Thursday, April 23, 2009

Do you like your sci fi Hard, or Soft?

Excuse the interruption.

I thought some of you might like a quick headsup on this discussion on LinkedIn.com

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=2842926&gid=45166&trk=EML_anet_qa_cmnt-cDhOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA

The header is also a link to the discussion.

Normal discourse will now resume....

4 comments:

  1. Hi Rowena
    Thanks for link. I registered with LinkedIn but it still said I couldn't access link because I wasn't a member of the group.
    It sounds interesting as I am still trying to work out how much hard science to put in my SciFi/Romance WIP!
    Let me know what else I need to do please.
    Thanks

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  2. Ombersand,
    Are you able to join the group? It is:
    Science Fiction readers, writers, and collectors

    You can probably find a link to it if you scroll through my LinkedIn.com profile page (rowenacherry) and all the groups to which I belong.

    There are too many of them, but there's a gem almost every day.

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  3. Thanks Rowena have sent off a request to Wilke.

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  4. Finally got "linked in" thanks Rowena. Interesting group. Good to see a number of males. They probably make up the majority of the scifi readership, so I need to get a handle on how they think and what they are looking for if I am ever going to get my WIP published!
    Found this comment interesting:
    "Quite often, the real distinction we're making when we put some stories into the "hard" category and others into the "soft" is not one of the plausibility of their science, but rather how well the author has written around the holes in the science! We will often accept stories as "hard" even if they contain some pretty for-sure scientifici impossibilities, as long as those are presented to us in such a way that they're at least plausible. The author gives us an out in terms of enabling the suspension of disbelief from the scientific perspective. And on the other hand, much of what we call "soft" winds up with that label only because it is left all too clear that at least one key factor in the story flies in the face of everything we know scientifically."As another group member wrote, hard scifi can become outdated when real science catches up to it.
    This comment was also interesting:
    "My thought is that it has to do with the intent of the story. Hard sf is *about* the technology. The characters are often just there to showcase the technology, to give the readers somebody to follow through the story. Soft sf is about the characters, and the sf element is just there as a background. It's a rather subtle distinction to make, which is why people may differ on which category they put any particular story into."It seems most of the males in that group like "hard" scifi. Wonder if it is because they like tech stuff or are not rapt in reading about emotions?

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