LogFAQs > #976074757

Muscles posted...

I'm not sure where the line is for hard sci-fi vs soft sci-fi but my favorites that I read were Clarke and Crichton

The usual sort of delineation is that hard sci-fi tends to focus on the science first and characters/story are sort of a bit of an afterthought, while soft sci-fi is more using less defined science as a backdrop to tell a more personal story.

This is a pretty good summary:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

I mostly only bring it up because I know there are some people who say "sci-fi" when what they really mean is just "action/adventure in space". But full-on hard sci-fi would bore the absolute shit out of them.



Muscles posted...

I just finished the Talismans of Shannara yesterday, I love the world he's built so far. My only problem with him is that he calls back to previous books way too much, but I love his characters and stories so I push through it, definitely worth it. I know a lot of people say Sword of Shannara is a Tolkien clone but honestly it loses that vibe for me like half way through. My favorite from the first 7 books has probably been Wishsong of Shannara.

I kind of preferred the overarching story of books 4-7. But if you have a problem with references to past stuff and callbacks, you might start to tap out around the same point I did.

My other problem with the later books in the series is that he starts integrating one of his other series into its universe, where it kind of stops being pure fantasy and starts shading into weird post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy crossover, and that's not really to my taste (though oddly, I loved when Fred Saberhagen did it even more blatantly in Empire of the East).