...Wait, dammit, that is one!
Ahem. So. People seem to have this "hierarchy" of SF hardness (the Mohs Scale, a certain wiki calls it), where the mere presence or absence of particular elements determine a series' hardness.
Fetid dingo's kidneys (dammit, that's another one). What determines hardness is not the mere presence or absence of a given element, but how well it's handled. What defines hard SF is that one justify one's creativities with the laws of physics. Merely being more daring in speculation does not render a series soft; ignoring the possibility of speculation is what makes a series soft. A series can have aliens, FTL, and artificial gravity, and be as hard as Lord Indra's vajra; or a series can have none of those things, have the action all take place in one star system, and yet be softer than gentle, retarded candies described in Cajun (LSU has a Cajun French dictionary online, if that confused you).
- Aliens. The mere presence of aliens doesn't affect the hardness or softness of a series one way or another; how they're presented does. A harder series will have its aliens thought out, with distinctive culture and ecosystem. Example: Larry Niven's Kzinti (aliens) vs the Reavers in Firefly (not aliens, but sort of a plain-label generic equivalent). Niven actually paused to say, "Wait, how would Kzin society function?" Yes, his answer was an illiterate caricature of feudalism, based on very bad anthropology, but the Reavers are rabid people who can somehow cooperate enough to crew spaceships, so I think he wins.
- Artificial gravity. Again, this doesn't directly affect hardness—the gracefulness of handwaving does (and neglecting to handwave means you've chosen to answer "Pass" to the question, and receive no points). Granting for the moment that exotic matter exists (or can be made, possibly using the Casimir effect), it should be possible to use its weird property (negative mass) to create warps in spacetime. It might be possible, as theorized by Alcubierre and many after him, to use one of these warps to achieve FTL. But that's controversial (see below). What isn't controversial is that you could use one of those warps to induce an actual gravity field. One thing it won't do, though, is negate rest mass—it might be usable as an inertia damper, redirecting the forces of acceleration away from ship and crew and into the surrounding space-time geometry, in a sort of Einsteinian judo, but it won't negate the need for motive force, and certainly (we're looking at you again, Firefly) won't make a reaction engine any more efficient.
- FTL. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre had the first idea for FTL that doesn't throw out General Relativity...and there are about 87 variants of it out there. It's a warp-drive, or a very localized space-fold drive, compressing space around a ship for motive force. The main challenge, by Krasnikov (who reduced the requirements of negative energy, which I would've considered the biggest difficulty, to the equivalent of a few milligrams) and Coule, who also picked holes in Krasnikov's proposed solution, is that the exotic matter for the warp would have to already be going at FTL speeds to go at FTL speeds. It might not even matter, if, rather than moving the exotic matter itself, one could use the exotic matter to make a warp, then move the warp itself (the fabric of space-time can move FTL with no trouble, that's how the Big Rip would happen, if it were gonna). Notice how hypothetical all this is, since we have no knowledge of exotic matter, let alone its properties, nor how such a space-time phenomenon would behave—is it useful itself as a means of propulsion, for instance, or can you use it to compress space and then move through it by conventional means? The latter would handily remove the need for the exotic matter to also be tachyons, since the motive force would come from something else, and the warp would just affect the distance moved through (theoretically, at one extreme, making it possible to use a shaken Coke bottle as an FTL thruster). There is ample room to wave your hands in, in other words, and no reason to be satisfied with nonexistent FTL, other than it being a better artistic choice. There's never any reason to be satisfied by vague FTL (BSG, I see you back there, stop trying to hide).
- Reactionless drives. These are becoming something of a dirty word in SF, because they haven't always been handled very well (see, e.g., Campbell and the thing-that-spins-on-a-scale antigravity-device hoax). Only there might be a couple ways to do it—one's a much more modest, indeed entirely uncontroversial (if you can get the exotic matter), application of an Alcubierre warp. Another is a thing I saw described in a paper by one David Waite, called inertia control by stress-energy tensor metric patching. I don't entirely understand it (I never took high school calculus, never mind the kind that involves Lorentzian manifolds), but it seems, in layman's terms, you can sort of roll an object up in spacetime itself by patching together the space on opposite sides of a spherical shell made of, again, exotic matter. Rolling it up like this apparently allows control of the inertia inside; I'm not clear if it renders what's inside the shell weightless, or if one could create another space-time distortion inside it to have gravity, but a (probably inaccurate, sue me) version of it is the engine the aliens use in my books. It has the added trait (shared with Dr. (?) Waite's version of the Alcubierre warp), of creating an event horizon, in the strict sense that whatever's inside the distortion becomes invisible, the shell becoming a black gap in the starfield behind it (it wouldn't have any other traits of a black hole, though, except that the distortion it makes might cause small amounts of Hawking radiation as it forces virtual particles actual). Much narrative richness to be had, eh?
Land o' Goshen, this is getting long. To be continued!!
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