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<blockquote data-quote="papastebu" data-source="post: 3460468" data-attributes="member: 40894">I would actually say that hard science fiction has less necessity for world-building than any other form of speculative fiction. This is because, generally, hard science is the milieu, rather than the world/galaxy in which events take place.A great many of Asimov's stories, for example, required little world-building, because he had the science right in his head, and he didn't write about things that people couldn't extrapolate within their sense of disbelief from things that they saw or heard about every day. The readers could basically build the world themselves, and Asimov was free to state &quot;This is the state that the world has arrived at, given what we have today taken to this point.&quot; He speculated, for sure, but his framework was already there.Star wars, on the other hand, is fantastic, and required more explanation, because the force is a fictional speculation based on a real-world speculation. Blasters are not accepted fact, or even extrapolated &quot;fact&quot;, based on existing technology. The closest thing, I think, to hard science that exists in Star Wars is the lightsaber, with its ion stream contained by a magnetic field. Even that's a stretch; how come it's not a ball of light on the end of a stick?Anyway, the point is that if you have less fact to back it up, in a game or a story, then you are going to need to have more things--settings, objects, occurrences, histories, relationships, laws, etc, ad nauseam--in place for the reader/player to look and say, &quot;Oh. That's why that works/happened/looks like that,&quot; or whatever.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="papastebu, post: 3460468, member: 40894"] I would actually say that hard science fiction has less necessity for world-building than any other form of speculative fiction. This is because, generally, hard science is the milieu, rather than the world/galaxy in which events take place. A great many of Asimov's stories, for example, required little world-building, because he had the science right in his head, and he didn't write about things that people couldn't extrapolate within their sense of disbelief from things that they saw or heard about every day. The readers could basically build the world themselves, and Asimov was free to state "This is the state that the world has arrived at, given what we have today taken to [B]this[/B] point." He speculated, for sure, but his framework was already there. Star wars, on the other hand, is fantastic, and required more explanation, because the force is a fictional speculation based on a real-world speculation. Blasters are not accepted fact, or even extrapolated "fact", based on existing technology. The closest thing, I think, to hard science that exists in Star Wars is the lightsaber, with its ion stream contained by a magnetic field. Even that's a stretch; how come it's not a ball of light on the end of a stick? Anyway, the point is that if you have less fact to back it up, in a game or a story, then you are going to need to have more things--settings, objects, occurrences, histories, relationships, laws, etc, ad nauseam--in place for the reader/player to look and say, "Oh. That's why that works/happened/looks like that," or whatever. [/QUOTE]

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