Well, that's kind of rude, psikey.
You're insisting that people download three electronic story files (and for those of us who just had to pay extra per month for bandwidth or can't pay for it, or aren't set up to easily take ePub files, that's a problem,) and read all three of them just to get an inkling of what you're trying to talk about.
But I don't think we really have to do that, as you tend to talk about the same talking point. I don't have a problem with that talking point per se -- judging stories by how they handle science; though the insistence that we all should do it gets a tad annoying. (And the obsession with Star Wars, which has played a minimum role in SF writing, mostly in sending readers into the field, I don't get.) I do have more of a problem with the idea that the 1950's SF was full of good science. Overall, it was filled with a lot of crappy science with occasional good stories from those who knew what they were doing. But elaborate details of science seldom occurred. As you mentioned, science concepts often got just a mention, which would cause you to check out the real science in an encyclopedia. Most SF stories in the past were not about science concepts and the science was in the background. Our harder SF tackled science more directly, but often in inaccurate, bendy ways to get at the story.
For instance, that short story about the stowaway girl being thrown out of the space shuttle. Yes, it was about fuel mass ratios, but the story tackled the issue in a very illogical manner. The story was about a politically dystopian society that did not value human life, and it bent circumstances so that an illogical solution to the physics problem that would result in death was the one chosen, instead of other, more logical emergency tactics -- a sociological premise, not a scientific one. It was an unrealistic story in that the shuttles did not have proper emergency failsafes and redundancies for just these sort of problems and damages to the ship. Emotionally, it was a very interesting story. Scientifically, it was poorly crafted, in my opinion.
And that becomes a complicated issue. Bujold, for instance, throws in mention of cloning and such. It's a plot point in one book. But her stories are basically political military thrillers. The science is background, not premise. Is she really doing science in an accurate or prominent way? So I guess you would put her in the one category. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars we were talking about again, and the fact that it, like the short story about the stowaway girl, has unrealistic set-ups in it to get the political and ideological issues it wants to tackle, the sense of a frontier, and also some science situations that are quite dodgy. The science in Red Mars plays a prominent role in the story but not the central role, which is more given over to politics. Yet we still consider it hard SF, even though the science is not perfect, the world created not that realistic and the central concept about politics, not science, because the story involves hard science -- biology, some engineering.
Is a cyberpunk book that concentrates on electrical technology -- engineering -- hard science? Is a story hard SF when it centers on political issues, not solving a scientific problem? Is Isaac Asimov's post-apocalypse story, Nightfall, which is primarily about sociological and psychological issues of the people who are fighting with each other and trying to survive when night falls on their sun-filled planet really about the science, or is the basic science just an excuse to have people running and screaming? Is a SF story about people who can radically alter their bodies and how that effects them not dealing with a hard science concept that is directly relevant to our current world? Can we call A Canticle for Liebowitz, another post-apocalypse story that has very little actual science in it beyond some slide rules, nukes and giant computers, (but it does have terrific writing,) and instead is concentrated on the self-destructive and creative urges of humans to build societies and pass knowledge a hard science story? Clarke's 2001 also has very little science in it, though it does have mega powerful aliens and an upset computer. It's about the ambitions of humans versus the enormousness of the universe. It did, however, inspire the design look of tablet computers in the movie, which came first, so there you go. But we didn't get a complete break down of how those devices worked, because it was simply background.
So it's not a simple thing to grade, the science content. The science does not exist in a vacuum. The science is rarely central over political, social and personal and philosophical concepts, but can be the set-up for exploring those or emeshed in them. Our SF stories, in the 1950's and now, have been much more about how we react to science and feel about science than about the bones of the scientific devices or events themselves. That reaction is possible even in a story where the science is highly speculative or loosely in the background as the spaceships ply their trade.
When we know that science in a story is off, bent, not realistically applied, that may effect our experience of the story, but it may not invalidate it. Despite having some science and science set-up objections to Red Mars, I still find it an interesting story, and many others regard it as a seminal hard SF work. We may, according to our preferences, be more focused on stories that emphasize physics and engineering and not like ones that are biologically based, even though that is also hard science. We may like a military space saga, even though the science involved is no more than a passing mention or occasional plot device. We may find that science to be more or less important, depending on our enjoyment of the story.
So science alone, for me, makes a poor component for grading anything. Larry Niven can give me a scientifically accurate breakdown of how the Ringworld exists, but that doesn't change the fact that the main story is a personal and political one, involving religion and attachment, that those societies on the Ringworld are not very convincingly rendered (although they are somewhat satiric,) and that some of the science points are tetchy. The science in that story is set-up, but it is hard sciences. So I have no interest in trying to isolate the science content in stories and evaluate on that alone. If I did, then 90% of the SF written in the 20th century would probably fail to make the grade, including works by Asimov, Clarke, Clements and the rest. I do not make any one component of writing -- science content or other content, characterization, prose styling, plot requirements, etc. -- my god when it comes to stories. That limits too much where I can go.
