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0 pointsdiaz8y ago0 comments

Really? I saw season 1 and loved it. Then eventually found out there was a second one and was happy. Had no idead it got canceled too. I tried to see the first and second episode of expanse and didn't like it one bit. Dark matter pleased me plently. Made me remember a little of Firefly mixed with something else like stargate or something.

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DmenshunlAnlsis8y ago· 3 in thread

This comment and thread in general make me feel a little odd. I love sci-fi, hard soft and everything in between. I read all of The Expanse books so far, and they’ve been entertaining, but I don’t find them to be very memorable. The other thinf that gets me is it very quickly becomes anything, but hard sci-fi! I’m not going to spoil anything, but any real pretense of hardness goes by Abaddon’s Gate.

The show, I couldn’t get through the first season for the action and dialogue. The story was very compressed, and even in the books wasn’t deep enough to withstand compression.

But... I seem to be just about the only person to feel that way here! I feel like I read different books and watched a different show. I realize that taste has a huge variability, and I accept that, but I usually have a better grasp on why others love something I didn’t. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t love or hate it, I just think of it as bathroom/beach/airplane reading?

TeMPOraL8y ago

I'd blame it on taste variability. I'm a fan, and some of the criticism I read in the thread surprised me very much as well. Between general taste and the standards set by other stuff one reads, there's plenty of variability.

RE hardness, I'd say it's 90% hard by volume. The protomolecule is a core plot point, but its magical properties aren't big part of the story, by volume (with possible exception of Cibola Burn). Beyond that, the only "out there" elements are the absurd fuel efficiency of the Epstein drive, and the plausability-stretching stealth tech. But it may be that my threshold for hardness is lower than yours. I wonder what other things you would classify as not being properly hard?

DmenshunlAnlsis8y ago

Traversable wormholes, the “Slow Zone” and yes pretty much everything about the protomolecule. It’s hard, until you realize theres more energy and time at play than is feasible given the age and total volume of the universe. They’re also ignoring relativistic effects on approach to the wormholes, which would be necessarily extreme. Some elements are hard, but it’s just a skin of it.

I guess to me hard sci-fi = “physically possible” and that might not be fair. As I said though, I don’t mind soft sci-fi, because after all it is fiction and that’s fun. It’s just, if you’re going to throw magic into the mix, why not have at it?

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colordrops8y ago

Would most sci-fi fans consider Contact to be hard sci-fi? The main ideas are nearly identical.

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