Yeah that’s a more concise and sensible definition.
I mean they were designed by legitimate scientists for use in our reality, they’re about as hard as it gets.
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So once a scifi tech gets tough enough, it just becomes a regular tech piece… got it.
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Sci-fi’s hardness scale just means how scientifically-accurate it is. Hard sci-fi could theoretically work IRL, soft sci-fi may as well be magic, and there’s a sliding scale between. Star Wars/Trek are soft sci-fi, and a lot of old science fiction stories are hard, although I don’t actually know enough about that era of science fiction to even say for certain whether Bradbury and Asimov were proper contemporaries.
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Soft-scifi differs from regular magic because usually it is attempted to be somehow explained as a piece of tech made thanks to a yet-to-be-discovered material/energy (unlike proper magic).
clarke’s third law (char limit)
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Soft sci-fi shades into fantasy at the very far end (see Star Wars - it has magic), although usually it’s still relatively defined fantasy because soft magic systems and sci-fi don’t really intersect well if the former’s a normal part of the setting.
Soft sci-fi tech isn’t going to look the same as magic, but narratively, it’s quite similar.
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It’s just that scifi in general is far more “expensive” than magic.
It’s got a certain quality to it. It’s as hard to define sci-fi as to define magic, but generally, it’s impersonal. This is why the Force is magic. Manipulating the Force is an ability, and not completely a skill, like programming’s a skill. The Force connects with people. Supertechnology doesn’t do that, innately. It is a thing, which was built, and you interface with it. Magic, generally, was always there, and was never built by anyone, and you connect with it instead.
I suppose that’s one boundary line. Something’s magic if it fundamentally relies on something you didn’t build and can’t replicate. (That doesn’t bar extremely analysed magic, like human technology, nor does it bar ‘magic’ that’s actually based on very advanced outside technology, which is arguably not really magic vibeswise even if it’s functionally identical.)
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Several series have had magic very definitely invented, and in a series like the expanse, supertech is more or less magic by that definition. The alien species made the protomolecule and the protomolecule makes a goddam stargate, and no one can reproduce or make any of that. It is technology though ,because someone invented it, and it follows rules that seem impersonal and “realistic”.
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I guess that very-soft scifi could be a transistional phase between “regular scifi” and “magic”.
Do you think time travel would be added in some capacity to Thrive one day?
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OH GOD NO, i cannot imagine that working at all, but yk, cool mod idea. Letting the doctor explore your world over time or something would be so cool.
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Who/What do you mean by “the doctor”?
Returning to the topic, should there be a chance for a communication to fail (for instance in society stage when you’re still using people for delivering orders)?
The correct way to phrase that question is “Doctor who?”
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Well I don’t think they’d come to a random Thrive playthrough.