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by daishi55 2 hours ago
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.

3 comments

> 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.