Mildly pissed after reading a story advertised as “science fiction” that literally had no fictional science premise to it. It was just a bad regular story set in the future with a couple of cosmetic props with no plot use.
This is bullshit. Don’t do this.
Conversation
Even generously interpreted as speculative fiction, the speculation didn’t really play a serious role
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I’ve tried to read some recent emerging stuff, but it’s tiresome how speculative fiction seems to have been taken over by a narrow kind of wishful ideological pseudo-speculation that displays no real curiosity, only crude moral conceits
Very depressing
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I almost think hard vs soft scifi is a useless distinction. There’s only curious and incurious. Often the answer to “what was the writer curious about when writing this?” is “nothing”
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"Hard scifi" often isn't much more plausible than "soft scifi". I was constantly frustrated reading "Three Body Problem" because it went on for pages about technical details on human-powered computers full of horrible design decisions and ignored blatant synchronization problems.
I recall there also being a part that gave a poor description of Shannon Entropy, and then claimed that a game made their graphics "better" and "more deeply meaningful" by essentially just adding in random noise.
Then there was the weird particle physics stuff at the end...
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3bp didn’t read “hard” to me, merely dark and gritty.
Hard is more like Vernon Vinge

