[bananaflag]

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".

[graemep]

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

[miyoji]

> the hainish universe has no FTL travel

That's not quite right. There are FTL ships in the Hainish books, but they carry no passengers because living things cannot survive FTL travel.

[miyoji]

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.

[ghusto]

The straw man was the 2 obvious statements she made (sci-fi has more than science, technology is more than computers and whatever). She argues for both, when nobody was arguing against, then says; therefore I write (hard?) sci-fi.

[teraflop]

> therefore I write (hard?) sci-fi.

This is not at all what Le Guin is saying! It's right there at the end of the essay: "I agree with my reviewer that I don’t write hard science fiction."