Super-Scientific Realism

or “Over-Hard Sci-Fi”

Ordinary fiction has lots of holes in its logic which we let it get away with for a bit of fun. One of the tropes of rationalist fiction is to deny the author that tool, requiring characters to have realistic motives (rather than doing things like giving up just to fit the scene) and a world with a consistent physics (so there can be magic or other fantastic elements, but it has to follow definite rules). Somewhat similarly, hard sci-fi requires everything to be realistic to the best of scientific knowledge

An interesting thing about this is that our understanding of the real world isn’t generally consistent. At any given time, there tend to be a number of known inconsistencies between theory and data. Could there be a genre of fiction which specifically emphasized being more consistent than our best view of reality? You’d play off of the known inadequacies of a theory, filling in details as consistently as possible, but without trying to be like reality. The aim would be to look like something a consistency-obsessed alien would come up with, having access to only our theories divorced from observation. This would likely be easiest in the softer sciences, such as economics and sociology, where the result would be a kind of other-world anthropological visit to the society which would result if the simplified models were true. A somewhat harder case would be biology; I have next to no idea what strange things would be predicted by biology if its theoretical inconsistencies were resolved without regard for reality. The grand challenge, of course, would be physics: describing the strange alternative worlds where quantum field theory holds but general relativity doesn’t, and making a plot? Carrying out the implications of our best partial unified theories? Surely there exist people who could write this, but not I.