Rediscovering Hard Science Fiction – and Why “Fantasy in Space” Doesn’t Quite Scratch the Same Itch

For a long time I drifted away from hard science fiction—at least the kind of SF driven by ideas rather than space wizards, space empires, or fantasy tropes wearing chrome-plated armour. Then last year I picked up Greg Egan’s Permutation City, and something clicked back into place. The same part of my brain that lit up as a kid reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 or Rendezvous with Rama suddenly woke up again.

There’s nothing quite like that particular flavour of SF: the big-idea, mind-bending, concept-driven storytelling where the central engine of wonder is thought itself. And yet, over the past decade, only a handful of books scratched that itch. Charles Stross’s Glasshouse did it. Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief did it. But many other “SF” titles I picked up turned out to be… something else entirely.

Fantasy in Space – And Why It Sometimes Works (and Sometimes Doesn’t)

A lot of modern speculative fiction marketed as science fiction is essentially fantasy with spaceships. I don’t say this as criticism; some of these books are among my favourites. Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series? Brilliant. C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy? Atmospheric, dark, and compelling.

But both could easily be rewritten without a single starship and they would still work just fine. Their core mechanics, worldbuilding, and themes operate independently of scientific logic. They rely on magic—explicit or implicit—not on speculative extrapolation of technology or physics.

And honestly, I often find “fantasy in space” more palatable than hybrids that try to blend the two directly. Works where magic and science operate side by side tend to break my suspension of disbelief, not because I’m a purist, but because the rules start to contradict each other. Magic that violates fundamental physics is hard to reconcile with a world that simultaneously wants me to take its science seriously.

Yes, Clarke’s Third Law tells us that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But that only helps if the magic is technology, or at least behaves like technology. If it’s just magic labeled as science, the illusion falls apart quickly.

When Magic Is Science After All

There are brilliant exceptions where the boundary between science and magic becomes the point. Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth both present decaying far-future worlds where what looks like magic is revealed (or strongly implied) to be technology forgotten by time.

This “magic-as-misunderstood-science” feels more honest, in a way. It leans into Clarke’s Law while preserving internal logic. And it’s far more satisfying than pretending that gravity-manipulating sorcery or soul-binding rituals somehow coexist with real-world physics.

A Personal Contradiction: Why I Still Prefer Star Wars to Star Trek

Given all this, it’s always been ironic that I prefer Star Wars over Star Trek. If anything violates the science/magic separation, it’s Star Wars. The Force is magic, plain and simple. Hyperspace travel has no scientific grounding whatsoever. And the midichlorian detour in the prequels—an attempt to rationalise the irrational—only made things worse.

And yet… I’m far more forgiving with films. Different medium, different expectations. Movies aren’t trying to build rigorous speculative frameworks. They thrive on myth, archetype, image, and emotion. Books invite slow thinking; films ask for fast feeling. So I let Star Wars be a fairy tale in space, and I don’t demand the same internal logic from it that I expect from a science-fiction novel.

Returning to the Big Ideas

Maybe this is why Permutation City hit me so hard when I picked it up last year. It reminded me how powerful idea-driven SF can be when it takes itself seriously enough to follow its implications all the way down. And how rare that experience has become.

It also reminded me that there’s space—pun unavoidable—for all of it: the hard SF that bends your brain, the fantasy that hides in a spacesuit, and even the space operas that don’t care about physics at all. But every once in a while, it’s nice to return to the works that treat science and thought experiments as their true protagonists.