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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 1937845" data-attributes="member: 5328">I think that perhaps you are overlooking the difference between 'real' and 'realistic'. To be realistic, a fiction only has to resemble what we believe is real, not be what actually is real.The point of 'hard' science fiction is not that it accurately predicts what we will find when and if we go 'out there', but that it avoids irritating the players or audience with the recurring thought "I know that is impossible". 'Hardness' in SF is realative to the consumer's beliefs about science. This being the case, the 'hard SF' of a person with a high-school science education may be soft to a grad student in planetary science, and vice-versa (ie. a grad student can know that something is plausible that seems impossible to a person with less knowledge). A lot of golden-age SF (eg. Heinlein and Asimov) features an ancient, dessicating Mars and a nascent, swampy Venus, and was hard SF in its own day: it matched, not reality, but contemporary beliefs.A case in point involves the Blue Planet game setting. The designers are competent marine biologists, and I will take their word that the biology of the setting is well done. But I am a trained and professional economist, and I just can't suspend disbelief in the economic-political set-up they posit (for the humans). For one group of people it works as hard SF. For another it excites disbelief.</blockquote>