I don't know, I'm personally pretty alright with differentiating between hard science fiction and soft science fiction. There's something wonderful about going out on a limb and trying to envision a world where the impossible is possible. I consider science fiction and fantasy a continuum rather than strict categories.
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different strokes for different folks.
I prefer HARD SF.
It annoys me when Fantasy claims to be SF.
When I was reading dead tree I used to complain to the staff at the bookstore about mixing the two.
I felt that they should be separated in different sections in the bookstore.
All I got were blank stares....
...I don't think they read much.
I wonder, too, how much of what would have been referred to as hard Sci-Fi would no longer be treated as such in light of knowledge that was simply not available at the time of those writings....
MOST of it.
That's one thing about SF (of the hard variety in particular)....you MUST take into consideration when it was written. What was the state of the art at that time?
I recall an Arthur C. Clarke book in which a character took his phone out of his pocket...AMAZING...this was when
was the very latest in mobile communication
In my experience, most bookstore staff read pretty heavily.
I used to spend a lot of time at The Center for Science Fiction Studies at the University of Kansas, and got to meet a lot of scifi and fantasy writers. The topic of whether hard SF was the only true SF came up a lot, and pretty notably almost all of them derided the notion- especially the hard science fiction writers. (At minimum, because soft scifi is a bit of a gateway drug for hard scifi- not a lot of people jump straight in the deep end.)
All that being said, I do love me some hard science fiction.