Why do most wannabe SF writers reject science?

[Broomstick]

I've written both non-fiction and fiction - and yes, I've been published. (Nothing famous or particularly lucrative, but I keep hoping...)

Non-fiction is easier because, well, the world is limited and has rules you can't change that helps keep your narrative on track. Fiction is harder, especially if you're making up your own world, because you really do have to come up with everything and you must be very careful and organized to stay consistent.

Yes, adhering to real-world physics helps because it's consistent and limited. Defining limits can be important, even when you're trying to be imaginative.

[Bluewolf]

As many have said, I don't think its a case of people being hostile to the idea of actual Science in their writing. It's more of the case that they simply feel as if its not worth the effort to research into it, that they are using Science like magic (a way to explain things) or that they want are too lazy.

On top of that, hard sci fi can be seen as limiting (and it is to many ideas). I can imagine some writers basically wanting to have their fighters and ftl drives and not having to scrap them.

[Zixinus]

On top of that, hard sci fi can be seen as limiting (and it is to many ideas). I can imagine some writers basically wanting to have their fighters and ftl drives and not having to scrap them.

Which is another issue. Some writers might want to go a bit with the heavier science, but realise that people expect fighters and swords to come along. It helps makes a more exciting story and when your work isn't that top-notch to begin with and you're on the pay, they'll squeeze in fighters because it helps.

FTL drives (or lack of thereof) are a bit of a different story. If you have a large government several solar systems wide and since having several years of pausing time can throw a cramp into your pace, you just go with it. Even Asimov went with it, if I recall.

[Bluewolf]

Then again there is alway's the literal space fantasy option, AKA 40K yet that tends to be harder to do right but does allow you to basically mix the genres up a bit.

Also given on what Zin say's. They may not simply care about what is realistic or not. The demographic they are aiming for may not.

[Bluewolf]

And it isn't to many ideas, and where it is limiting, like we said above, that is often a good kind of limitation.

Well it depends on how hard the hard sci fi is. What if I wanted to have pew pew lasers and magical flying churches? What if I wanted to have space sword's or ships that act like planes in space? In the end it comes down to taste. Some people may not like those limits at all as it restricts on what they want to see. On top of that some people wont go into SF for realism which means. Again it all depends on several things.

On the topic of vision. It's probably that some think their idea of SF is better or is better than what there is but I also think there are a few who just don't really care. I can't imagine everyone thinking that their view of SF is better, more that it is there story and they get to do what they like with it. Simple as that really. I have never seen anyone project a "hurr hurr my view is best" message.

[Nyrath]

Which well-known sci-fi authors are actually scientists? Peter Watts is the only one who springs to mind right now.

Off the top of my head:
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Isaac Asimov
E. E. "Doc" Smith
John Cramer
Gregory Bendford
Vernor Vinge
David Brin
Fred Hoyle

[Starglider]

What if I wanted to have pew pew lasers and magical flying churches? What if I wanted to have space sword's or ships that act like planes in space?

For a start, set your story in some alternate dimension or universe. Make it officially science-fantasy. Honestly, I don't know why more writers don't do this, there's really little to be gained in (even implicitly) claiming that your novel is a plausible future history, unless you that is your primary goal as a writer.

Also all this obsession with storytelling; in 'serious' science fiction, the story is often secondary. It's purpose is to illustrate the primary ideas, and deliver a little entertainment along with them. Said ideas can actually be raw scientific and technological ones, but usually they're more about how specific advances will change future society and human lifestyles. If you're doing that, then the 'future history' perspective is important to making the book relevant. 99% of writers have neither the ability nor the desire to engage in this kind of futurism-disguised-as-fiction. If you are using sci-fi as window dressing only, stay the hell away from describing be future history.

[Simon_Jester]

On the original topic, I suspect that most of these wannabe writers are getting their first introduction to 'putting the science in science fiction' in the format "you can't do that." You can't have a planet-city because of heat pollution, you can't have an FTL communication system because it creates causality loops, and so on.

It's pretty depressing when every cool idea you ever have is getting shot full of holes, especially by someone who talks down to you. At some point, the natural reaction is to say "Fuck it, I'm never going to get anything done if I keep listening to this guy drone on about all the things I can't do!" Science and fiction aren't the only place where this happens. People can only juggle a limited number of important points in their head at a time; if you pile enough rules and confounding variables on them they start rejecting some of them simply as a defense mechanism.

So I think a lot of them are rejecting science because of a marketing failure; science is presented to them as a list of things they can't do. And the list is so long that they can't possibly remember all the rules, which makes it even more off-putting. Talk to people about what they can do, or suggest what they should do, and they'll be less inclined to rebel against your advice than if you tell them they're wrong and dumb.

New Space Opera - Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Peter F Hamilton, Ken MacLeod, Dan Simmons.

David Weber? Or does he not qualify in your eyes?
________

I'd expect to see a corresponding increase in the acceptance of science and more writers of the likes of Asimov.

Asimov was a good writer, but his science fiction stories are not exactly what I would call well grounded in reality. Foundation has the good guys making walnut sized nuclear reactors, robots have anti-matter brains, scientific progress stopping in a galactic empire, etc. He wrote stories, not predictions of the future.

To be fair to the fellow, when he wrote the walnut sized nuclear reactors the working of real nuclear reactors were still classified information under the Manhattan project (this was about two or three years after the Stagg Field pile went critical). And "positrons" were fifteen years old and understood only by a very restricted subset of physicists rather than being general knowledge.

So the idea that nuclear energy could be miniaturized from industrial machinery down to the size of a D battery, much as electricity was, wasn't as scientifically ignorant then as it is today.

Asimov wrote a lot of nonfiction as well as fiction...

I learned quite a lot of science when I was younger by reading collections of Asimov's nonfiction essays. They were really quite good, though they're a bit dated now.

...and [Asimov] understood that fiction is, at a fundamental level, about people and not facts. Readers will forgive implausible physics before they forgive implausible characters. He was entirely aware of when he was bending or breaking science when he wrote fiction, but it's fiction, by definition it's about something that didn't happen so it's already a falsehood. If the story requires faster than light travel then an author will use it, even knowing that current science says such things are impossible.

As Broomstick notes: ironically, Asimov's characterization was a little flat. And he got away with it, because science fiction is a bit special in that a story can thrive and become a classic by selling an idea, as well as by selling a character.

For example, take "The Cold Equations," by Tom Godwin: simplistic characters, provocative idea. I'm not saying the idea is good or bad, by the way; I'm only saying it's provocative. It's certainly provoked a lot of comments, both pro- and con-, over the years.

What's wrong with the Lucky Starr books? Sure, Asimov's version of the solar system turned out not to be all that close to the REAL one as we found out what it's like. So what? Those books were still good entertainment.

Really? They struck me as formulaic and repetitive with cardboard characters. If you felt differently (and apparently many have) then just chalk it up to my personal opinion being different from yours.

Did you read them through thirteen year old eyes? It might make a difference. Also, it's worth remembering that Asimov was writing back when the formulas for formulaic sci-fi characters were relatively new. Even though he typically didn't invent them, they weren't old enough to have gone rotten yet.

[andrewgpaul]

Which well-known sci-fi authors are actually scientists? Peter Watts is the only one who springs to mind right now.

Depending on your definition of "well-known", Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter . Reynolds has a PhD in Astronomy.

[Samuel]

To be fair to the fellow, when he wrote the walnut sized nuclear reactors the working of real nuclear reactors were still classified information under the Manhattan project (this was about two or three years after the Stagg Field pile went critical).

Except that it is still blatantly impossible. Even without knowing anything about nuclear reactions I can tell you why it wouldn't work- because you can't turn heat energy directly into work. It is something you can add that sounds cool (like positronic robots), but thinking out how it works reveals how insanely impractical it is. Power generation is not the same as storage mediums is the bottom line.

[Covenant]

FTL travel is one of those rare exceptions to the normal rules of hard science fiction, since there's only so much you can do with slower-than-light travel without it being a constant and unusual interruption to the normal way a 'universe' works. People usually conceptualize things the way they would to Earth--where a long trip might take days, weeks or months--but rarely years just to arrive. And communications in modern society are instant--the idea of it taking those same years or tens of years to get a reply message is nearly incomprehensible.

And for good reason, it basically means that your heroes can't go to Planet X unless they want everyone they know to be dead by the time they get back. Relativity takes the normality of a story and distorts it through the lens of reality, and it really takes over the story in many cases. If your story is about some of these implications then you have a ready-made set of situations to go over, but if it's a story about something else besides how space travel is incredibly difficult... then your story will suffer from a lack of FTL.

I think some of these implications are interesting, but they too easily dominate things if they're left up to reality, since you do spend ten times the amount of time explaining the results of STL travel than you do anything regarding FTL travel, even in the most nitty-gritty of circumstances.

Most people agree that it's not really the lack of Real Science than it is the lack of consistancy and vision with regards to the fake and real sciences mixed in. Hard sci-fi is only interesting because people who write it usually do so with fake science in mind, and write to the differences between fake and real science universes as a subtext. "No FTL, so blah blah blah. No Laser swords, so blah blah blah." A hard sci-fi mystery on a world of the future without that subtext, and without much technology being discussed in depth, would be more like a normal novel with talking appliances. Both want to tell a certain story--the real challenge for hard sci-fi is not the science, but making it interesting as a main part of the narrative.

[ThomasP]

I always find it interesting how you have a lot of anti-hard people saying "who cares about those details anyway", but at the same time, argue that their vision is better... because it lets them keep certain details. Now, sometimes those details actually matter to the story, but they are also often fairly irrelevant to the big picture.

Replace "lets them keep certain details" with "lets them rip off whatever popular movie or TV show they want to copy" and I think you've pretty much captured it.

It just reeks of laziness and lack of real interest all the way around; not only are they so uninterested in their own story that they can't bother making it internally consistent, but they can't even be bothered distinguishing it from the mainstream stuff already out there.

So how's that helping the story out, exactly?

Seems more like an excuse to tell a crappy rip-off story than write something halfway interesting.

[Samuel]

People usually conceptualize things the way they would to Earth--where a long trip might take days, weeks or months--but rarely years just to arrive. And communications in modern society are instant--the idea of it taking those same years or tens of years to get a reply message is nearly incomprehensible.

Didn't human society operate that way in the past? Travel times were long, communications were scarce, delayed and innaccurate and most people never left their home region.

[Simon_Jester]

Except that it is still blatantly impossible. Even without knowing anything about nuclear reactions I can tell you why it wouldn't work- because you can't turn heat energy directly into work. It is something you can add that sounds cool (like positronic robots), but thinking out how it works reveals how insanely impractical it is. Power generation is not the same as storage mediums is the bottom line.

Although given the way that Asimov's walnut-sized nuclear power supplies seem to work, it's quite plausible that they really are some kind of battery. I remember the personal shield generator Hober Mallow gave to... some random Empire functionary, I don't remember- running out of power in a day or two. That sounds a lot more like a battery than a power plant to me.

Asimov's nuclear walnuts are an artifact of the pre-Manhattan Project era, when people knew that atomic power existed, and that it was tremendously powerful, but not how it could be harnessed or what the limitations were. You might be able to deduce the limits by knowing what was then known about nuclear reactions, but the only way you'd learn it was in journal articles, because atomic energy wasn't famous enough to get the waves of popular-science explanations it's had today. If you weren't up to doing quantum mechanics for yourself, you didn't have a good place to go to get a practical summary of it.

That's why horrible lethal bullshit like this was still selling in the late '20s. It may not be a surprise to SD.netters that the general public at the time didn't know jack about "the mysteries of the atom," but what's more significant is that even the educated public didn't know anything worth mentioning, either. This was still the cutting edge of theoretical physics; it wasn't something that every person with a decent education in general science knows as it is today.

The set of people who had enough of a clue to know what was and was not possible for nuclear power was still extremely limited, and I don't think it reflects at all badly on Asimov that he wasn't one of that small group in the early '40s.

People usually conceptualize things the way they would to Earth--where a long trip might take days, weeks or months--but rarely years just to arrive. And communications in modern society are instant--the idea of it taking those same years or tens of years to get a reply message is nearly incomprehensible.

Didn't human society operate that way in the past? Travel times were long, communications were scarce, delayed and innaccurate and most people never left their home region.

Never that long, that scarce, or that anchored to the home range, though. To recover the "premodern" feel of slow-but-possible communication and travel takes "slow" FTL, something in the 10-100c range.

[Crazedwraith]

Well, if you really want to do that, I'd echo Starglider and say go head on into writing fantasy/space opera. (Except I wouldn't call it "science fantasy", since science has nothing to do with it.) But note that writing fantasy isn't a free ticket to just do whatever. Even magic should have its limitations that you keep in mind when writing; internal consistency should still be there, and when you are making /all/ the rules, it makes your job that much harder.

So in the end; You've not got a point. You are really just being snooty about nomenclature. Oh no! That's not science fiction! Its space opera!

Hard science is not the be all end all of science fiction. There's nothing wrong with soft science fiction like The Culture. What matters in sci-fi is a concept. Like you've been saying but why should you let that concept be limited by real science? Take The Culture, that throws science out of the window; but its certainly science fiction in that it explores a post materialistic society.

In the end if you're going to stick within the realm of actual science you're not writing science fiction; you're writing 'speculative fiction' (what writers call their sci-fi when they don't want the stigma of writing sci-fi)

[Broomstick]

There's long been a rule of thumb that hard science fiction can break one physical law, but needs to remain true to the others. So, for example, you could get away with an FTL drive but that's it, aside from consequences of an FTL drive (be it an engine, a "jumpgate", whatever) you need to adhere to real science as understood at the time you wrote it.

As time went on, though, certain memes became so common that the audience began to accept "one cheat + 1" - so you could have an FTL drive AND one other broken rule of physics. Maybe FTL and being about to interbreed with an alien species via natural intercourse instead of genetic engineering.

The bit about current public knowledge is also a factor. The radioactive "cures" being a good example, but there other ones, some less deadly. For instance, in the original Star Trek pilot the Enterprise zoomed by in the opening sequence without any sound at all. And the audience didn't like it, called/wrote saying something was wrong with the audio, etc. Why? Because in their experience when something went by very fast it made noise. Remember - Start Trek originally ran before we got to the moon. Virtually no one had any experience with space at that point, and what was shown - liftoffs - were big, noisy affairs. Star Wars had noisy fly-bys with its space ships, too - the first one came out in 1977, still not a lot of common knowledge about space. Starting in the 1980's or so people started saying "Hey, you can't hear noise in a vaccum - what's this swwwwwooooosh! business with spaceships?" Now we've had series like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (the new version - old version had "swoosh") where the spaceships DON'T make swooshy noise while traveling through space - and fans are happy because they know that's how it's supposed to be. If it WASN'T done silently these days they'd be complaining. That happened solely because a fact - there is no noise transmitted in space - went from the realm of "known only by a very, very few specialists" to "common knowledge".

When I read a story like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - which really was hard science fiction (in fact, quite a bit holds up even today though not all of it) I have to adjust for the fact it was written in 1870 and back then fluorescent lights and scuba gear were either laboratory curiosities or completely unknown. Likewise, when you read science fiction from 1930 - 1950 you'll have to take into account the time period of authorship to some extent. We know some things now people didn't know back then. We now have technologies that didn't exist back then.

That said - either you admit you're writing "science fantasy", "space opera", or "speculative fiction" (all of which can generate some fine entertainment) or make the effort to write science fiction, which largely boils down to it is the "What if?" story:

What if night only fell once every X hundreds of years? ("Nightfall", by Isaac Asimov, the original short story)

What if we had artificial servants with real intelligence? (Everything from the R.U.R., the first story to use the word "robot", through Asimov's robot stories on through everyone else's take on it.)

What if someone tried to travel around the world in a ridiculously short period of time with contemporary transportation technology? (Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne)

This means the story can function with the concept being the star of the show (although really good characters and plot sure helps make it great instead of merely good), which is one distinguishing characteristic that sets it apart from historical romances or mysteries or bestseller potboilers.

[Serafina]

I actually like "outdated hard sci-fi" very much.
It's quite interesting to see what we (humanity) has learned, and it gives a nice feeling for the scientific understanding of past periods.
Also, it makes me feel smart

[Starglider]

Well, if you really want to do that, I'd echo Starglider and say go head on into writing fantasy/space opera. (Except I wouldn't call it "science fantasy", since science has nothing to do with it.)

I call something 'science fantasy' when the physics (and chemistry, biology, computing etc) are clearly different from and incompatible with real physics - but are still consistent, are investigated in-universe by scientific means, and are used to produce technology that anyone can use (given adequate training). It's magic when physical cause-and-effect is replaced by mysticism and arbitrary character powers, and it's just bad writing when it's inconsistent. IMHO Star Wars qualifies as science fantasy because although there is some magic and general silliness in it, most of the universe is depicted as running on technology and science equivalent in form (though obviously not detail) to the technology and science we have in reality. Take that away and you would have Spelljammer, albeit with a different special effects style.

[Batman]

Since when has science fantasy NOTHING to do with science? Yes, it's not hard SciFi, but frankly virtually NOTHING labeled SciFi is.Heinlein wasn't, Asimov wasn't, Smith wasn't, and Trek and Wars sure as hell aren't. As long as it's CONSISTENT in the ways it ignores/bends science I find the term Science Fantasy appropriate. Artificial gravity? Fantasy. Limited by e=mc^2? Science. Hypermatter? Fantasy. 1000s of gs worth of acceleration? Fantasy. Need inertial compensators to LIVE through that? Science (while the compensators themselves are again fantasy).
True Fantasy is when it's done by literal magic while Science Fantasy is when it's done by technology we simply don't understand.

And yes, a lot of stories could be told without the SciFan elements. Why in Valen's name is that desireable? Either the author pulls it off or he doesn't. What's the inherent advantage of a hard SciFi story? Why would a story told WITHOUT the SciFan elements be BETTER?

[Broomstick]

Since when has science fantasy NOTHING to do with science? Yes, it's not hard SciFi, but frankly virtually NOTHING labeled SciFi is.Heinlein wasn't, Asimov wasn't,

Excuse me - although the whole of their works weren't hard science fiction, some of it was. So sorry you can't grasp that authors can work in more than one genre or sub-genre.

And between hard SF and science fantasy is "soft SF", which is where there are multiple "cheats" as I described above but it's still largely realistic.

For example:

Hard science fiction: 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea

Soft science fiction: The Mysterious Island (which is a sequel of sorts to the above and contains multiple improbabilities/continuity problems as well as incorrect science even for its own time)

Science fantasy: The "John Carter of Mars" series.

Space opera: The "Lensman" series

True Fantasy is when it's done by literal magic while Science Fantasy is when it's done by technology we simply don't understand.

No, I'd disagree - "technology we simply don't understand" may simply be advanced technology. If the tech does something we know to be theoretically possible, even if we can't do it ourselves, then as long as no impossible details are given it could still qualify as "hard" SF.

Science fantasy is when we know it's impossible but {handwavium} it's done anyway because it advances the idea/story.

I'd claim "soft" SF is when we know it's most likely impossible but we'd really, really like to have this toy anyway.

And yes, a lot of stories could be told without the SciFan elements. Why in Valen's name is that desireable? Either the author pulls it off or he doesn't. What's the inherent advantage of a hard SciFi story? Why would a story told WITHOUT the SciFan elements be BETTER?

It's a genre distinction. Don't call it hard SF unless it IS hard SF, and if it has unicorns and pixies and magic spells it's not science fiction at all. There is nothing wrong with fantasy (which has its own sub-genres, by the way) Writing a good hard SF story is hard, it's a real challenge and most wannabe writers (which is what this thread was originally about) can't do it. Just as most wannabes can't write a good mystery or a good historical romance or (if you've ever read any fan generated slashfic you know what I mean) good porn.

[Ford Prefect]

Depending on your definition of "well-known", Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter . Reynolds has a PhD in Astronomy.

These two are actually interesting cases because of the sheer amount of utterly bullshit technology which is perpetuated in their stories. I have to wonder what Reynolds was thinking when he came up with hypometric weapons, for example. I have spent many minutes thinking 'gee, hundred gee fusion drives sure are pushing it' and then bam he just whips out a device which disappears matter at will.

[Batman]

Since when has science fantasy NOTHING to do with science? Yes, it's not hard SciFi, but frankly virtually NOTHING labeled SciFi is.Heinlein wasn't, Asimov wasn't,

Excuse me - although the whole of their works weren't hard science fiction, some of it was.

What of Heinlein's or Asimov's work WAS hard SciFi? The hardest Asimov did that I know of (outside ordinary fiction) were the Robot stories and those ALWAYS had the positronic brain. Heinlein usually had a good bit of science woven into his early stories but even HE usually had some handwavium involved at the power generation level.

So sorry you can't grasp that authors can work in more than one genre or sub-genre.

I'm well aware that Asimov did a lot of NON-SciFi, mystery and non-fiction work, thank you very much. I'm NOT aware he ever did anything that would qualify as HARD SciFi (possibly excluding that Nightfall story you mentioned, which I haven't read but the novelization of stunk) but I'll happily conceed if he did. The SciFi work he's FAMOUS for however decidedly doesn't qualify as hard SciFi. Same with Heinlein. He's certainly HARDER than Asimov but not Hard SciFi by a long shot, not even with the no FTL no nonrotational AG stuff.

SNIPPY FOR LENGTH
And that's where I disagree. Hard SF=Stuff we can do TODAY, or COULD do if we were willing to pay for it, or could do in 200 years if we were willing to pay for it. I don't bother to distinguish between soft SF and SciFan. Once you break the laws of physics, it's SciFan.
As for Space Opera, that doesn't have a bearing on how if at all physically realistic a story is. It's a way of telling a story.

True Fantasy is when it's done by literal magic while Science Fantasy is when it's done by technology we simply don't understand.

No, I'd disagree - "technology we simply don't understand" may simply be advanced technology. If the tech does something we know to be theoretically possible, even if we can't do it ourselves, then as long as no impossible details are given it could still qualify as "hard" SF.

We disagree again it seems. Just because Heinlein's matter converter DOESN'T violate e=mc^2 does NOT make it HARD science in my book.
Technically, neither does Wars hypermatter.

Science fantasy is when we know it's impossible but {handwavium} it's done anyway because it advances the idea/story.

We're obviously working with different definitions of ScienceFantasy then.

I'd claim "soft" SF is when we know it's most likely impossible but we'd really, really like to have this toy anyway.

We'd really really like to have FTL, antigravity etc today.

And yes, a lot of stories could be told without the SciFan elements. Why in Valen's name is that desireable? Either the author pulls it off or he doesn't. What's the inherent advantage of a hard SciFi story? Why would a story told WITHOUT the SciFan elements be BETTER?

It's a genre distinction. Don't call it hard SF unless it IS hard SF, and if it has unicorns and pixies and magic spells it's not science fiction at all.

I never said the author should be ALLOWED to call it a HARD SciFi story. I'm bothered by Destro claiming it shouldn't be considered SciFi PERIOD, and his (at least as I read it) implication that it would automatically be a better story WITHOUT the SciFan elements.

There is nothing wrong with fantasy (which has its own sub-genres, by the way) Writing a good hard SF story is hard, it's a real challenge and most wannabe writers (which is what this thread was originally about) can't do it. Just as most wannabes can't write a good mystery or a good historical romance or (if you've ever read any fan generated slashfic you know what I mean) good porn.

Nobody said a word about HARD SciFi. Valen knows franchises that AREN'T hard SciFi got grilled about fucking up the math (Go Rhodanites!), and how about Weber's styrofoam starships in the Honorverse leave alone what happened here WRT Trek and Wars.
From what I understand Destro is saying if it ISN'T hard SciFi it's straight fantasy, and I'm sorry, I'm not buying that. Especially not when the vast majority of the stuff WE here happily lable as Science Fantasy are generally considered ordinary SciFi.

[ThomasP]

Depending on your definition of "well-known", Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter . Reynolds has a PhD in Astronomy.

These two are actually interesting cases because of the sheer amount of utterly bullshit technology which is perpetuated in their stories. I have to wonder what Reynolds was thinking when he came up with hypometric weapons, for example. I have spent many minutes thinking 'gee, hundred gee fusion drives sure are pushing it' and then bam he just whips out a device which disappears matter at will.

I can give both guys benefit of the doubt though, because you can at least tell they knew they were bullshitting (in the books/stories I've read at least).

I mean think of where the hypometric weapon came from

[Covenant]

FTL travel is one of those rare exceptions to the normal rules of hard science fiction, since there's only so much you can do with slower-than-light travel without it being a constant and unusual interruption to the normal way a 'universe' works.

Lack of imagination! Just make a setting where everyone lives in habitats in high earth orbit. (edit: many exceptions to this include aliens, but aliens don't necessarily require ftl to have) Travel now takes just hours or days, communication lag is no more than a few seconds, and you're still in space with all the vastness that implies.

Indeed, you never have to explicitly mention this at all. Your characters can just hop on a train or shuttle (or whatever) to New New York, get there in a few hours and leave it at that.

The Earth and Moon being there are just background details that don't need to impact the story at all if you don't want them to.

While I agree in part, I still think it's important to state that it is necessarily much different, especially when you want to have aliens, to have humanity more or less constrained to the solar system. It's certainly rather hard to have much of a war story when the majority of humanity lives in immensely fragile terrariums in space. Making it work requires quite a few contrivances, all of which do indeed add a certain depth, but start--as I had postulated--taking over the story itself. Handwaving's one useful function is to keep people focused on the story instead of on the scenery.

So that would fall into the "only so much..." category. At some point having thus-and-so many orbitals is still just a concession to the reality of the situation, and asks people not to have their wars with a quintillion soldiers, or planetary invasions, or so on and so forth--but to stick with orbitals and the like. It's like trying to tell a story of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but with it taking place as a gang war inside of a single city. Even with the change of scope and scale, there's certainly a story there, but it's a different story.

If it is a better story merely because it conforms to science is something I think is probably false. Adherence to realism isn't a distinguishing element of plot, unless any breaking with reality is noticeable and annoying.

[Samuel]

It's certainly rather hard to have much of a war story when the majority of humanity lives in immensely fragile terrariums in space.

Why? You have a different war story- just like you don't have fighters in space to re-enact WW2.

asks people not to have their wars with a quintillion soldiers, or planetary invasions,

Because they make no sense? Why invade a planet when you have the high ground? If you want to redo ground warfare in a sci-fi setting have Stargates or some other way that makes people go from planet to planet.