When I became a published writer, I had a bit of an identity crisis. Some reviewers referred to me as a writer of 'hard sf'. How could I be, if I couldn't do an Egan and spend half a year working out the physics of my next book? In that case, did that make me a writer of fantasy, or science fantasy at the very least? After all, I had faster than light travel, worm holes, and force fields - all stuff firmly in the realm of fantasy according to those more scientifically literate.
I was therefore enormously relieved to find not one but two thoroughly clear-eyed summaries of the essential spirit of science fiction in the aforementioned anthology in the form of Peter Watts' and Ted Chiang's introductions to their own stories.
From Ted Chiang's introduction to 'Understand':
"SF needn’t have anything to do with science, but to the extent that a work of SF reflects science, it’s hard SF. And reflecting science doesn’t necessarily mean consistency with a certain set of facts; more essentially, it means consistency with a certain strategy for understanding the universe. Science seeks a type of explanation different from those sought by art or religion, an explanation where objective measurement takes precedence over subjective experience. And though hard SF can take many different forms, it always describes people looking for or working with that type of explanation.”
The second quote is from Peter Watts' introduction to one of two stories he has in the anthology:
"... hard SF is often distinguished from its softer, inferior cousins by virtue of adherence to rigorous — or at least, plausible — science. Plausible, is it? Okay, then: Goodbye Niven, goodbye Herbert and Vinge. Begone with your genes that code for luck, your spaceships piloted by psychics, and your galactic Slow Zones. Goodbye Brin: A Ph.D. should’ve known better than to resort to ftl. You’re not plausible enough for this sandbox.
But of course I’m attacking a straw man here — because as we all know, it’s not the math that counts, it’s the attitude. (...) we may not have the blueprints for a warp engine handy, but you’d better believe that our future technologies have sprung from the same empirical science that gave us Teflon and chemotherapy. Our tales abide by the spirit of science, if not the letter."
Our tales abide by the spirit of science, if not the letter. How great is that? There's more - a lot more - Watts has to say, but I've taken a fat enough quote out of the book as it is. For my tastes, these two arguments represent what I believe is the best analysis yet both of what sf is and what it's for. Does that mean I'm a 'hard sf' writer? I suspect not, at least certainly not compared to those authors who have the relative advantage of a working background in the sciences. But then am I a writer of science fiction, or technological fantasy? Given the above arguments, I think it's safe to say I do indeed write sf.
And it gives me a much more certain sense of what it is I do, and why I do it.