Comment by fc417fc802

> There's, you know, fiction elements -- gates, aliens, magic.

Setting aside magic, fictional science and technology aren't incompatible with hard sci-fi; in fact I'd argue that exploring those on "serious" terms is the entire point of the genre.

At some point I started seeing people advance this weird idea online that hard sci-fi means essentially nonfiction but that's not correct (or even sensible if you stop and think about it since at that point you're just writing a traditional character or political drama or whatever). It simply means taking a simulation style approach to various technological elements of the story. The deeper the simulation goes (ie the more nested levels of "okay and why does that work that way and what are the practical impacts on society") the "harder" the work is.

Magic is an interesting case. In theory it could be compatible with science but in practice the sort of phenomena that people usually mean by that term necessarily imply the intervention of some higher power.