> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
> What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
The first paragraph of Heinlein's Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein says "he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction."
Going the other way, the entry for "Hard science fiction" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction includes his "The Past Through Tomorrow" collection of stories and "The Rolling Stones" as representative of hard science fiction.
Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy.
It would be much more difficult for a hard sci-fi series to gain the kind of traction that Star Trek and Star Wars do, simply because the kinds of story it can tell are much more constrained...and it doesn’t allow for the same kind of wow factor.
> Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy.
I kind of disagree. What people want out of their stories is something that resonates with them emotionally or that speaks to the human condition. The fantasy vs science dichotomy doesn't really apply, and it's mostly subjective anyway.
Also, it helps to remember that Star Wars and Star Trek were pioneering in their respective media. Star Wars basically invented the motion picture blockbuster and "epic" sci-fi. Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
But both are also far more about people than technology or even extrapolation. If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings - it's actually a fairly grounded universe - and there are many such settings that somehow allow for telepaths as well. It's entirely possible to have hard sci-fi that has a wow factor and human drama (Babylon 5 comes to mind as an attempt, maybe the Expanse,) it's just not something people want to do because science is difficult, whereas teching the tech is easy.
> Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
Star Trek (TOS, this changed a bit with TNG and DS9) didn't even make the society the main characters were part of an important focus, it was more focused on external-societies-of-the-week, and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models.
> If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars
...wouldn't happen, because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
>and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models.
Fair enough, but TOS was more internally consistent and fleshed out than the anthology series of the time, and taken more seriously than Lost in Space. No one on the Enterprise got turned into a talking carrot, Kirk would never stand for such tomfoolery.
>because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
I don't know... without that, you've still got an intergenerational conflict between two rival houses (Skywalkers and Palpatines,) which is standard space opera fare. The Force as religion and politics could still be a driving factor without tangible manifestations of the supernatural, as that already happens in the real world.
You could even go the Babylon 5 route and pull the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" card and call the Jedi "technomages." They're just doing some weird thing with quantum (mumble) that we don't understand.
Star Wars must at least share the "invented the motion picture blockbuster" status with Jaws, which came out the year before.
Star Trek TOS was not that internally consistent or realistic.
Consider that within a couple of years they discovered that Jack the Ripper had actually been due to a non-corporeal alien, that aliens had visited Ancient Greece, resulting in the Greeks worshiping them as gods, and that Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, and Brahms were all the same person, still alive at about 6,000 years old .. and that Cochrane was still alive.
The odds that there are many others alien visitors, and ultra-long-lived humans, is very high. That should have a big impact on how humans try to understand their own history and cultural evolution, but it's never mentioned.
Or, think about how the ancient Greek myths influenced the later Roman ones, and how the Roman culture influenced even the German culture nearly 2,000 years later. The strong similarities between human history and the Roman-like culture of 'Bread and Circuses' (with the gladiator having the Greek name Achilles) and Nazi Germany ("Patterns of Force") or even US culture, as in 'The Omega Glory' with the Yankees and Communists, and holy words identical to the US Pledge of Allegiance and Preamble to the Constitution seemly written on Omega IV several hundred years before they were written on Earth.
This is hand-waved as Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development. Given that we know that aliens influenced Earth history, and other planets seem to have a similar history, shouldn't they be thinking how odd it is to still have parallel development? Does it mean that equally powerful aliens are affecting all of the other cultures too? Why don't humans meet any of them?
And, if mental powers can be created through an injection, why aren't more people doing it? Where is the research into understanding how that works?
> the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
> most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings
I don't understand energy in Star Wars.
Why don't the imperial troops fire at the escape pod? So what if no life was detected. It's ret-conned that droids aren't allowed to use escape pods. But you can still place the plans in the droid, turn it off on a timer, stick it in the escape pod, and eject the pod, yes?
We know droids can be shut down because C-3PO shuts himself down for the night to conserve power. They've got two suns, plenty of land, and no excess solar power? And it's relatively cheap to get a flight off the planet, which requires loads of power - and potential energy is easily converted to kinetic. So, why is it accepted that C-3PO needs to save power?
The short lived tv series SeaQuest DSV suffered terribly from the need to have believable science but at the same time the need for fantasy to make the story interesting. After the first few episodes, they mainly failed and started finding excuses to shoehorn outer space into plots. I loved the idea of the show but the execution makes me wonder if the problem was with limited talent or if hard sci-fi is just very difficult, especially for the visual format.
Unrelated to anything else, someone I went to school with (in a small-town high school way in Upstate NY, nowhere near Hollywood or NYC or anywhere else TV-connected) was actually closely related to the producer (or director, or something) of that series, and guest starred in an episode when we were in 8th grade.
I wasn't commenting on Heinlein, I was commenting on John W. Campbell, who was basically the go-to editor for hard SF (and had an Agenda, capital-A intentional).
The Expanse is popular because -- surprise! -- even a niche market can be a large market when it's a niche in a billion person audience.
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.