Tau Zero's Journal: Stories you couldn't write today

(I had thought about the topic for this JE, and then forgot about when I was posting last night. Had I remembered it, I probably would have talked about this instead of archaic words.)

(There are two signs of senility. Forgetfulness is one of them, and I forget the other.)

The problem with (hard) science fiction is that it depends on science, and science is uncovering new knowledge at an exponentially-increasing rate. Take the origin of my nom de plume, Poul Anderson's book "Tau Zero". The plot revolves around relativistic time dilation and a cyclic universe. A colony ship-full of people find themselves in a difficult situation: they can accelerate but cannot stop and can't make repairs until they get to a place where the gas density is low enough to be safe (at their speed, each hydrogen atom is a very powerful cosmic ray). By the time they have gotten outside the galaxy to make repairs so much time has gone by that their original destination colony is long past them, so they just continue accelerating and letting the universe age faster and faster around them due to time dilation (tau=zero). The universe stops expanding, collapses and re-explodes; they emerge into the next cycle where everything is new and they get to start over.

You couldn't write this story today, at least not as hard SF. The discovery of "dark energy" means that the universe will expand forever, so the fundamental premise is wrong.

There are lots of other SF stories you couldn't write today, like "The Flying Sorcerers." Not because of the physics, but because you'd have to take all the misogynistic elements out of it. However, satire runs by different rules.

I'll posit that

[ekuns]

probably more than half of all hard-sci-fi (where the intent is that the physics will remain possible as new advances are found) become obsolete by new discoveries. And a much greater fraction of other Sci Fi stories. The only way to escape this fate is to go profoundly speculative or space opera (where you just don't care) or science fantasy. And yes, I've read stories that I considered to be science fantasy. :)

One of my favorite hard Sci Fi authors is Forward.

The good news is that new science disco