Thanks for the link. An exquisitely crafted essay by an intelligent, literate person is just the breath of fresh air I needed. I've got a bunch of unread LeGuin around here; that might be good for my mood.
LeGuin says a lot about what fiction is, and a fair amount about what science fiction isn't, but not much about what science fiction is. I think she just has no use for the concept of science fiction except as a marketing category -- it's just fiction as far as she's concerned.
That said, I'm going to claim that she more-or-less agrees with my original point: fiction describes how people might respond if X happened, and "science fiction" restricts X to be something scientific or technological. The degree of "hardness" in the science fiction can be measured by how much attention it pays to X's details, or X's plausibility given the laws of science as we understand them today, or how elegantly minimalist a change to those laws would make X plausible... but I don't think any of those things particularly interests her, which makes her (along with, say, Ray Bradbury) not a "hard SF" writer.
Isaac Asimov perhaps exemplifies the opposite approach: inspired by reading something about science or technology, he makes as tiny as possible a twist to it, follows the logical and scientific consequences as far as possible, and then examines the consequences for people. I'm sure this is the sort of SF writer I would be, if I were one, since I'm much more comfortable with logic and science than with people. But let's face it: Asimov's non-fiction, by and large, is worlds better than his science fiction.
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Re: what's hard SF?
Date: 2020-07-23 11:56 am (UTC)LeGuin says a lot about what fiction is, and a fair amount about what science fiction isn't, but not much about what science fiction is. I think she just has no use for the concept of science fiction except as a marketing category -- it's just fiction as far as she's concerned.
That said, I'm going to claim that she more-or-less agrees with my original point: fiction describes how people might respond if X happened, and "science fiction" restricts X to be something scientific or technological. The degree of "hardness" in the science fiction can be measured by how much attention it pays to X's details, or X's plausibility given the laws of science as we understand them today, or how elegantly minimalist a change to those laws would make X plausible... but I don't think any of those things particularly interests her, which makes her (along with, say, Ray Bradbury) not a "hard SF" writer.
Isaac Asimov perhaps exemplifies the opposite approach: inspired by reading something about science or technology, he makes as tiny as possible a twist to it, follows the logical and scientific consequences as far as possible, and then examines the consequences for people. I'm sure this is the sort of SF writer I would be, if I were one, since I'm much more comfortable with logic and science than with people. But let's face it: Asimov's non-fiction, by and large, is worlds better than his science fiction.