Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Heinlein’s Double Star Could Not Win a Hugo Today

Because the science is rubbish, and we know it. This is a real problem for contemporary hard SF: the universe is not nearly as hospitable to space travel as we once thought, and it’s a lot harder to write about robust human settlement beyond Earth without cheating on the science than we thought in the 1950s.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The last two books I read had (coincidentally) the rigors of life-in-a-vacuum as their central concern: Neil Stephenson's Seveneves and Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. Possibly the most dystopian Robinson I've read.

Will McLean said...

Liz: would you recommend Aurora, dystopia and all?

Beth Tanner said...

Which makes me sad as it's one of my favorite Heinlein books. It also makes it demmed hard for those of us trying to write SF.