Why Science Fiction Is a Setting, Not a Genre
Recently I came across a video by Rachel from The Shades of Orange. It’s a thoughtful piece recommending books she considers hard science fiction.
To her credit, Rachel takes pains to explain her definition: Science fiction grounded in real or plausible science, as opposed to soft science fiction, which uses scientific aesthetics without showing its homework.
Rachel is also honest about her own biases. She prefers the “hard” side of the science fiction spectrum but acknowledges the merits of “soft” sci-fi too. And she stresses that you don’t need a degree in physics or biology to enjoy hard science fiction.
Her recommendations reflect this balance: approachable bestsellers like The Martian, midlist thrillers like Saturn Run, pop science crowd-pleasers from Michael Crichton, and doorstopperss like Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves for the oldheads.
What comes through in the video is that Rachel’s enthusiasm is genuine. Her presentation is clear, and her intent friendly. Yet like many modern reviewers, she accepts certain categories at face value. Specifically, she builds her whole video on the binary of “hard” versus “soft” science fiction. And the problem that dichotomy introduces is that it’s worse than useless. It’s a relic of mid-century gatekeeping, and clinging to it does more harm than good.
Related: Why “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” Are Dead
The hard/soft split rests on an unfounded premise: That the presence of rigorous science makes for a distinct kind of storytelling. But that assumption collapses under even light pressure. Today’s “hard” SF is tomorrow’s retrofuturist curiosity. Every time scientific knowledge advances, the hard line slips. What counted as airtight science in 1940 often looks quaint or even laughable in 2025.
Consider Hugo Gernsback’s electrical gadget stories, hailed in his day as the pinnacle of scientific plausibility. Today they read like alchemy. Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory, a cornerstone of his supposedly “hard” Foundation stories, is no closer to being real than Van Vogt’s Null-A dream logic. Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain drew praise for its scientific rigor, but we now know its microbiology is outdated.
By definition, every work of “hard” science fiction softens with age. The category is unstable, temporary, and arbitrary. It has no lasting utility.
Why, then, did the field cling so tightly to these labels?
Enter Damon Knight and his fellow gatekeepers.
As sci-fi grandmaster John C. Wright has pointed out, Knight waged open war against A.E. Van Vogt, the true father of Golden Age science fiction. When The World of Null-A hit, readers were electrified. Here was a writer who could marry breathless pulp storytelling with genuinely novel speculative frameworks. Van Vogt’s nonlinear plotting and dream logic enthralled fans … and threatened critics. Knight dismissed Van Vogt as incoherent. And through repetition, that smear stuck.
By the time Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein were joking about being the “Big Three” in the 1970s, the fan consensus had ossified. Van Vogt was memory-holed. The Pulp Archivist has shown that the earliest “Big Three” actually did include Van Vogt alongside Heinlein and sometimes Asimov or Bradbury. But the critics decided that Serious™ science fiction required hard scientific rigor, and Van Vogt’s dreamlike plotting didn’t fit their mold.
The hard/soft distinction became one more tool for the mandarins to elevate some authors while discarding others.
But reality doesn’t go away just because some people try to ignore it.
The deeper error is mistaking science fiction for a genre at all. It isn’t.
Genres are defined by conventions of plot, character, and theme. A mystery must center on the investigation of a puzzle. A romance must chart the progress and setbacks of a love affair. A tragedy must end when the hero’s fatal flaw leads to his undoing.
What does science fiction require? A poll of readers would probably turn up:
Spaceships
Time machines
Robots
Astute readers already see the issue. Those are trappings, not structural elements.
Swap out the technology for …
Crystal-powered airships
Fairy rings where 10 years pass in a day
Golems
The story beats remain identical.
The Martian is a tale about a man marooned on a desert island, using his wits to stay alive.
Jurassic Park could just as easily be a fantasy about wizards conjuring monsters they can’t control.
Seveneves can be envisioned as a mythic exodus wherein the gods smite Earth, and humanity must flee across the sky.
The supposed genre markers of science fiction are window dressing. Strip them down, and you’ll find mysteries, adventures, tragedies, romances, or even Westerns.
Because science fiction is a setting, not a genre.
Related: How Tropes Cannibalize Creativity
Once we recognize that science fiction is a setting, the “hard” vs. “soft” argument collapses entirely.
After all, no one talks about “hard romance” versus “soft romance.” Mystery authors don’t fret about whether their detective novels have realistic investigative procedures. The only reason science fiction keeps this false dichotomy is because mid-20th-century critics insisted on it.
Sadly, the psyop worked. Most modern fans have inherited these categories without questioning their origins.
Rachel, for one, wants to help new readers find approachable entry points, which is admirable. But she wouold do better to drop the artificial taxonomy imposed by people like Damon Knight, whose primary interest wasn’t enriching the field, but controlling it.
If we want to talk about what makes a story good or bad, categories like “hard” and “soft” are distractions. What matters are the same elements that matter in any genre:
Are the characters compelling?
Does the plot reach a satisfying resolution?
Are the themes coherent and powerful?
Does the setting serve the story instead of the other way around?
Van Vogt’s critics derided his plotting as irrational. Yet his stories gripped readers as few others could. That’s why he was counted among the Big Three before the gatekeepers wrote him out of history. When we strip away their arbitrary definitions, we can see more clearly what Van Vogt achieved. He gave readers stories that burned themselves into memory; whose strangeness invited rereading and reflection.
That indelibility; not a sliding scale of technical accuracy, is the measure of great storytelling.
The critics who insisted otherwise did so to police the industry and exile writers like Van Vogt who didn’t play by their rules. The tragedy is that their categories linger to this day, warping how fans and reviewers talk about the field.
It’s time to leave those makeshift categories behind. Don’t ask whether a story is “hard” or “soft” science fiction. Ask whether it’s a good story.
Because in the end, that’s all that matters to readers.
Watch TheShadesofOrange video here:
For action-adventure that defies genre labels to bring you Gundam by way of Xenogears, read my military SF epic Combat Frame XSeed!
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.