A Rant About “Technology” (2005)(ursulakleguin.com) |
A Rant About “Technology” (2005)(ursulakleguin.com) |
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.
Can we go back on all of that?
Game of Thrones broke the spell, bad things suddenly could happen, substories could be ended badly. Writers learned there are two possible formulas not just one. Suddenly there was a tension and drama.
Too many modern writers would have ended The Shawshank Redemption by having Andy Dufresne get shot by a prison sniper the minute he got free.
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
Harry Potter and its own spawn bears fairly distinct influences, less "direct plot copies" (Narnia itself borrowing heavily there from the Christian Bible, of course) but more mechanically and "YA fantasy vibes."
His Dark Materials is basically a deliberate Narnia rebuttal/counter-argument. I think I've heard of a couple other "intentionally darker/twisted Narnia" inspirations in series, but am blanking on them.
Terry Pratchett made a few direct references pointing that assumed a high level of ubiquity.
IMO certainly as enduringly foundational as Asimov.
Dick would belong there too at the same level of a Lewis or Asimov.
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.
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 ;)
“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”
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.
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
Besides, it's not even her best work.
Looking forward to reading your story! You might consider Ted Chiang.
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.
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)
I think this goes too far and then everything is science fiction? She talks about low tech. Is Hatchet science fiction?
Sounded pretty reasonable to me anyway.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
However I don’t think hard sci-fi has ever been strictly limited to known physics. It just requires consistency with it.
Greg Egan is one of the OGs of hard sci-fi, and a lot of his work is borderline psychedelic in how far he takes speculative-yet-consistent physics.
There are plenty of physically consistent “FTL” mechanisms in the family of “bend spacetime” that don’t violate c and have not been disproven.
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.
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.
Speaking of prediction powers, there's one that stands out and turned out to be quite prescient on a bunch of topics, both tech and social. Ender's Game was published (fleshed out, novel version) in `85 and it got quite a few things pretty accurate:
- tablets & touchscreen widely used as a common interface to content
- the Internet as a wide web, everyone using it, instant messaging, and so on
- Social networks, forums where debates are held, and more importantly sock puppet accounts and wide scale manipulation (for politics, etc)
- AI for world generation, military use for training, adaptive difficulty, etc.
In the later books there are concepts like digital currency, AI controlled corps/accounts, AI becoming "sentient" and moving itself between mediums, etc (well, that one is not yet here, but who knows...)
No that's just competent writing. Hard sci-fi is very much about real science.