Hacker News Reader

One thing with the early sci-fi is you will have to pretend you don’t know what we now know about the other planets. Asimov (The Martian Way I think got Saturn’s rings very wrong) and Heinlein (Mars and Venus are both depicted very wrongly and still a very entertaining story in Double Star) had a few stories and novellas.

View on HN

Well-written relatively hard but outdated scifi is, in effect, well-written slightly-softer scifi.

I just imagine this is not our universe, but an alternate where whatever they came up with makes sense and is internally consistent. That's what you have to do for most sci-fi, after all :)

And by applying this rule then it's all hard sci-fi: take the fluffiest "Conan" tale and just tweak the parameters of the universe until it becomes not merely possible but actually inevitable.

Exactly!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com