A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
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A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
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Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#2Not 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.
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#3Not 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.
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#4To wit, LeGuin is the one who originally coined the term "ansible," which is about as hard sci-fi as you can get.
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#5Not 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.
By the standards of someone as articulate as Le Guin it's definitively a rant.
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#6This 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".
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#7To 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.
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#8To wit, LeGuin is the one who originally coined the term "ansible," which is about as hard sci-fi as you can get.
How is it hard sci-fi? It was basically magic
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#9Le 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.
Re: A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
#10This 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