So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel: Difference between revisions

Firstly, there is that which is [[Bad Writing]] in any genre. There are artistic, [[Doylist]] reasons why you'd want to do this, such as inexperience, not reading Allthetropes, a search for reliable, but still bad tropes out of fear of being fired from a writing job (eg. TV and movies are too expensive to treat failure as an option), being underpaid, having an [[Anvilicious]] object lesson to deliver, hating one's boss, other projects and rarely, simple laziness. Treat failure as an option, but never be satisfied with failure nor mediocrity. As a writer in hard SF, you must fully intend to succeed with flying colors, even if you have to take the risk of failure. Because you're dealing with an audience smart enough to have the basic understanding of consistency, accuracy, and natural science required to care about and more-or-less know where a work fits into the [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness]], and you're dealing with impersonal forces that can easily take decades or centuries that are not easily [[Time Skip]]ped, such as sub-light interstellar travel, technological and social innovation and the rise and fall of civilizations, you often must write an epic. [[Mood Whiplash| You can't get away with writing a cartoon]]. Hard SF audiences are intelligent and have access to works of other genres and literary award winning works of hard SF, of which there are many, so they won't stick around for [[So Okay It's Average| mediocrity]], which bores them, nor for [[So Bad It's Horrible| failure]], because hard SF audiences look forward to reading literary award winning works of hard SF.

Secondly, here is a list of tropes that are generally considered [[Bad Writing]] specifically in a realistic hard SF universe, along with some works or franchises that successfully implement some of them and are still considered to be hard SF:

* [[Inertial Dampening]]. Example: Orion's Arm implements this in the Halo Drive and the rumored Void Drive. The Halo Drive implements this by nacelles that use gravito-magnetism to harness the fuel/engines proper into the main hull of the ship, so everything and everyone in the main hull is accelerated equally, thus making nothing there feel the acceleration. The Void Drive would implement this by having the entire ship inside a space-time metric.

* [[Reactionless Drive]] (at least until the [[w:RF resonant cavity thruster|RF resonant cavity thruster]], aka the EmDrive, is confirmed, if ever) Example: Orion's Arm, written collaboratively, implements this by making the space-time metric really small instead of metrics large enough to surround the ship without making the metric a lot [[Bigger on the Inside]], apparently because making metrics that are large on the outside is too difficult.