When I was younger I absolutely adored hard science fiction, like my dream was to be able to write like all the greats! But I'm kinda dumb, so I stick to funny punny little short stories. Honestly what I do write reads more like bad Terry Pratchett fanfiction then good science. Also funnily enough I can't stand most first person perspective but that's all I can write effectively.
I think you might be selling yourself short; you're capable of appreciating hard sci fi, and I think that means you could work your way to writing it with research. Just do it progressively and don't get overambitious at first, or it'll feel like you've run face first into a cliff, and that will definitely make it feel impossible.
Person and tense are an interesting discussion that I have
opinions about.
For anyone unfamiliar, person is the perspective a story is being told from, and tense is the temporal relationship between the narrator and events, whether they happened in the past or are happening in the present.
Person has three options:
1st Person: "I threw the ball." First person is great for stories that are tightly focused around a central character. Scientia is in first person for this reason. It's great for that kind of story because first person immediately gets the reader inside the head of the main character. This helps the audience identify with them as quickly and strongly as possible, which is very useful. The downside of first person is that it makes it harder to tell the inner stories of other characters, although there are tricks for doing this. You can have multiple point of view characters that switch between chapters (an advanced technique, it can get confusing in a hurry) or do what I did in Scientia and have interlude chapters in 3rd person. Most of the time though you tell the inner stories of other characters through characterization. Their expressions, the way they react, all that tells a story to the audience. Grammatically this works out to the main character's actions being in 1st person and the actions of everyone else looking the same as they would in 3rd person.
Your mileage may vary, but the general thinking is that 1st person is somewhat easier to manage for a newer writer than 3rd person. Mostly because there's less to keep track of with one main character than several, and because it makes building reader rapport with the main character relatively easy. You're free to get directly in their head in the narration, freeing you to explore their inner commentary and reactions to events, without having to hint at what they're thinking to the audience indirectly. You'll still have to do that for the secondary characters, but for the main character your hand is much freer.
2nd Person: "You threw the ball." I would never use this except for the case of a forum quest where the reader is controlling the main character.
3rd Person: "He threw the ball." Third person is great for when you want a large cast of characters and don't want to be restricted to focusing on any one character exclusively as your lens through which the reader sees the world. The downside is that you have to work harder to convey character's inner lives to the reader. Some people try to cheat this by just stating what characters are thinking in the narrative, but I think it's always clunky and awkward and advise against it.
Whichever you choose, be as consistent as possible. Some would say never change, but arguably techniques like switching POV between chapters and having interlude chapters are, they're just broken up and framed in such a way that the switch isn't quite so jarring as it would be mid-chapter. (Which you should definitely never do.)
Tense technically has three options, but really two:
Past tense: "I threw the ball." Past tense is the gold standard for long form adult fiction. Unless you're absolutely sure you know what you're doing and why, always use past tense.
Present tense: "I throw the ball." You sometimes see present tense in young adult fiction, and almost never in adult fiction. There's nothing wrong with it per se, it's just not what most of your readers will be expecting and some percentage of them will find it rather jarring. I believe it's best avoided for that reason, but this opinion is not without controversy.
Future tense: "I will throw the ball." Included for completeness only. Only lunatics write whole stories in future tense. If you encounter such a writer in the wild, back away slowly and make no sudden movements. They may be rabid.
There's also something else worth mentioning, which is the perspective of the narration. There are two options here.
Omniscient perspective: The narrator is speaking from the perspective of knowing everything that's going on. There's two general approaches to this. The narrator might be taking the perspective of a god or a greek chorus commenting on events. "Little did John know that his day would soon take a turn for the worse." That's the version you usually see in 3rd person omniscient. The other approach is to have the narration coming from the perspective of a character retelling events with the benefit of hindsight and future knowledge. "Little did I know then that my day would soon take a turn for the worse." That's the more common approach in 1st person omniscient.
Omniscient perspective is very much out of fashion. It used to be more common, and it can work in the right kind of story, but I would caution against using it unless you're very sure you need it for a particular purpose. Most of all
be consistent. Authors sometimes randomly switch into omniscient perspective for a bit and that's jarring. Anything you can get across in omniscient perspective that you need to get across you can get across in limited perspective, you just have to sometimes be a little clever about it. Give it some thought and you'll come up with a way, even if you have to massage events to convey whatever clue you want to your reader. You're the god of the universe, you can do that.
Limited perspective: The narrator only knows what the main character in a scene knows. In 1st person this is obviously limited to whatever the perspective character sees/hears/knows/etc. They won't narrate someone sneaking up behind them if they don't notice them, they'll narrate the sudden surprising pain of the knife in their back, or whatever. In 3rd person you'll still have a 'main character' of sorts, or possibly a group of them, that the narration is proceeding from the perspective of. This is sometimes described as an 'over the shoulder' view.
Limited perspective is the modern standard. It's useful because it preserves tension and mystery that would be lost with an omniscient narrator constantly spilling the beans. Tension is a virtual necessity in any kind of engaging story, even light and fluffy stuff, and mystery is a pretty common sort of plot, even if it's as a secondary element. (Mystery doesn't have to be like a murder mystery, it just means that the main character(s) don't know everything that's going on and find out over the course of the story. The two big mysteries that Scientia wrestles with are 'What's up with my power?' and 'How did I wind up in Worm?'. I gradually inserted clues to those over the course of most of the story, and as secondary elements they've now been resolved in time for us to head into the climax and denouement of the primary story element, which is action/adventure.)
In summary, and this is my personal (but reasonably informed) opinion, most people writing fiction should choose between 1st person limited past tense, or 3rd person limited past tense. The major determining factor is whether you can tell the story through one character's eyes or if you'll have to have several throughout the whole story. Other options are possible but should be considered advanced techniques to be used when you're very sure you know what you're doing and why.
