of the best hard scifi and you'll find the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, or at least the Three Body Problem, on almost every one.
Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.
I'll give you that the further the trilogy goes the looser the explanations get, but that's by design. We jump far, far to the end of the universe. How does anyone give a reasonable explanation for billion year advanced technology?
On the flipside, in the Expanse, humans are limited by physics and largely modern limitations, sure, but the crux of the story is built around a magical alien molecule for which we are never given an explanation. It's hard scifi to a degree, but no less soft than say, the sophon in ROEP.
If you can, find me a published author stating "I wrote this story strictly in terms of a level 5 in the Mohs scale"; there will be none (unless they're targeting reddit as a reader base).
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScal...
The protomolecule turned people into vomit zombies with a collective hive mind that could communicate instantaneously across the solar system and move an asteroid defying all laws of gravity, with the ultimate secret intent of building an interstellar wormhole.
Again, in the series (at least early on) humans are quite limited by known constraints and it would easily be considered hard scifi in many regards. But its central conceit was no less blithely nonsensical than that of TBP's - I simply can't understand how someone could put one in the hard category but disqualify the other.
I think one key difference for me is that we are not told what the protomolecule is, so we can imagine it is some kind of massive DNA-like structure packed with enzymes and whatnot that can plow through biological material and reorganize it. That is a plausible start. Then, sure, it may overdo the capabilities a bit.
The sophon, though, we are told exactly what it is: it is a proton unfolded into a 2D plane on which a supercomputer is etched, which is able to configure itself in order to intercept and direct light, which is how it is able to spy on us and pull light tricks. The problem is that it is nonsensical from the start. If you can unfold a proton around a planet in such a way that it blocks all light, it is being bombarded by far more energy than it would be in a particle accelerator. It's like using paper origami to bounce asteroids, basically the same issue as the Expanse, except worse, and that's before we even get into the supercomputer stuff.
Still, point taken. The Expanse should probably not be classified as hard sci-fi either.
I cannot believe this to be true. While I'm wary of the "no True Scotsman" aspect to the term "hard sf", TBP and it's sequels are about as hard as jello.
Honestly, the author would have been better off allowing things to just be hand wavey instead of poorly explaining everything.
I was thinking about why these books gripped me, while usually I get tired quickly of space opera. For me, it's in the quality of the execution. Each book and each chapter gives you direct action via a predictable sequence, while the characters get a little more round each iteration.
It's very Asimov-like, in that the elements where the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions (or human/psychic, human/alien, human/robot, etc) handled in a very rationalist, almost mechanistic way.
And also like Asimov, there's super-science stuff (e.g. warp drives in Foundation, time travel in The End of Eternity) that isn't "explained" in any way, it's just part of the setting.
During my reading, I thought this was the point. I'm not sure the stories were trying to be in any specific genre, maybe genre-adjacent at best, but the author wanted to focus on what happens to the human and humanity with all this advanced, arguably fantastic tech.
Too soon...
Individuals in the series largely act as if their personalities have been hit by the dual vector foil.
But the series is rarely about the individuals. Instead its about exploring how humanity - and aliens - might react to the existence of one another.
In this regard I feel Liu created in the reader a vertigo-inducing sensation of depth.
I wasn’t trying to be dismissive, although it’s not entirely my cup of tea; my comparison to Asimov is meant as a compliment.
Sci-fi should focus on the social implications of hypothetical technologies.
Contrast that with Three Body where the main plot driver revolves around FTL communication with indestructible intelligent nano-scale machines that can be anywhere any time, then gets progressively less realistic from there. I did enjoy the thread about the human ships going extra-solar, though, which was closer to Expanse in terms of Hard SF meeting a magical element (+dimensional travel).
What really irked me about The Three Body Problem was the way it blithely introduced faster-than-light communication as a plot point -- a key plot point! -- without any hint of a nod to the fact that this is impossible as far as we currently know. In fact, quite the opposite, the speed of light is taken to be a hard limit elsewhere in the story and that plays a key role too. So which is it?
I think it can be okay to invent magical tech in hard SF, if and only if you clearly distinguish the magical bits and work through all the ramifications logically. A great example is the “bobbles” in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
They are not nano-scale, they are planet-scale, 11-dimensional computers projected into 3-dimensional space.