I ’ve always thought the term “ toilsome scientific discipline fable ” referred to stories or novels where the scientific discipline was important to the story , and which endeavor for inviolable scientific and expert accuracy . But now it turn out I was wrong , and in reality “ hard SF ” refers to history about personal ontogenesis , along the line of business of the Hero ’s Journey . At least that ’s what John Clute claim in his institution to a new reprinting of a 1974 Christopher Priest novel , The Inverted World .
NYRB Classics is reissuing Inverted ( whose original cover come out above ) with an introduction by Clute , carbon monoxide - editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . And here ’s what Clute enounce about the music genre Priest ’s first novel look in , as quoted in the NYRB ’s blog :
Hard SF can be defined as that kind of science - fabrication tale in which a clearly defined agonist ( almost always manly ) leaves his endangered world on a majuscule adventure , during the course of which he begins to empathise the true nature of his Earth and comes to grips with the risk that threatens it through a clearly limit , skill - based cognitive find . A new world is then bear , which the hero will monitor for the interest of his folk , in a manner consistent with Joseph Campbell ’s description of the culture hero in The Hero with a Thousand Faces ( 1949 ) . The Hard SF story carry its hero from cognitive darkness to conceptual light , and no stylistic fog , no problematic of any sort , should compromise that powerful drive .
In other quarrel , skill is just the trappings for yet another bent of stories about gallant finding themselves in the wild ? [ NYRB blog ]
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