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.
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?
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 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 ;)
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.