Le Guin is a master of fiction, period. While she's very different from modern sci-fi/fantasy, her work is almost as foundational as Tolkien, Lewis, or Asimov.
Take her Earthsea series (which was very loosely adapted as a Studio Ghibli movie). It's much slower paced than modern fantasy. Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here), and it almost reads more like an extended fairy tale.
But when you start reading it you can see how it influenced so much modern stuff (eg. she was telling stories about going off to wizard school decades before Harry Potter existed) and both the story and the writing itself are both so well crafted that (in many ways) no one who's come after has managed to surpass it.
If you like either sci-fi or fantasy, do yourself a favor and read some of the amazing writing this titan of an author created.
Can I make a side-rant how since Game of Thrones, it seems to have become an expectation that characters must be killed off? Apparently readers are (expected to) be so desensitized that nothing below "the main party that is the main reason you're reading this story can die at any moment" registers anymore.
In fact, even that is just the bare minimum. To really make an impact, we need some mass casualties like the Red Wedding or Thanos' "snap" in the Avenger movies.
> We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all.
remarkable given the similarity in your comment yet that it was about something completely different: violence vs technology.
It is backslash against years and years of shows where you are 100% certain characters will be unharmed. Cumulatively, shows lost tension for many of us - there were no stakes whatsoever. You have massive fight, but there is no excitement about the fight, because it is basically just an elaborate dance part. There are good and bad and good must always win and if bad thing happening is always punishment for moral failure forced formula got overfed.
Game of Thrones broke the spell, bad things suddenly could happen, substories could be ended badly. Writers learned there are two possible formulas not just one. Suddenly there was a tension and drama.
Yeah, that was basically the Disney/Spielberg formula, which got overdone.
> There are good and bad and good must always win and if bad thing happening is always punishment for moral failure forced formula got overfed.
I mean, maybe there are different moral horizons behind this. I would expect some basic "doing good is in the end more successful than doing evil" morality in shows.
The alternate message seems to be an uncaring universe where it plays absolutely no role if you're an asshole or try to help people, because deaths happen randomly anyway.
Which would be an omen of how our world developed in the following years for real...
(GoT never went completely nihilist though, which I appreciate. Even the most random deaths had at least long-term consequences for the rest of the story, and a lot of characters kept their morality through all the carnage)
> I would expect some basic "doing good is in the end more successful than doing evil" morality in shows.
I dont and find it annoying when it is there all the time. It removes the tension too. Good people end up poor or die of cancer, attempts to save climate or prevent wars failed, those who fight fascism find themselves maligned and out of power.
> The alternate message seems to be an uncaring universe where it plays absolutely no role if you're an asshole or try to help people, because deaths happen randomly anyway.
That is how the real universe works, why should we insist on repetitive message that is not true?
On the positive side, real people dont help people just to get something in exchange. Real people dont avoid being asshole only for transactional reasons. They do that, because of who you want to be and because of being able to resist the temptation.
And the danger is that when people believe the above, they make the opposite implication - if you had success you must have been good. That is not true. In fact, being willing to lie or take advantage of people makes you more likely to be successful - you have more options at your disposal then honest people.
> It is not about message.
I do not really think shows were that influential. But, large part of harm is from people simply assuming that once someone is a winner and billionaire, they must have been good and moral and right the whole time. I dont believe in prosperity gospel.
It's to the point where grimdark fiction, for me anyway, is gauche and a cliche. At this point it's countercultural and transgressive for characters to go through hell and high water, but then have a happy ending.
Too many modern writers would have ended The Shawshank Redemption by having Andy Dufresne get shot by a prison sniper the minute he got free.
I could be misremembering but the Walking Dead season 1 and Game of Thrones season 1 came out around the same time, but didn’t really kill of any major characters until after the first season.
Both are based on pre-existing material but GoT source material predates the Walking Dead by 7 years.
JG Ballard, John Brunner (and others) were writing miserabilist dystopias back in the 70s.
Also, Dune, which is certainly not a "The good guys win" story.
And movies like Soylent Green.
The Disney trope turns out not to be a trope at all. The good guys win/hero's journey is much older than Disney, and it's popular because we'd like to be believe it's how the world works.
But GoT didn't do anything really new, except wrap some porn around the various murder plots.
I beg to differ. Earthsea is a good example of "tell, don’t show". It goes on and on with explaining things that happen without the showing part. It’s outright boring.
It might have been inspirational decades ago. Now, it reads dated. Tastes are different, but I’d not call it well-crafted at all.
A side point: when you say “Lewis” I assume you mean Charles Staple Lewis, not Sinclair Lewis. I find it hard to consider the former “foundational”. It was and is popular (much to the annoyance of his buddy Tolkien), but hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth).
As for Asimov, well, one can argue about his long term influence but who can avoid calling it foundation-al?
> hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth)
Harry Potter and its own spawn bears fairly distinct influences, less "direct plot copies" (Narnia itself borrowing heavily there from the Christian Bible, of course) but more mechanically and "YA fantasy vibes."
His Dark Materials is basically a deliberate Narnia rebuttal/counter-argument. I think I've heard of a couple other "intentionally darker/twisted Narnia" inspirations in series, but am blanking on them.
Terry Pratchett made a few direct references pointing that assumed a high level of ubiquity.
IMO certainly as enduringly foundational as Asimov.
Dick would belong there too at the same level of a Lewis or Asimov.
That "loosely" hides a bit of a tragedy on the Studio Ghibli adaptation: instead of accepting the transcendent Hayao Miyazaki work that she and we all deserved, she refused what she misunderstood would be a Disney-like cartoon...
And instead of this, much later, the not-at-all ready son, Goro Miyazaki, had a go without having done the massive thought-work that you can for example glimpse Hayao doing on the emotional arc of Ponyo
> I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.
What a wonderfully humble sentiment, and so plainly said. It's disarming to hear an idea stated so precisely which you've treated largely as subintellectum, despite its truthiness having a foundational effect on how you move about the world [0]. This so perfectly distills my (and I suspect others' here as well) draw toward all things technical. They are all mysteries, whose workings we must largely abstract away for the sake of our own sanity. But they are categorically products of our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is out there for anyone to claim, or to extend! Looking at my surroundings, I see thousands of objects which I could not today begin to re-create myself, and for each object, thousands of questions which could be asked - all of which have at some point been answered, and whose answers await those who are interested to ask. What an endless and delightful thing for the curious! A lovely thought.
[0]: Perhaps this feeling is why Le Guin is such a celebrated author, and I am not ;)
Reminds me of the sentiment expressed by James Burke at the end of the Connections series.
“Maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there as long as it's explained clearly enough, and then go and ask for explanations”
I find the most practical distinction of scifi vs fantasy is that scifi calls it credits and fantasy calls it coin. This classification has never steered me wrong.
But honestly categories never quite work at the edges. Some of my favorite books are post apocalyptic fantasy where the characters are definitely using scifi technology that I recognize as advanced versions of existing technology but they just think of as magic.
> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
> But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.
This sentiment reminds me of the email steve jobs sent himself shortly before he died:
> I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow
I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
> I do not make any of my own clothing.
> I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
> I did not discover the mathematics I use.
> I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive
of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
> I am moved by music I did not create myself.
> When I needed medical attention, I was helpless
to help myself survive.
> I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology
I work with.
> I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am
totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
Indeed, it seems to me that true technologists do not take for granted a book of matches, or a simple garment, or music, or law. Innovation is innovation
> When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
This is really poignant considering that he tried to handle this himself and refused conventional treatment for months - likely causing his death. It's interesting that he doesn't seem aware of this even afterwards, but it's probably for the best.
I guess the whole letter explains a personal crisis and probably explains why he did what he did. Is there any more writing from him on the subject?
I mean no disrespect to Jobs or technologists, but for some reason the quote reads to me like a deliberate attempt at finding something to be grateful for, as opposed to a genuine expression of gratitude. I think it's because of this part:
"I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being."
It feels forced. Like the author is trying to convince himself of that belief.
I'm always suspicious when I see these. Does the person genuinely feel grateful, or are they simulating a gratitude that they cannot feel?
One of my favourite books of all time is by her: The Dispossessed.
It "features the development of the mathematical theory underlying a fictional ansible, a device capable of faster-than-light communication, which can send messages without delay, even between star systems." [1]
It doesn't get better than that. Certainly not "harder".
Along somewhat similar lines, my main division between the two is that sci-fi generally touches on the interaction between "people" (often the main characters, but not usually limited to them) and the world's systems (politics, war, how future tech changes society, etc), while fantasy generally focuses on individual's internal struggles (how they deal with the violence in their swords and magic world, how they get along with their squad, how they deal with the politics they're stuck in).
Which isn't to say one is more personal than the other, just that the focus is different. How the world as a whole handles something can easily be covered with a single character's thoughts, and they can be worried about how they interact with the world that surrounds them.
No division is perfect of course, but I think it fits pretty well with a lot of the genre-bending works, and better predicts who will like what book. Some are totally in X genre because of the setting itself, but more often I find people sticking to one or the other because they like that kind of story.
(Also Le Guin is fantastic, very obviously an exceptional author, and you should absolutely read some of her works)
That's the difference though. Knowing enough about science to be creative with it vs. knowing little about science so you just write whatever you like.
By that construction, it seems like "hard sci-fi" would allow little to no creativity to push the envelope unless the author is also a theoretical physicist.
there is almost no sci-fi with at least some invention and speculation that bends known physics and/or engineering, either implicitly or explicitly. novels that seem very “hard” often ignore effects that would ruin the plot, and make up physics. it might be plausible and compatible with known physical laws, but it’s speculation plain and simple.
Interesting, I always thought that the modern interpretation is that hard sci-fi is "rooted in science" or close to it. The ansible (i.e. FTL communication) is, to our current knowledge, not possible. But it is such a useful plot device that it could be viewed as "close enough".
I understand the opposite of hard sci-fi to be the hand wavy "magic" stuff like photon torpedoes, teleportation, phasers, hyperspace, and so on.
I think the critical factor that makes sci-fi hard isn't known physics, exactly, but early on establishing a known set of rules and letting them play out as they will. The narrative has to respect and adjust to those rules, not vice versa.
This ends up driving most hard sci fi to current understanding of physics, with maybe one tweak. If you diverge more from that, it's difficult or impossible to establish the rules and their implications early on, and so choices about them later end up serving the narrative.
Though, a certain irony: hard sci-fi doesn't seem to offer much predictive insight about the future compared to other subgenres. The 20th century sci-fi genre that seems to offer the most insight into our current moment is probably the one with the wildest imaginings: cyberpunk.
Heh, yeah. At least we're currently a bit more prepared for a Seveneves scenario than we were say 15 years ago.
Speaking of prediction powers, there's one that stands out and turned out to be quite prescient on a bunch of topics, both tech and social. Ender's Game was published (fleshed out, novel version) in `85 and it got quite a few things pretty accurate:
- tablets & touchscreen widely used as a common interface to content
- the Internet as a wide web, everyone using it, instant messaging, and so on
- Social networks, forums where debates are held, and more importantly sock puppet accounts and wide scale manipulation (for politics, etc)
- AI for world generation, military use for training, adaptive difficulty, etc.
In the later books there are concepts like digital currency, AI controlled corps/accounts, AI becoming "sentient" and moving itself between mediums, etc (well, that one is not yet here, but who knows...)
> I think the critical factor that makes sci-fi hard isn't known physics, exactly, but early on establishing a known set of rules and letting them play out as they will
No that's just competent writing. Hard sci-fi is very much about real science.
Half of Star Trek would basically be "magic" by that rubric. I think she reasoned through a problem and conceived of a solution, even if she didn't have the implementation details figured out.
Science fiction, even more than historical fiction, is always about the present, which is why SF novels rarely age well.
But good literature is good literature and she sure had the knack, which is why I believe her work will continue to be read for quite some time to come.
In her brief essay (more of a note), she uses the word “technology” to invoke its own root: τέχνη, just means practical art (hence artifact).
The inclined plane is as much technology as the lithographed transistor. Yet when I was on a school board 15 years ago the teachers and in particular the heads were quite concerned that the kids be tought “technology” by which they meant Word and PowerPoint, lest the kids be left behind in the technological future.
I’m sure those hours helped exactly zero of the students who could have spent the time on something useful, like mathematics, painting or recess. At least the classical Greeks understood that better than the pedagogues of today. Le Guin did too.
When you look at the DNA of a creature it is filled with all kind of stuff that we consider junk and we have no idea what it does. But then some new disease or predator shows up and it turns out that DNA had a use, but you could not have predicted it before hand.
The issue with knowledge is it's really hard to know what bits of it are going to be important in your future. Learning powerpoint probably put food on the table of a great number of people, it turns out our economy had a lot of places for that, and seemingly less, or less new jobs that wanted a deep knowledge of mathematics.
Technology is not only "computery" electronica. A lever is technology. So is writing. Fair point, and I don't think anybody was arguing otherwise.
Sci-fi has elements other than technology, such as how the humans interact with the technology. Sure! Again, I can't imagine anybody's arguing that Sci-fi is only when you write about technology and any mention of feelings or other human stuff disqualifies it.
But what a non-sequitur to say that therefore, _science_ isn't the main focus of Sci-fi. It's fiction about _science_. If the story isn't centred around the science, then the Sci-fi is the backdrop and the genre is something else you've chosen.
The most famous example is Star Wars. You can take that trilogy and replace every spaceship with a ship, every planet with a country, and lose nothing other than fun visuals.
I mean, it is. Textiles are a technology. Extracting usable fiber from plants or animals was something we invented, so is making yarn. Knitting was invented, and shaping cloth to a foot was too. And then there's the modern side of automation. There's a lot of sophistication that goes into it.
I've only read "The Left Hand of Darkness". It's a very well written book, but it didn't emphasize enough technology/science/engineering for me to consider it even soft science fiction. I guess she's doing the work of expanding the scope of what technology could be used in science fiction. I'm not sure that's super useful, since by her definition, almost every work of fiction will involve technology.
Now I want to write a science fiction story where the core technology is never written about explicitly and can only be inferred from its effect on the characters :P
I think you have a misapprehension of the genre here; science fiction isn't 'fiction with lots of science in it'; it's fiction that deals with potential future possibilities [1], and--deeper than that--fiction which uses those possibilities to explore explore current society/ideas.
There's no requirement to centrally feature technology, and it would be a weaker genre if there was.
Your link talks about how hard it is to define science fiction, so in some ways, I'm just putting my opinion out here on the internet as a data point. I'd say the Left Hand of Darkness is more science fiction than Little Women, but it's also more like the Hobbit than it is like Foundation, Ender's Game, Snow Crash, or even 1984.
Having something like another planet or alien biology is necessary but not sufficient to make something science fiction. There is some fuzzy amount of focus on science/technology, style, and tropes that are needed to make something more science fiction than fantasy or speculative fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness read more like fantasy to me, and I don't think it would have been any different at all if the setting was Middle Earth and the ambisexual species were Hobbits. I think I wouldn't have blinked if it had been described as "science fantasy" to me rather than "science fiction".
I'll bump up Chiang on my reading list, I have heard a lot of good things!
I kind of disagree, but also, I guess, who cares if it’s sci fi or not? Is it a good story that matches your tastes? Then great. The bookstores lump all the “speculative fiction” stuff together, anyway, and I don’t usually look for my next book by genre.
It's great that works for you but there is a reason we have these labels. I've definitely had the experience where I want to escape into some hard sci-fi, and so there's a reason I pick a book from that genre over Anna Karenina. And if someone told me that Anna Karenina was hard sci-fi, it'd color my experience with that book.
Fine. Sci-fi is a broad genre that intersects at the edges with fantasy, alternate history, magic realism, and all kinds of other very imaginative styles.
The hard/soft axis is fuzzy. The extreme of hard is "known physics only" and generally modest technical leaps or changes (e.g. solarpunk imagines known physics but a very different technical vocabulary for how it's used).
The extreme of soft becomes fantasy with sci-fi veneer, like Star Wars.
Fiction is art. It's all valid. It just depends on the style you're going for and what kind of story you're trying to tell.
I like hard SF because I'm an engineer, but I also think there's not a lot of well written hard SF in terms of prose style and character development. I wish there was more.
what do you think of peter f. hamilton? i like the prose, but i am not sure about character development.
“The balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
“Life alone is precious, but conscious thought is the greatest gift the universe offers.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
“Resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
“He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
Not really a rant? She’s just clarifying a reasonable difference between different types of technology to explain how her work qualifies as science fiction without being all about what she calls “hi-tech” technology.
It's the original title, she labeled it a rant herself.
EDIT: The person I replied to has significantly edited their comment since my original reply so my comment now appears as a non sequitur. This is why I quote people, or wait a couple hours to reply once I know they're the sort to do this kind of thing.
It’s a rant, but not about technology. It’s a rant about her chosen genre being maligned unfairly.
I think a more interesting tack on this argument would be to say that hard sci-fi tends to be more pro-technology and soft sci-fi tends to be more technology-critical. But some soft sci-fi is genuinely technology-neutral, using futuristic settings for aesthetic reasons only, not for any kind of investigation or argument either way.
This is a bit of a strawman argument. Hard SF is not just "about tech", it is about making sure the tech agrees with scientific principles and is not just an ad hoc method to make some story possible. Soft SF can be about tech and its (social) implications (like her work) but is not written in this sort of spirit. This is why she has written "soft SF".
She sticks to some principles. The hainish universe has no FTL travel, which lots of hard sci-fi does. There are people with psychic powers,but that also happens in hard SF. Compare her to Niven, for example
A strawman is when you make up an argument to defeat it. She has made nothing up, the reviewer said, "As Le Guin isn’t a hard science fiction writer, these traits aren’t technological — technology is carefully avoided — but philosophical, psychological, social, or linguistic." You can complain that the reviewer is wrong in their characterization of hard science fiction, but Le Guin is not beating up a straw man, she's responding to an argument that she disagrees with, explaining her disagreement.
The straw man was the 2 obvious statements she made (sci-fi has more than science, technology is more than computers and whatever). She argues for both, when nobody was arguing against, then says; therefore I write (hard?) sci-fi.
This is not at all what Le Guin is saying! It's right there at the end of the essay: "I agree with my reviewer that I don’t write hard science fiction."
Le Guin is a master of fiction, period. While she's very different from modern sci-fi/fantasy, her work is almost as foundational as Tolkien, Lewis, or Asimov.
Take her Earthsea series (which was very loosely adapted as a Studio Ghibli movie). It's much slower paced than modern fantasy. Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here), and it almost reads more like an extended fairy tale.
But when you start reading it you can see how it influenced so much modern stuff (eg. she was telling stories about going off to wizard school decades before Harry Potter existed) and both the story and the writing itself are both so well crafted that (in many ways) no one who's come after has managed to surpass it.
If you like either sci-fi or fantasy, do yourself a favor and read some of the amazing writing this titan of an author created.
> Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here)
Can I make a side-rant how since Game of Thrones, it seems to have become an expectation that characters must be killed off? Apparently readers are (expected to) be so desensitized that nothing below "the main party that is the main reason you're reading this story can die at any moment" registers anymore.
In fact, even that is just the bare minimum. To really make an impact, we need some mass casualties like the Red Wedding or Thanos' "snap" in the Avenger movies.
Can we go back on all of that?
I found the essay quote,
> We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all.
remarkable given the similarity in your comment yet that it was about something completely different: violence vs technology.
It is backslash against years and years of shows where you are 100% certain characters will be unharmed. Cumulatively, shows lost tension for many of us - there were no stakes whatsoever. You have massive fight, but there is no excitement about the fight, because it is basically just an elaborate dance part. There are good and bad and good must always win and if bad thing happening is always punishment for moral failure forced formula got overfed.
Game of Thrones broke the spell, bad things suddenly could happen, substories could be ended badly. Writers learned there are two possible formulas not just one. Suddenly there was a tension and drama.
Yeah, that was basically the Disney/Spielberg formula, which got overdone.
> There are good and bad and good must always win and if bad thing happening is always punishment for moral failure forced formula got overfed.
I mean, maybe there are different moral horizons behind this. I would expect some basic "doing good is in the end more successful than doing evil" morality in shows.
The alternate message seems to be an uncaring universe where it plays absolutely no role if you're an asshole or try to help people, because deaths happen randomly anyway.
Which would be an omen of how our world developed in the following years for real...
(GoT never went completely nihilist though, which I appreciate. Even the most random deaths had at least long-term consequences for the rest of the story, and a lot of characters kept their morality through all the carnage)
> I would expect some basic "doing good is in the end more successful than doing evil" morality in shows.
I dont and find it annoying when it is there all the time. It removes the tension too. Good people end up poor or die of cancer, attempts to save climate or prevent wars failed, those who fight fascism find themselves maligned and out of power.
> The alternate message seems to be an uncaring universe where it plays absolutely no role if you're an asshole or try to help people, because deaths happen randomly anyway.
That is how the real universe works, why should we insist on repetitive message that is not true?
On the positive side, real people dont help people just to get something in exchange. Real people dont avoid being asshole only for transactional reasons. They do that, because of who you want to be and because of being able to resist the temptation.
And the danger is that when people believe the above, they make the opposite implication - if you had success you must have been good. That is not true. In fact, being willing to lie or take advantage of people makes you more likely to be successful - you have more options at your disposal then honest people.
> It is not about message.
I do not really think shows were that influential. But, large part of harm is from people simply assuming that once someone is a winner and billionaire, they must have been good and moral and right the whole time. I dont believe in prosperity gospel.
Contracts are shorter now. ;-)
It's to the point where grimdark fiction, for me anyway, is gauche and a cliche. At this point it's countercultural and transgressive for characters to go through hell and high water, but then have a happy ending.
Too many modern writers would have ended The Shawshank Redemption by having Andy Dufresne get shot by a prison sniper the minute he got free.
I think that all started with The Walking Dead
I could be misremembering but the Walking Dead season 1 and Game of Thrones season 1 came out around the same time, but didn’t really kill of any major characters until after the first season.
Both are based on pre-existing material but GoT source material predates the Walking Dead by 7 years.
Glen Cook was killing off major characters back in the 1980s.
JG Ballard, John Brunner (and others) were writing miserabilist dystopias back in the 70s.
Also, Dune, which is certainly not a "The good guys win" story.
And movies like Soylent Green.
The Disney trope turns out not to be a trope at all. The good guys win/hero's journey is much older than Disney, and it's popular because we'd like to be believe it's how the world works.
But GoT didn't do anything really new, except wrap some porn around the various murder plots.
... which started with "Night of the Living Dead"... :)
I beg to differ. Earthsea is a good example of "tell, don’t show". It goes on and on with explaining things that happen without the showing part. It’s outright boring.
It might have been inspirational decades ago. Now, it reads dated. Tastes are different, but I’d not call it well-crafted at all.
A side point: when you say “Lewis” I assume you mean Charles Staple Lewis, not Sinclair Lewis. I find it hard to consider the former “foundational”. It was and is popular (much to the annoyance of his buddy Tolkien), but hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth).
As for Asimov, well, one can argue about his long term influence but who can avoid calling it foundation-al?
Agree completely on Le Guin
> hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth)
Harry Potter and its own spawn bears fairly distinct influences, less "direct plot copies" (Narnia itself borrowing heavily there from the Christian Bible, of course) but more mechanically and "YA fantasy vibes."
His Dark Materials is basically a deliberate Narnia rebuttal/counter-argument. I think I've heard of a couple other "intentionally darker/twisted Narnia" inspirations in series, but am blanking on them.
Terry Pratchett made a few direct references pointing that assumed a high level of ubiquity.
IMO certainly as enduringly foundational as Asimov.
Dick would belong there too at the same level of a Lewis or Asimov.
CS Lewis was pretty influential on the YA fiction, Harry Potter type of literature. And his other works also have broad influence beyond fiction.
That "loosely" hides a bit of a tragedy on the Studio Ghibli adaptation: instead of accepting the transcendent Hayao Miyazaki work that she and we all deserved, she refused what she misunderstood would be a Disney-like cartoon...
And instead of this, much later, the not-at-all ready son, Goro Miyazaki, had a go without having done the massive thought-work that you can for example glimpse Hayao doing on the emotional arc of Ponyo
If I haven't read any of her books, which book or series would you recommend as a starting point?
The Dispossessed. If you like that one, you'll like the rest of her work.
> I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.
What a wonderfully humble sentiment, and so plainly said. It's disarming to hear an idea stated so precisely which you've treated largely as subintellectum, despite its truthiness having a foundational effect on how you move about the world [0]. This so perfectly distills my (and I suspect others' here as well) draw toward all things technical. They are all mysteries, whose workings we must largely abstract away for the sake of our own sanity. But they are categorically products of our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is out there for anyone to claim, or to extend! Looking at my surroundings, I see thousands of objects which I could not today begin to re-create myself, and for each object, thousands of questions which could be asked - all of which have at some point been answered, and whose answers await those who are interested to ask. What an endless and delightful thing for the curious! A lovely thought.
[0]: Perhaps this feeling is why Le Guin is such a celebrated author, and I am not ;)
Reminds me of the sentiment expressed by James Burke at the end of the Connections series.
“Maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there as long as it's explained clearly enough, and then go and ask for explanations”
https://youtu.be/hu9tb6fPCBw
I find the most practical distinction of scifi vs fantasy is that scifi calls it credits and fantasy calls it coin. This classification has never steered me wrong.
But honestly categories never quite work at the edges. Some of my favorite books are post apocalyptic fantasy where the characters are definitely using scifi technology that I recognize as advanced versions of existing technology but they just think of as magic.
> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
> But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.
This sentiment reminds me of the email steve jobs sent himself shortly before he died:
> I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
> I do not make any of my own clothing.
> I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
> I did not discover the mathematics I use.
> I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
> I am moved by music I did not create myself.
> When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
> I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
> I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
Indeed, it seems to me that true technologists do not take for granted a book of matches, or a simple garment, or music, or law. Innovation is innovation
> When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
This is really poignant considering that he tried to handle this himself and refused conventional treatment for months - likely causing his death. It's interesting that he doesn't seem aware of this even afterwards, but it's probably for the best.
I guess the whole letter explains a personal crisis and probably explains why he did what he did. Is there any more writing from him on the subject?
He said something similar when he was 28 at a design conference: https://youtu.be/t9HmOz8H0qI?t=2827 at 47:08
I mean no disrespect to Jobs or technologists, but for some reason the quote reads to me like a deliberate attempt at finding something to be grateful for, as opposed to a genuine expression of gratitude. I think it's because of this part:
"I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being."
It feels forced. Like the author is trying to convince himself of that belief.
I'm always suspicious when I see these. Does the person genuinely feel grateful, or are they simulating a gratitude that they cannot feel?
Makes me question their emotional sincerity.
One of my favourite books of all time is by her: The Dispossessed.
It "features the development of the mathematical theory underlying a fictional ansible, a device capable of faster-than-light communication, which can send messages without delay, even between star systems." [1]
It doesn't get better than that. Certainly not "harder".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Along somewhat similar lines, my main division between the two is that sci-fi generally touches on the interaction between "people" (often the main characters, but not usually limited to them) and the world's systems (politics, war, how future tech changes society, etc), while fantasy generally focuses on individual's internal struggles (how they deal with the violence in their swords and magic world, how they get along with their squad, how they deal with the politics they're stuck in).
Which isn't to say one is more personal than the other, just that the focus is different. How the world as a whole handles something can easily be covered with a single character's thoughts, and they can be worried about how they interact with the world that surrounds them.
No division is perfect of course, but I think it fits pretty well with a lot of the genre-bending works, and better predicts who will like what book. Some are totally in X genre because of the setting itself, but more often I find people sticking to one or the other because they like that kind of story.
(Also Le Guin is fantastic, very obviously an exceptional author, and you should absolutely read some of her works)
To wit, LeGuin is the one who originally coined the term "ansible," which is about as hard sci-fi as you can get.
I don't think an ansible is "hard sci-fi". Hard sci-fi deals with known physics, and FTL communication violates that.
I agree that the ansible isn’t hard sci-fi, it’s not defined rigorously IIRC.
However I don’t think hard sci-fi has ever been strictly limited to known physics. It just requires consistency with it.
Greg Egan is one of the OGs of hard sci-fi, and a lot of his work is borderline psychedelic in how far he takes speculative-yet-consistent physics.
There are plenty of physically consistent “FTL” mechanisms in the family of “bend spacetime” that don’t violate c and have not been disproven.
That's the difference though. Knowing enough about science to be creative with it vs. knowing little about science so you just write whatever you like.
By that construction, it seems like "hard sci-fi" would allow little to no creativity to push the envelope unless the author is also a theoretical physicist.
there is almost no sci-fi with at least some invention and speculation that bends known physics and/or engineering, either implicitly or explicitly. novels that seem very “hard” often ignore effects that would ruin the plot, and make up physics. it might be plausible and compatible with known physical laws, but it’s speculation plain and simple.
> which is about as hard sci-fi as you can get.
Interesting, I always thought that the modern interpretation is that hard sci-fi is "rooted in science" or close to it. The ansible (i.e. FTL communication) is, to our current knowledge, not possible. But it is such a useful plot device that it could be viewed as "close enough".
I understand the opposite of hard sci-fi to be the hand wavy "magic" stuff like photon torpedoes, teleportation, phasers, hyperspace, and so on.
I think the critical factor that makes sci-fi hard isn't known physics, exactly, but early on establishing a known set of rules and letting them play out as they will. The narrative has to respect and adjust to those rules, not vice versa.
This ends up driving most hard sci fi to current understanding of physics, with maybe one tweak. If you diverge more from that, it's difficult or impossible to establish the rules and their implications early on, and so choices about them later end up serving the narrative.
Though, a certain irony: hard sci-fi doesn't seem to offer much predictive insight about the future compared to other subgenres. The 20th century sci-fi genre that seems to offer the most insight into our current moment is probably the one with the wildest imaginings: cyberpunk.
Heh, yeah. At least we're currently a bit more prepared for a Seveneves scenario than we were say 15 years ago.
Speaking of prediction powers, there's one that stands out and turned out to be quite prescient on a bunch of topics, both tech and social. Ender's Game was published (fleshed out, novel version) in `85 and it got quite a few things pretty accurate:
- tablets & touchscreen widely used as a common interface to content
- the Internet as a wide web, everyone using it, instant messaging, and so on
- Social networks, forums where debates are held, and more importantly sock puppet accounts and wide scale manipulation (for politics, etc)
- AI for world generation, military use for training, adaptive difficulty, etc.
In the later books there are concepts like digital currency, AI controlled corps/accounts, AI becoming "sentient" and moving itself between mediums, etc (well, that one is not yet here, but who knows...)
> I think the critical factor that makes sci-fi hard isn't known physics, exactly, but early on establishing a known set of rules and letting them play out as they will
No that's just competent writing. Hard sci-fi is very much about real science.
Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan is specifically about physics which does not exist here.
"Hell is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang deals with a world in which god, heaven and hell are unambiguously real.
Both are definitely "hard sci fi"
How is it hard sci-fi? It was basically magic
Half of Star Trek would basically be "magic" by that rubric. I think she reasoned through a problem and conceived of a solution, even if she didn't have the implementation details figured out.
Star Trek was never described as hard science fiction.
That’s not hard sci-fi though. Something like Stephen Baxter’s work is hard sci-fi, the ansible was just a plot device
Science fiction, even more than historical fiction, is always about the present, which is why SF novels rarely age well.
But good literature is good literature and she sure had the knack, which is why I believe her work will continue to be read for quite some time to come.
In her brief essay (more of a note), she uses the word “technology” to invoke its own root: τέχνη, just means practical art (hence artifact).
The inclined plane is as much technology as the lithographed transistor. Yet when I was on a school board 15 years ago the teachers and in particular the heads were quite concerned that the kids be tought “technology” by which they meant Word and PowerPoint, lest the kids be left behind in the technological future.
I’m sure those hours helped exactly zero of the students who could have spent the time on something useful, like mathematics, painting or recess. At least the classical Greeks understood that better than the pedagogues of today. Le Guin did too.
When you look at the DNA of a creature it is filled with all kind of stuff that we consider junk and we have no idea what it does. But then some new disease or predator shows up and it turns out that DNA had a use, but you could not have predicted it before hand.
The issue with knowledge is it's really hard to know what bits of it are going to be important in your future. Learning powerpoint probably put food on the table of a great number of people, it turns out our economy had a lot of places for that, and seemingly less, or less new jobs that wanted a deep knowledge of mathematics.
Technology is not only "computery" electronica. A lever is technology. So is writing. Fair point, and I don't think anybody was arguing otherwise.
Sci-fi has elements other than technology, such as how the humans interact with the technology. Sure! Again, I can't imagine anybody's arguing that Sci-fi is only when you write about technology and any mention of feelings or other human stuff disqualifies it.
But what a non-sequitur to say that therefore, _science_ isn't the main focus of Sci-fi. It's fiction about _science_. If the story isn't centred around the science, then the Sci-fi is the backdrop and the genre is something else you've chosen.
The most famous example is Star Wars. You can take that trilogy and replace every spaceship with a ship, every planet with a country, and lose nothing other than fun visuals.
>And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it’s written by people who don’t know what the word means.
I think this goes too far and then everything is science fiction? She talks about low tech. Is Hatchet science fiction?
I haven't read Hatchet, is it about fictional technology or real technology?
Real, although the speed of the development in the novel is fictionalized
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatchet_(novel)
I have great respect for her but this isn't the only essay she's jarringly defensive (imo) in response to a critic. Ok sure, a sock is "technology"...
I mean, it is. Textiles are a technology. Extracting usable fiber from plants or animals was something we invented, so is making yarn. Knitting was invented, and shaping cloth to a foot was too. And then there's the modern side of automation. There's a lot of sophistication that goes into it.
I've only read "The Left Hand of Darkness". It's a very well written book, but it didn't emphasize enough technology/science/engineering for me to consider it even soft science fiction. I guess she's doing the work of expanding the scope of what technology could be used in science fiction. I'm not sure that's super useful, since by her definition, almost every work of fiction will involve technology.
Now I want to write a science fiction story where the core technology is never written about explicitly and can only be inferred from its effect on the characters :P
I think you have a misapprehension of the genre here; science fiction isn't 'fiction with lots of science in it'; it's fiction that deals with potential future possibilities [1], and--deeper than that--fiction which uses those possibilities to explore explore current society/ideas.
There's no requirement to centrally feature technology, and it would be a weaker genre if there was.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction
Your link talks about how hard it is to define science fiction, so in some ways, I'm just putting my opinion out here on the internet as a data point. I'd say the Left Hand of Darkness is more science fiction than Little Women, but it's also more like the Hobbit than it is like Foundation, Ender's Game, Snow Crash, or even 1984.
It takes place on another planet, and isn't alien biology "science" speculation, enough?
Besides, it's not even her best work.
Looking forward to reading your story! You might consider Ted Chiang.
Having something like another planet or alien biology is necessary but not sufficient to make something science fiction. There is some fuzzy amount of focus on science/technology, style, and tropes that are needed to make something more science fiction than fantasy or speculative fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness read more like fantasy to me, and I don't think it would have been any different at all if the setting was Middle Earth and the ambisexual species were Hobbits. I think I wouldn't have blinked if it had been described as "science fantasy" to me rather than "science fiction".
I'll bump up Chiang on my reading list, I have heard a lot of good things!
I kind of disagree, but also, I guess, who cares if it’s sci fi or not? Is it a good story that matches your tastes? Then great. The bookstores lump all the “speculative fiction” stuff together, anyway, and I don’t usually look for my next book by genre.
It's great that works for you but there is a reason we have these labels. I've definitely had the experience where I want to escape into some hard sci-fi, and so there's a reason I pick a book from that genre over Anna Karenina. And if someone told me that Anna Karenina was hard sci-fi, it'd color my experience with that book.
Fine. Sci-fi is a broad genre that intersects at the edges with fantasy, alternate history, magic realism, and all kinds of other very imaginative styles.
The hard/soft axis is fuzzy. The extreme of hard is "known physics only" and generally modest technical leaps or changes (e.g. solarpunk imagines known physics but a very different technical vocabulary for how it's used).
The extreme of soft becomes fantasy with sci-fi veneer, like Star Wars.
Fiction is art. It's all valid. It just depends on the style you're going for and what kind of story you're trying to tell.
I like hard SF because I'm an engineer, but I also think there's not a lot of well written hard SF in terms of prose style and character development. I wish there was more.
what do you think of peter f. hamilton? i like the prose, but i am not sure about character development.
“The balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion.” ― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
“Life alone is precious, but conscious thought is the greatest gift the universe offers.” ― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
“Resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be.” ― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
“He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties.” ― Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
Of his work the Reality Dysfunction was the one I liked the least. Character development in his last 2 series, Salvation and Exodus, seems improved.
Not really a rant? She’s just clarifying a reasonable difference between different types of technology to explain how her work qualifies as science fiction without being all about what she calls “hi-tech” technology.
Sounded pretty reasonable to me anyway.
> Submission title is a bit misleading.
It's the original title, she labeled it a rant herself.
EDIT: The person I replied to has significantly edited their comment since my original reply so my comment now appears as a non sequitur. This is why I quote people, or wait a couple hours to reply once I know they're the sort to do this kind of thing.
Yes, I noticed that was her title and not the submitters title so I edited my comment accordingly.
Instead of your EDIT, you could’ve deleted your reply since it was no longer relevant.
By the standards of someone as articulate as Le Guin it's definitively a rant.
It’s a rant, but not about technology. It’s a rant about her chosen genre being maligned unfairly.
I think a more interesting tack on this argument would be to say that hard sci-fi tends to be more pro-technology and soft sci-fi tends to be more technology-critical. But some soft sci-fi is genuinely technology-neutral, using futuristic settings for aesthetic reasons only, not for any kind of investigation or argument either way.
This is a bit of a strawman argument. Hard SF is not just "about tech", it is about making sure the tech agrees with scientific principles and is not just an ad hoc method to make some story possible. Soft SF can be about tech and its (social) implications (like her work) but is not written in this sort of spirit. This is why she has written "soft SF".
She sticks to some principles. The hainish universe has no FTL travel, which lots of hard sci-fi does. There are people with psychic powers,but that also happens in hard SF. Compare her to Niven, for example
> the hainish universe has no FTL travel
That's not quite right. There are FTL ships in the Hainish books, but they carry no passengers because living things cannot survive FTL travel.
A strawman is when you make up an argument to defeat it. She has made nothing up, the reviewer said, "As Le Guin isn’t a hard science fiction writer, these traits aren’t technological — technology is carefully avoided — but philosophical, psychological, social, or linguistic." You can complain that the reviewer is wrong in their characterization of hard science fiction, but Le Guin is not beating up a straw man, she's responding to an argument that she disagrees with, explaining her disagreement.
The straw man was the 2 obvious statements she made (sci-fi has more than science, technology is more than computers and whatever). She argues for both, when nobody was arguing against, then says; therefore I write (hard?) sci-fi.
> therefore I write (hard?) sci-fi.
This is not at all what Le Guin is saying! It's right there at the end of the essay: "I agree with my reviewer that I don’t write hard science fiction."