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Comment by PurpleRamen | Hacker News Reader

> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact.

This implicates the brain and experience being genderless, which does not really seem to pass by today's understanding of it. But then again, the brain would probably also experience a very traumatic phase of body-adaption. There are many syndromes with people having strange feelings about the body they were born in, or missing parts of it; how awful would be to switch the whole body overnight and not having a long phase of adapting to it. Not sure if I would really call this elegant. But then again, body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.

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Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. You can't really explain technology which doesn't exist without risking getting it completely wrong as actual science moves along, or just harming the narrative by focusing on irrelevant details.

If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. Nanobots constantly tweaking hormones? Your mind and memories simply layered over a virgin clone brain with everything set for whichever sex that body has?

If the writer set out to explore that theme they might delve into it, otherwise all that matters is that it works and sounds plausible from within the context of the story.

Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. 'What if money could buy a body of the opposite gender?' is all that is relevant.

Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.

> Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it.

No, that's pretty much the definition of it.

> If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation.

No, that is just explaining away poor writing. Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.

> Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people.

Starting with ignoring the first obvious consequences is not exploring how something affects people, it's just wishful thinking.

> Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.

If Star Wars would be SciFi, then we should get some good enough explanation for this. People are disputing about those details to great lengths for good reasons.

There were probably a few more sentences hand waving these sorts of details in the books, by the time they got mentioned you were probably more interested in worrying about the Moon-wide epidemic of suicide that the Moon’s governing AI had tasked the book’s protagonist with discovering the cause with, after the protagonist recovered from being brought back in a fresh clone after succumbing to it.

That’s the plot of Steel Beach, if you want to go see what happens next and how much time Varley actually spent on the details of this stuff.

> Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.

Only when the details you are explaining are relevant to the story you want to tell and the themes you want to cover.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores a planet populated by an offshoot of humans who have developed a genderless existence where they experience sexual characteristics only once a month and are genderless the rest of the time.

The book does not explain how this works biologically or why this came about evolutionarily, because that is not the point. The interest of the author was to explore the cultural and sociological implications of this situation. If a group of humans lived without gender most of the time, how would this affect their culture and society? And what does that in turn say about our own gendered society?

Diving into the biological nitty-gritty of this fictional scenario would distract from the social themes the author was trying to explore.

> ... , then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation.

We have solved the issue to travel fast from A to B (by car, train, etc), yet we haven't solved motion sickness. There are treatments, sure, but the underlying issue hasn't been solved.

> body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.

I think it was Fredrik Pohl in Man Plus who got that part better sorted out - of course your body/physical experience shapes your brain.

One of the Oliver Sacks stories (I know, his stock crashed recently) was about a man who had lost his vision as a toddler, and had it restored in midlife. Which tripped him badly.

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus , https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not... ]

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