zlacker

>>anarba+(OP)
Fair warning, this story is about 9,000 words. But it's so rich and weird and dazzling. It's among my favorite Lem stories — although i admit i hadn't read anything of his until we (MIT Press, where i work) started reissuing his books last year, so i'm by no means an expert on him. Anyway, there was a lot of interest in an excerpt from Lem's memoir I submitted here a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25533405), so thought i'd share this as well.

>>anarba+Z
Really glad to hear there is an effort forward to bring out more of Lem's work. One of the most interesting SF authors, with what would seem to be a deeper understanding of actual science than most of the others I've read. I especially love His Master's Voice, and am happy to see that on the list of MIT reissues!

>>eigenh+YN
Lem's criticism of much mainstream US SF at the time likewise takes the view that there's too little Science behind any of this Science Fiction. I'm not sure how much of his literary criticism is in print, "Microworlds" is the volume I read.

I like my SF very hard ("Incandescence" by Greg Egan is roughly where I'd say I'm comfortable, a plausible mechanism by which a pre-industrial civilisation might discover general relativity, that novel made me cry at the end) but even when he's being totally whimsical I really enjoyed Lem.

>>tialar+Vc1
Lately on Amazon the term "hard" has been misused or redefined for "military scifi" / "violent scifi".

That aside,

I just have a regular understanding of most fields in science. I know a bit here and there. More astronomy.

My field is computer science, so I have some knowledge there.

What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy. Huge absurd things of course.

I have read so many different descriptions on how FTL works. I dont think (ignorance on my part) that we have a solid theory for how it can be done.

- Warping of space/time (or higher dimension),

- "portals" left by "an ancient civilization"(that sort of evades the issue)

- wormholes

- "Taming a god"

- through special cracks in space/time that only a special navigator (species) can feel.

- improbability drive (I do love Douglas Adams).

and many more.

When you read can you take the existence of FTL on just being there, do you reject the ideas fully, or do you judge it on its merits if the description extrapolates current knowledge into a future where we can FTL? (if ever)

>>ThinkB+7c2
> What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy

I think hard sci-fi requires that the book universe has consistent rules and the book focuses on their consequences, while soft sci-fi focuses on stories and the rules are unspecified or don't drive the plot.

The rules don't need to be what we currently think about our universe for the book to be hard sci-fi.