I enjoyed reading it, but Hyperion struck me as having a great many fantasy elements. It has both time travel and FTL (both of which are nonsense given current physics, there is no reasoned framework to explain them in). Also, symbiotic life extension technology.
I also crankily believe that unobtanium is also a fantasy element (sorry Larry, scrith too), so maybe I shouldn't bother having the conversation. But why is a magic wand 'a stupid plot device', but an inexplicable technology is 'a reasoned exploration'?
Or is that not what hard sci fi means? Because fantasy often focuses on the social implications of magic, which is at least a similar sort of activity as imagining how big you can make something if you can adjust the laws of physics.
All valid but the caveat 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. The line between what is science fiction and what is fantasy in a future setting can be very thin.
I'm basically arguing that any such line is arbitrary.
The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is probably a useful one for helping readers find books they like. Going further than that seems like it is going to almost always involve a lot of personal preference.
OK, I removed the adjective "hard". I'm not sure what I was thinking, using such a nebulous term. If you ask nine people the difference between "hard" and "soft" scifi, you'll get ten answers. And the vast excluded middle threatens to dwarf the two complementary categories anyway. I meant merely to differentiate those examples of scifi that go beyond "then they pressed the warp drive button and warped across the galaxy", to consider how humans might travel very fast. In the perhaps poorly chosen example of the Hyperion sequels (if any category would fit them, it's probably "kitchen sink"), bodies were reconstructed by a cruciform "symbiont" that restored recent snapshots. I imagine that instead, whatever cellular processes tardigrades exhibit might be somehow induced in humans.
The difference between hard and soft speculative fiction (science vs fantasy is really more about the setting than the universe structure) is how big the plot holes are in the fabric of the universe.
Why does only one special person have the magical powers? Why do people use their incredible powers only for rather mundane tasks? How is it possible to create that space fortress that has more steel than the all conjectured quantities within 100 light years? The more questions you can ask and file to get good answers for, the softer the fiction is.
I also crankily believe that unobtanium is also a fantasy element (sorry Larry, scrith too), so maybe I shouldn't bother having the conversation. But why is a magic wand 'a stupid plot device', but an inexplicable technology is 'a reasoned exploration'?
Or is that not what hard sci fi means? Because fantasy often focuses on the social implications of magic, which is at least a similar sort of activity as imagining how big you can make something if you can adjust the laws of physics.