The Ship Who Sang 2: Hard and Soft SF

RichardAbbott

Hard science fiction this is not - Anne McCaffrey has little or no interest in, for example, how the ship drive works, except as a plot device when it is inefficient and could be improved. She has very little concern for the distances between planets, except insofar as they introduce unavoidable delays. She does have some interest in the human biology of how you get a human brain into a ship (or in other stories in the series, a space station or planetary base). But her interest is primarily relational. Did this work for you? How much hard science do you like in a book? Did the story suffer from the lack of (physical) science?

clash_bowley

I don't need any hard science in a book. I do need common sense, but then I love star wars so I'm not real consistent. I do really appreciate good hard science in a book - was a tech writer/illustrator for many years in extremely high tech fields, so I am very used to hanging with badass physicists and can translate to and from their simple but beautiful language. I REALLY like hard SF, but I am totally cool with soft as a sneaker full of monkey poo. When I got to places in the story where, y'know, science!, I just roll my eyes and laugh and forge ahead.

BarnerCobblewood

It worked fine. SF this is not.

Apocryphal

I generally prefer soft SF, I guess, though I like hard SF as well if it doesn't get too dry.
Interesting the reliance on tape in this future. Actually, I've read a few SF novels this year that describe futures that still rely on tapes. It seems like data storage and transferal not evolving much is one of the common blind spots in SF writing, as well as lack of internet and not really taking inflation into account.

RichardAbbott

Given the time of writing, I think it was a good choice to have a ship mind that wasn't an AI of some kind. That probably means that the core of the story dates less with the passage of time. The bits that show their age are, as @Apocryphal indicates, incidental gadgets like tape storage

NeilNjae

There wasn't a lot of emphasis on technology in the book, but there weren't egregious errors either: it wasn't like Star Wars or Dune with a lot of mysticism and the like. So definitely SF, even if it wasn't hard. This book is about people and their relationships, both to each other and society in general.

And that raises the question of why this story is SF at all. Could fundamentally the same story have been told where Helva was a brilliant professional in some field, while also being physically disabled and dealing with the same issues of being seen as less than human? Do the SF trappings give some distance to the issues, and allow us to deal with them without quite so much heat and emotion?

Information technology is a blind spot for a lot of SF and similar in the 60s and 70s: pretty much no-one saw it coming.

BarnerCobblewood

Reading this something was niggling me, and I realized that it was that PKD had also written a short story, Mr. Starship, about this theme in 1953 (disabled people being extended through being placed in a Spaceship, although the disability is brought about by aging rather than birth). You can read about it here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Spaceship and download it at Gutenberg if you're interested.

Something odd, I can't insert a link on my phone. Also no drop down edit menu.

RichardAbbott

@BarnerCobblewood said:
Reading this something was niggling me, and I realized that it was that PKD had also written a short story, Mr. Starship, about this theme in 1953 (disabled people being extended through being placed in a Spaceship, although the disability is brought about by aging rather than birth). You can read about it here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Spaceship and download it at Gutenberg if you're interested.

That was fun and thanks for the link - it's a short read and a fairly straightforward one. The usual theme of the time where it was taken for granted that a human operator would always outperform an automated or robotic one, and there's no trace of the existential crisis "AI is going to take over" which would come later. I can sort-of imagine Anne McCaffrey reading Mr Starship and thinking to herself, "hmm, nice idea but it needs some work to get it more compelling".

BarnerCobblewood

It's clearly a young PKD writing, but I thought that the idea that living beings were always superior to machines because they represent another magnitude of complexity of response was pretty ground breaking for 1953 pulp. If I remember correctly there was a similar discussion in RUR, which is late 20s I think, and Metropolis deals with similar themes, but does anyone know of pre-WW2 treatments in Anglo-American sf?

BarnerCobblewood

Edited because same as earlier post

RichardAbbott

@BarnerCobblewood said:
It's clearly a young PKD writing, but I thought that the idea that living beings were always superior to machines because they represent another magnitude of complexity of response was pretty ground breaking for 1953 pulp. If I remember correctly there was a similar discussion in RUR, which is late 20s I think, and Metropolis deals with similar themes, but does anyone know of pre-WW2 treatments in Anglo-American sf?

The Lensman series is full of hot-shot space pilots who with steely eyes fixed on the visiplate and hands on the rocket controls fight a reluctant spaceship down from orbit to ground in the fastest possible time. Autopilots are either simply not present or else clearly vastly inferior.