Don't go by wikipedia! There's no authoritative definition for hard/soft sci fi at all! If you look at the article, the second and third definitions used aren't even cited, which means that they could be nothing more than reasoned out by whoever was editing the encyclopedia at the time. It's just something people talk about. Considered soft by who, after all? We don't know who conjured up 2/3 of those rules, since we can't see if the first source explained them (The link to the first source is dead too).wayfriend wrote:Yes, FTL travel can't be reasoned out. Which is why, according to the wikipedia definition (see upthread), stories with FTL are often considered "soft".
But there's nothing wrong with being soft sci-fi! It's not a disparaging comment! There's no requirement that sci-fi strive to be "hard" in order to be good, either.
Personally, I find hard sci-fi rather boring - it can be like reading an account of accounting practices. Interesting, but ultimately unmoving. Dune is maybe the rare exception for me.
In fact, in the wikipedia article on soft sci-fi the paragraph after the one you quoted argues that there's no set definition for hard/soft sci-fi. So perhaps we shouldn't even go around saying "this is a hard sci-fi book" and "this is a soft sci-fi book." If you had a book which was mostly hard sci-fi, but tossed in FTL, would that automatically class it as soft sci-fi despite all the hard elements in the book?