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Subgenres/Sci-Fi/Soft

Soft Sci-Fi

Soft science fiction is more interested in people and societies than in hardware. It uses the future to ask questions about culture, psychology and politics.

Parent genre: Sci-FiNamed in the 1970s, rooted in the 1960s New Wave4,484 books classified in Saga

Where soft sci-fi came from

“Soft” is defined against “hard.” Once readers began calling scientifically rigorous science fiction hard SF in the late 1950s, the other half of the field needed a name too. It drew on the social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics, rather than physics and engineering.

The New Wave of the 1960s made that half central. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagined a planet without fixed sex, and her The Dispossessed (1974) compared an anarchist moon with a capitalist planet. Octavia E. Butler's Kindred (1979) and Parable of the Sower (1993) used speculative premises to examine race, power and survival.

Much of the science fiction that crosses over to general readers is soft. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2013), which drew wide attention for its handling of gender in space opera, all treat the science as a premise and the people as the subject.

What separates it from neighbouring subgenres

Soft science fiction is defined by what it treats as the hard problem. The speculative idea is the starting point, and the story's real interest is what that idea does to people, cultures and institutions.

Hard Sci-Fi

Hard science fiction makes physics and engineering part of the plot and tries to get them right. Soft science fiction takes its premise for granted and spends its rigour on the human consequences.

Dystopian

Many dystopias are soft science fiction, since they're about social systems. Dystopian is a narrower label for one kind of society; soft science fiction covers every kind.

First Contact

First contact stories can be hard or soft. The soft ones focus on language, culture and misunderstanding rather than spacecraft and biology.

Space Opera

Space opera is defined by scale and adventure. Some of it is soft, such as Ancillary Justice, but the label describes the canvas rather than the approach.

Hard science fiction asks whether the ship would fly. Soft science fiction asks who would be allowed on board.

How it reads

Expect character-driven stories with a single speculative change, such as a new biology, a different social order or a strange technology, explored for its human effects. The technology is often lightly sketched or unexplained, and nobody minds.

Many soft science fiction novels are shelved as literary fiction, and their writers don't always call them science fiction at all. The label is less a genre than an approach, and it covers a lot of the field's most celebrated books.

Frequently asked

What's the difference between hard and soft science fiction?+

Hard science fiction builds its story on accurate physical science and engineering. Soft science fiction draws on the social sciences, or simply focuses on people, and doesn't explain its technology in detail.

Is soft science fiction less serious?+

No. The term describes which sciences a book draws on, not its quality or rigour. Some of the most acclaimed science fiction ever written is soft.

Where should a new reader start?+

The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic and a good sense of what the approach can do. For a recent example, Klara and the Sun is a short, quiet novel narrated by an artificial friend.

Is The Handmaid's Tale science fiction?+

It's speculative fiction set in a near-future America, and it's usually counted as soft science fiction and dystopian fiction. Atwood herself has preferred the term speculative fiction.

Is Star Wars soft science fiction?+

It's usually called space opera or science fantasy. It's soft in the sense that its technology isn't explained, but its focus is adventure rather than social questions.

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