Hard Science Fiction

Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell's Islands of Space, and the complementary term soft science fiction, formed by analogy to the popular distinction between the hard natural sciences and the soft social sciences, first appeared in the late 1970s; Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, built on mathematical sociology, is among the examples generally considered hard science fiction, though critic Gary Westfahl argues that neither term forms part of a rigorous taxonomy, functioning instead as approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful.