What is Hard Science Fiction?

A. Hard Science Fiction is the most concerned with "Hard Science", premise and serious projection of technological development and also extrapolations in Natural Science including stellar phenomena, the Exo-Ecology of world-building where in alien character motivation and view point arises from Exobiology, and where in problems and their solutions center on real Science when characters get into a dire jam or find puzzles to solve, as in the works of Hal Clement. Often Hard Science Fiction may be further distinguished by a de-emphasis upon characterization in favor of even by such a vast and profound scope as to engender a certain quality of it's own impersonal values in rejection of the classical human values of literature, as in, for prime example, the deliberately sterile Nietzschean grandeur of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Hard Science Fiction descends from the genre of Scientific Romance, the name attributed to the pioneer Science Fiction ...  more