Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- >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?
by arthurjj - I haven't read Hatchet, is it about fictional technology or real technology?by fmbb
- The essay is more concerned with the definition of “technology” than the definition of “science fiction”. It merely points out that distinguishing between hard and soft sci-fi by the presence of technology is folly, since even Bronze Age technology is still technology.
Hatchet has technology - the titular hatchet, along with the airplane that crashed and the various items the protagonist collects at the end. But the presence of technology in the work does not determine if it is science fiction or not.
This is straying away from the article, but if Hatchet were dictated to a tribe who didn’t have metallurgy, perhaps it could be perceived as science fiction.
- Nuance.
She uses science and technology to amazing affect to tell the story she wanted to tell in Dispossessed. Key points, the starship that travels between the moon and the sun, the freight rail system etc.
She also uses it poorly, in the creation of the weird Ansible device.
I understand the Ansible is required for some of her other works but tbh leaving the creation of instantaneous interstellar communication as a footnote without societal impact feels like a bit of a letdown.
by protocolture - 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".
by practal - 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.
by api - 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
by fsiefken - To 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 magicby simmerup
- > 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 don't think an ansible is "hard sci-fi". Hard sci-fi deals with known physics, and FTL communication violates that.by Cpoll
- 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.
by gumby - 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.
by pixl97 - 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)
by Groxx - 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.
by Swizec - > 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
by airstrafer - 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.
- A billionaire discovers society exists.
> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
It's also the exact interface that wealth allows you to bypass.
by scruple - > 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?
by dwedge - > 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 ;)
by joebergeron - Just want to say, thanks for writing this! It was lovely to read this expounding upon the depths and contours of the original statement. The point seemed so obvious when she expressed it that I skimmed right over it in my reading, but your post helped me see how profound it is.by mplanchard
- 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”
by derektank - 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.
by hungryhobbit - If I haven't read any of her books, which book or series would you recommend as a starting point?by vova_hn2
- 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
by polotics - 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
by gumby - 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.
by WA - > 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?
by xg15