Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor
Prophesy is outside the province of technological viability and attempts to dress it up in "psychohistory" or whatever comes across as a combination of ham-handedness and timidity on the authors part. In principle the physics of whether a sword can decapitate an orc and the physics of whether a space missile hits or misses a given target are equally irrelevant to whether prophesy has a place in the story. The same applies with living stars, and the like. Such plot devices are equally fantastic whatever the TL and are tangential to whether or not the technology itself performs as it would under the assumption of it's existence. The fact that prophecy is more in space opera then in hard sci-fi is a literary phenomenon not a scientific one.
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I don't think that the absence of prophecy as such in hard SF is unrelated to the scientific problems with prophecy. A prophecy (or a living star) might be a plot device but it's also, if you use it in the story, a thing that exists in your fictional world.