Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated
>I thought it meant "very hard to understand"
For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].
[0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually.
At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed.
So... Anyone ever actually read IJ?
But, you know. There's a lot of social cachet in talking about whatever's trendy lately, as long as you don't make it obvious that you actually studied it among people who are only pretending in front of someone they want to impress. That may constitute defection and attract harsh punishment.
I say what I like here because I don't care what internet randos think of me, and no one with a life reads or comments on this website. I avoid such carelessness with great care in real life, at least unless I intend to give so grave an insult.
That need is most rare, but when I do find it, people often quietly introduce themselves to thank me after. In the meantime those who know me tend to find me kindly and somewhat retiring, if not at first positively shy, despite or perhaps because of my imposing size and build and carriage.
The thing is, what they see isn't a lie. That's why I value this website so highly. It offers a venue for the love of pettifogging disputation and waspish propriety that's always flawed an otherwise I think quite solidly respectable sort of character. Doing that on here, I feel no urge to do it out there. I believe the term is "harm reduction?"
When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.
Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF.
It's at least a 2D area:
hard <-> soft
is at 90º to
rigorous <-> totally without rigour
Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules?
Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett).
I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error.
To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense.
It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause.
Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.
HN is a better place without comments like this.
Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.
Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.
Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.