On one side is the physicist Saxifrage “Sax” Russell, whose “Green” position advocates for immediate and rapid terraforming of the planet to make it more suitable for human occupation. Much of the first novel Red Mars revolves around the “Russell-Clayborne” debates on the fate of the planet. The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson represents a tremendous achievement in this subgenre, exploring the speculative terraforming and colonization of the fourth planet by the “First Hundred” human colonists and their descendants. Gone are unexplained warp drives and magic laser blasters hard science fiction limits itself to technologies that could have believably evolved from present day, and explains how they work. Instead of relying on brevity, hard science stands on realism.

Hard science fiction adopts a different approach. Other technologies play unimportant parts in the overall story, avoiding the deus ex machina tropes of more expansive speculative futures. Dick explore how individual scientific advances affect society and the characters. Clarke, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (on which Total Recall is based) by Philip K. Timeless short stories like The Last Question and Nightfall by Isaac Asmiov, The Ten Billion Names of God by Arthur C. One approach to avoiding these issues is brevity. Since the in-universe science drives their plots, these stories can rapidly feel dated as real-life technological progress obviates the speculative inventions of yesteryear. Divergent, The Maze Runner, Jupiter Ascending), or scifi premises shoehorned into action/horror movies with unsatisfactory endings and better special effects than acting (e.g. Bad scifi frequently fills bookshelves and movie theaters: predictable dystopian stories with a “chosen one” protagonist (e.g. Science fiction is a difficult genre to get right.

The red mars trilogy