It's quite stellar that readers come away from some of these series with such different notions.
Look up lists of the best hard scifi and you'll find the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, or at least the Three Body Problem, on almost every one.
Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.
I'll give you that the further the trilogy goes the looser the explanations get, but that's by design. We jump far, far to the end of the universe. How does anyone give a reasonable explanation for billion year advanced technology?
On the flipside, in the Expanse, humans are limited by physics and largely modern limitations, sure, but the crux of the story is built around a magical alien molecule for which we are never given an explanation. It's hard scifi to a degree, but no less soft than say, the sophon in ROEP.
"Hardness" in science fiction is scarcely an academical subject of literature. I personally like Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness [0] but not beyond a thought excercise.
If you can, find me a published author stating "I wrote this story strictly in terms of a level 5 in the Mohs scale"; there will be none (unless they're targeting reddit as a reader base).
> Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.
I cannot believe this to be true. While I'm wary of the "no True Scotsman" aspect to the term "hard sf", TBP and it's sequels are about as hard as jello.
Honestly, the author would have been better off allowing things to just be hand wavey instead of poorly explaining everything.
TBP's sophon is one of the most blithely nonsensical sci-fi technologies I have ever read. I found it far, far more egregious than the Expanse's magical alien molecule, to the point it put me off reading other books in the trilogy. IMO it disqualifies TBP from the hard sci-fi category entirely, but I admit I might be a bit too worked up about it.
The protomolecule turned people into vomit zombies with a collective hive mind that could communicate instantaneously across the solar system and move an asteroid defying all laws of gravity, with the ultimate secret intent of building an interstellar wormhole.
Again, in the series (at least early on) humans are quite limited by known constraints and it would easily be considered hard scifi in many regards. But its central conceit was no less blithely nonsensical than that of TBP's - I simply can't understand how someone could put one in the hard category but disqualify the other.
I've only read two books of the Expanse, what I've read is a bit soft, but I would argue it is harder than TBP.
I think one key difference for me is that we are not told what the protomolecule is, so we can imagine it is some kind of massive DNA-like structure packed with enzymes and whatnot that can plow through biological material and reorganize it. That is a plausible start. Then, sure, it may overdo the capabilities a bit.
The sophon, though, we are told exactly what it is: it is a proton unfolded into a 2D plane on which a supercomputer is etched, which is able to configure itself in order to intercept and direct light, which is how it is able to spy on us and pull light tricks. The problem is that it is nonsensical from the start. If you can unfold a proton around a planet in such a way that it blocks all light, it is being bombarded by far more energy than it would be in a particle accelerator. It's like using paper origami to bounce asteroids, basically the same issue as the Expanse, except worse, and that's before we even get into the supercomputer stuff.
Still, point taken. The Expanse should probably not be classified as hard sci-fi either.
Look up lists of the best hard scifi and you'll find the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, or at least the Three Body Problem, on almost every one.
Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.
I'll give you that the further the trilogy goes the looser the explanations get, but that's by design. We jump far, far to the end of the universe. How does anyone give a reasonable explanation for billion year advanced technology?
On the flipside, in the Expanse, humans are limited by physics and largely modern limitations, sure, but the crux of the story is built around a magical alien molecule for which we are never given an explanation. It's hard scifi to a degree, but no less soft than say, the sophon in ROEP.