‘On Science And Science Fiction’ by Kathryn Cramer

I read Cramer’s introduction last night but was completely unable to penetrate it. I put that down to tired eyes but re-reading it today I’m still unable to make much progress. Paragraph follows paragraph with little sense of an argument building or even much of a connection between the various assertions. Not only do I have no idea what Cramer means by hard SF but I find it hard to work out what she believes about anything so often does her writing fold back in on itself.

It is also, in its own way, as disingenuous as Gregory Benford’s introduction. Early on, Cramer says: “There has been a persistent view that hard sf in somehow the core and center of the sf field.” (25) No mention of the fact Benford has just stated this view a couple of pages earlier; each introduction exists in a strange vacuum.