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Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness/Speculative Science: Difference between revisions
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'''Speculative Science:''' Stories in which there is no "big lie" -- the science of the tale is (or [[Science Marches On|was]]) genuine speculative science or engineering, and the goal of the author to make as few errors with respect to known fact as possible.
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* In ''[[Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind]]'', the [[Easy Amnesia|memory-erasure]] device is reasonably plausible from a scientific perspective, and as a story set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]], there is little else that could be objected to.
* [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'': Minus [[Instant AI, Just Add Water|Mike itself]], pretty much everything is already around, or could easily be put together in the next half-century (the book is set in 2075-2076). The only fly in jam here is that we had a moonbase for a minimum of thousands by the 90s.
* ''The Menace From Earth'' (also by Heinlein) posits a sublunar colony that doesn't require a ton of future-tech but would be absurdly expensive to build with today's technology. Beyond that, the story sticks tightly to realistic extensions of the current technology. The protagonist is even engaged in drafting the design for a starship that anticipates engines that haven't been invented.
* ''[[I Miss the Sunrise]]'' is set far in the future, but doesn't rely on [[Applied Phlebotinum]]. Many of the technologies present are described in great detail and generally work according to real physics.
* ''[[
* Charles Pellegrino's ''[[Flying To Valhalla]]'' and ''[[The Killing Star]]''. The Valkyrie spaceships (and their alien equivalents) are a design [[wikipedia:Project Valkyrie|seriously proposed]] by Pellegrino and Jim Powell. And, unfortunately, the [[Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better|major source of mayhem]] is pretty plausible too.
* Steven Gould's ''[[Helm]]'' brings two major science-fiction elements: [[Terraform|terraforming]] and technological [[Brainwashing]]. The former is described in significant detail in an early chapter, and the terrain depicted of the book reflects the planet's history. The brainwashing is treated in less detail, but its mechanism of operation is convincing nonetheless.
* Quite neatly demonstrating that science fiction hardness is not perfectly correlated with plausibility: ''[[Car Wars]]''. The only thing lifting it above Futurology on the Scale is the optional [[Body Backup Drive]] rules.
* [[John C. Wright]]'s ''[[The Golden Oecumene]]'' trilogy, which has interstellar travel that respects the speed of light, and ''[[Hermetic Millenium]]'', which is [[Space Opera]] set as hard an SF future as he could write.
* ''[[Moon]]'': Minus the [[Space Is Noisy]]<ref>Which is ''almost'' justifiable; only close-ups have noise and it may be what Sam himself is hearing from inside a spacesuit.</ref> and
'''''Futurology:''''' Stories which function almost like a prediction of the future, extrapolating from current technology rather than inventing major new technologies or discoveries. Expect [[Zeerust]] in older entries.
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* ''[[Ghost in the Shell]]'' is for the most part completely plausible, although some of its elements are not so much impossible as [[Awesome but Impractical]] (eg. [[Spider Tank|SpiderTanks]], [[Invisibility Cloak|cloaking devices]] etc.). Others ([[Instant AI, Just Add Water|sentient AIs developing self-awareness]], [[Hollywood Cyborg|full-body prostheses]], [[Brain Uploading]]) are so realistically presented as to be almost frightening.
* TV docudramas about near-future space exploration, such as ''[[Space Odyssey: Voyage to The Planets]]'' and ''Race to Mars''.
* [[Stephen Baxter]] tends to write in this category, with books like ''Titan'', about a mission to the eponymous moon using a combination of decommissioned Shuttle, ISS and Apollo technology.
* [[Michael Flynn]]'s ''Firestar'' series, a near-future setting about averting an asteroid that might otherwise hit the Earth.
* ''[[Neuromancer]]'', the [[William Gibson]] novel, falls on the hard side of the spectrum, largely because his vague depiction of [[Cyberspace]] has preventing it from aging too badly (although [[Zeerust]] abounds nevertheless). His description of the Freeside space colony is not too far off from what humans could realistically create in the near future, although it gets some of the details about [[Artificial Gravity]] wrong. Ironically, the most difficult thing in the novel to create in real life might be the AI itself that the title refers to.
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[[Category:Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness]]
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