What really irked me about The Three Body Problem was the way it blithely introduced faster-than-light communication as a plot point -- a key plot point! -- without any hint of a nod to the fact that this is impossible as far as we currently know. In fact, quite the opposite, the speed of light is taken to be a hard limit elsewhere in the story and that plays a key role too. So which is it?
I think it can be okay to invent magical tech in hard SF, if and only if you clearly distinguish the magical bits and work through all the ramifications logically. A great example is the “bobbles” in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
TBP is also very cavalier about basic interactions with energy. To make a sophon, I kid you not, the aliens unfold a proton into a 2D sheet that they wrap around their entire planet. The unfolded proton has the same mass as the folded one (explicitly stated), but far from being invisible, it actually blocks all incoming light from their sun. That's orders of magnitude more energy than it takes to shatter protons in particle accelerators, smashing into the sophon for days on end, and it just... holds together? And then it gets to Earth and can apparently move and fold and unfold on its own and intercept all of our communications (which should also shatter it).
What really irked me about The Three Body Problem was the way it blithely introduced faster-than-light communication as a plot point -- a key plot point! -- without any hint of a nod to the fact that this is impossible as far as we currently know. In fact, quite the opposite, the speed of light is taken to be a hard limit elsewhere in the story and that plays a key role too. So which is it?
I think it can be okay to invent magical tech in hard SF, if and only if you clearly distinguish the magical bits and work through all the ramifications logically. A great example is the “bobbles” in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.