A few thoughts on the purpose of making your fictional science rigorous and the “sublime universe” stuff.

I think there are two orthogonal axes here: Sublimity and rigour. Rigour, also known as “hard” SF, basically epistemic discipline, and sublimity, which is the essence of Golden Age SF and what Liu is gesturing at in the Church of SF essay. Some books have both, like Deepness in the Sky or House of Suns, and some just have one. For example, Death’s End and the Culture books both sacrifice rigour for the sake of sublimity.

Le Guin, Herbert and Tolkien (for example) all applied a similar level of rigour as seen in hard SF - but rigour relative to the humanities literature. E.g. history, theology and linguistics for Tolkien. They also grounded what they were doing in this deep foundation of cognitive archetypes, like Tolkien going back to primary sources on mythology, or Le Guin’s “psychomyths” and readings of Jung. Hard humanities fiction is basically similar in approach to hard SF, but gets more recognition in the mainstream because it’s more legible to mainstream critics who are, after all, humanities professionals.

This hard HF idea is not original, I’m riffing off Ozy Brennan here (ozybrennan.substack.com…). She lists three primary merits for hard humanities stuff: socratic argument, world citizenship, and narrative imagination. For hard SF, I would say that three merits are:

1. Being in conversation with reality rather than existing in this world of human cognitive archetypes which can easily descend into solipsism. Placing people to scale within the structure of the universe. Often things like morality are constrained by the possible.

2. Being in conversation with our current narratives to explain the arrangement of the world at the deepest levels.

3. To get at these deep narratives that really depend on the external world. For example, Terra Ignota is centrally about things that Palmer could have discussed in a more literary book about Columbus or Venice or whatever, but it’s enhanced by being science fiction.

I don’t know, I’d like to refine these more, but it’s a start? Regardless, I do feel that there are these foundational justifications for both rigour and sublimity, just as foundational as what the New Wave was working with. But to really excel you need to understand the foundations and I think this is what holds back a lot of hard SF.

I also think Liu’s case of religious awe is part of this but it’s too narrow.

I think hard SF is currently more difficult to write in some ways than hard HF, because you need scientific rigour but also this deep literary grounding like Le Guin had. Some people pull this off, like Ada Palmer and Ken Liu, but you have to straddle these very disparate fields, whereas you kinda pick up on the literary stuff doing the background research for your hard humanities fiction. Or at least it’s next door rather than having to completely code switch from physics or biology to psychoanalysis.

Many have argued that this gulf between the humanities and hard sciences is a fundamental issue and at the bottom of a lot of the meaning crisis stuff. I’m sympathetic to this and it gets to the heart of why hard SF is important and should be taken seriously. It’s the central issue in a lot of my favourite SF novels like Terra Ignota or Ventus.

There is also a lot of bad hard SF where the author intuitively understands that they enjoy working out the details of their fictional world as an end in itself and don’t think deeper about the root of that. This is how you get shallow STEM triumphalism and datasheet worldbuilding.

Something else interesting is the case of hard SF which has aged poorly. You kind of see this with Dune, actually, where Herbert was leaning on a bunch of humanities literature in anthropology or psychology that was later superseded IIRC. But there’s lots of Golden Age SF which is rigorous to the literature of the time, which was wrong. An extreme example would be the novels about the jungles of Venus. I think this is still worth studying, intuitively, because of what it says about our relationship to the world. But this also needs more refinement.