You know, y'all fly off the handle pretty quickly. My very first post on
this subject was purposefully argued from a linguistic stance. If you'd
like, we can just go more connotative:
_hard_ science, versus _soft_ science. Now you tell me that choice of
adjectives is not somehow significant.
_object_ive reality.
_subject_ive reality. You think these terms, as well, are non-connotative?
One poses the world as a manipulated commodity; the other presents a more
manipulative relationship to the world, but with several possible realms of
focus (all subjects can have a different reality).
I said *nothing* about ... what was it?
>Ignorance
>Superstition
>Religion
>Fantasy
(interesting choice, however--one which i won't touch with a 8" or 10-ft
pole...) being the sole domains of feminism, sf written by women, or any
such balderdash. Once again: the original question was: is (the notion of)
hard science inherently sexist. Yes, it is. Doesn't invalidate it, doesn't
make its conclusions immediately wrong, doesn't obviate *my* objective or
subjective reality. It's just inherently a sexist concept. Basta.
>As for hard science fiction:
> I think you have to try to write in the hard sf mode; novels do not
>become hard sf by accident any more than they become Gothic. For example,
>Nicola Griffith certainly seems to know enough about waste treatment to write
>a hard sf treatment of the subject, but IMHO she was going after something
>different in _Slow River_ -- maybe something bigger. She said something
>similar to this in the SFWA bulletin, about how when she added characters to
>her knowledge of biology, everything changed.. I don't see it as a criticism
>of _Slow River_ to say that it does not fit within the hard sf canon.
Gee, that's kind of you.
Hard sf seems to me, if we work from Suvin's definition (which has the
benefit of being concise, understandable, and not dependant on examples),
that "hard sf" constitutes those works whose *novum* consists of something
science/technologically-based. Remember, the novum is that "novelty factor"
which is the crux of the story (szujet). Much (bad) hard sf from the Golden
Age is remembered because the novum was so over-whelming that
"characterization" seemed to be a mere add-on, something to make the work
into an actual piece of fiction instead of a scientific disquisition. I'd
have to reread Griffith's book, but as I remember, the closest technology
gets to being the "raison d'etre" for the story is cyberpunkish, but it's
not really hard because of the waste treatment plant. But I'm probably
wrong--I really can't remember the details right now. But I don't think the
mere presence of technology in a story--no matter how scientifically precise
it is--is what makes an sf work hard or not.
I'm reading Butler's _Xenogenesis_ trilogy right now (missed some of the
earlier, more classic stuff not having grown up in an English-speaking
country), and according to the above definition, this trilogy is definitely
hard sf: the story could not have been possible without genetic
manipulation. The fact that the thrust of the story is about difference,
and human response to difference, does not change its categorization. Many
of the "mars exploration" stories I've read, however, despite flame-tootling
rocket et. al., are not "hard" in the slightest: they're just updated
versions of western expansionism.
Awright, awright. These discussions have been interesting, but jumping
around like a bunch of mexican beans...
Heather
=)
hmaclean@kent.edu
http://kent.edu/~hmaclean/
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