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What no love for Knuth's Surreal numbers? https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html I think if you're not into sci fi, you

by VLM 10y ago

What no love for Knuth's Surreal numbers? https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html I think if you're not into sci fi, you've discovered what most call the distinction between hard and soft sci fi. Soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies. Hard sci fi is what if this really thought provoking component datasheet or speculative theoretical physics paper were true, maybe I could sell more copies if I put some humans into the story as filler for my gimmick. I'm personally pretty bored with human condition stories; I've read them all or lived thru the experience myself over the decades, but sci fi still delights me with glorious creativity even if the bolted on characters are sometimes one dimensional cardboard cutouts. The system you suggest of a human story teller deferring to the scientists is usually screwed up by one side or the other; when it isn't, its noteworthy. One example of an English Lit major not screwing up the science would be KSR's famous Mars Trilogy from around the turn of the century. That's a really good trilogy! Proving that at least theoretically your system is possible, having been successfully implemented at least once historically.

mklim 10y ago
>soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies. This is a pretty unfair description of the category. Soft scifi is a story that has fantastical tech/physics that aren't completely explained. The tech is usually crucial to the story in some way, but the how of the tech's functioning is left unsaid. I find it unlikely that you've somehow lived through the entire range of events and emotions that can comprise the "human condition", but that aside: a lot of the soft scifi stories out there are focused around hypothetical inhuman conditions for which the fantastical tech is crucial. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is focused on whether artificial sentience is less worthy than organic, Whedon's Dollhouse on the potential personal and societal ramifications of being able to save/load our brains digitally, Ancillary Justice on what it might feel like to have your consciousness simultaneously inhabiting multiple bodies, "The Measure of a Man" from TNG on what it means to be sentient and if artificial sentience is possible (or even possible to measure once achieved), Her exploring how a truly sentient AI would relate to humans and impact our society. There are a lot of vague stories out there that use spaceships as an attention-grabber, but that isn't what defines the genre.

by VLM 10y ago

mklim 10y ago

>soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies. This is a pretty unfair description of the category. Soft scifi is a story that has fantastical tech/physics that aren't completely explained. The tech is usually crucial to the story in some way, but the how of the tech's functioning is left unsaid. I find it unlikely that you've somehow lived through the entire range of events and emotions that can comprise the "human condition", but that aside: a lot of the soft scifi stories out there are focused around hypothetical inhuman conditions for which the fantastical tech is crucial. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is focused on whether artificial sentience is less worthy than organic, Whedon's Dollhouse on the potential personal and societal ramifications of being able to save/load our brains digitally, Ancillary Justice on what it might feel like to have your consciousness simultaneously inhabiting multiple bodies, "The Measure of a Man" from TNG on what it means to be sentient and if artificial sentience is possible (or even possible to measure once achieved), Her exploring how a truly sentient AI would relate to humans and impact our society. There are a lot of vague stories out there that use spaceships as an attention-grabber, but that isn't what defines the genre.