Soft does not tend to be light at all - soft treat scientific laws and principles as, well, soft limits and sufficiently advanced technology as magic that can handwave away any scientific element (as opposed to hard which treat scientific limitations largely as hard limits to what's plausible).
(For comparison, the article I'm talking about was using speculative for *soft* sci-fi, which is a whole other thing).
...which is yet *another* definition of speculative. Can people *stop* hijacking it?
...so tempted to bury those agents under the kind of speculative they don't want and when they complain point out that *they* are misusing *our* term until they get the message and find their own word.
(All of which is, of course, speculative, because whether you're speculating about technology that might exist within our understanding of science or about a different understanding of science, you're still speculating!)
It's not sci-fi's word to hijack as part of their eternal waste of bandwidth over whether it's better to be imaginative about what technology you can have within the current limits of science or to be imaginative about what the limits of science could be.
...are people really trying to rebrand soft sci fi as "speculative" sci-fi now or something?
...Speculative is *already* a genre word that serves as the umbrella for all "this is a world not quite like our own" genre: fantasy, sci-fi (hard AND soft), supernatural, eldritch, althistory, etc.
All of us at Can*Con are saddened to hear that Renaissance Press have taken the difficult decision to cease operations.
Renaissance Press and the writers they publish have been a big part of our convention for many years. We will miss them, and the loss will be felt by the SFFH community.
And the Lord said unto thee, "I will never surrender you, I will never disappoint you, I will never roam elsewhere and leave you. I will never cause distress, I will never forsake you, I will never speak an untruth and do harm upon you."
To be fair, if you called it écho de coeur in French I probably *still* wouldn't have understood what you were talking about - I've never seen écho used as short for échographie before!
Yes, Sauron take a more antagonistic role in book V, with the siege of Minas Tirith et al. But, as fond are people are of it, that's firmly the B-plot of the story. Aragorn and Ganfalf may be Sauron's enemies, but they're simply not the protagonist. They're there, again, to set the stakes.
The Nazgul stop being relevant to Frodo's quest about one-sixth of the way through the story (no more Nazgul/Frodo clashes after the Ford of Bruinen), and Sauron's orcs are (at best) a speedbump on the road to Mount Doom.
(Gollum, likewise, exist both to show the stakes of Frodo's personal struggles and to serve as a dark mirror to Frodo's own struggles. Frodo's victory doesn't hinge on overcoming him ; but on overcoming his own revulsion toward him and chosing pity (like Gandalf foreshadowed in so many words). )
This is your irregular reminder that at its heart, the central conflict of the Lord of the Rings is Man vs Self, as exemplified through the temptation of seizing the ring and using it.
Sauron...is a background prop who exist to set the stake of that conflict. (Hence, the staying off-page).
Statistics kicked my ass the first time I tried to study.
Then I redid the class and really got into it for a while.
Gotta stress again how a lot of the kindest, most welcoming, most respectful, and most supportive friends I’ve met online are actually those who are into icky gross disgusting problematic fiction. They're the best and honestly the chillest people to be around. I feel safer when I'm around them.
STAY AWAY FROM UOTTAWA RIGHT NOW! ACTIVE SHOOTER!
And if you're NOT at UO, AVOID THE AREA.
If you’re at the University of Ottawa, please lock down and stay safe!
And this winter was a special case of even longer and darker and quieter. The birds are definitely welcome back!
I hate to break it to people but a post-US led world order doesn’t look like global socialism. It looks like the Warring States Period but the states have nukes.
The two truths:
1) There is nothing wrong with porn, let people safely make it, let people safely enjoy it.
2) If you let people define porn as bad, authoritarians will ALWAYS expand the definition until their hands are around your neck.
I'm just not interested in that kind of emotional four years old in adult bodies anymore. I've put up with their nonsense enough in real life, and far more than that in fiction where their sort spent the twenty years before Covid being THE constant among all television and fiction,
"Dear Smoke Monster: please eat everyone except Hurley" is not a healthy relation with a show.
That rewatch died a hard death in season 2.
So some post going around about characters these days being too self aware, and how you need broken characters to create stories.
And couldn't help but think how the entire lack of self awareness from any cast members not named Hurley single-handedly killed my Lost rewatch two years ago.
Must you take everything from us, Gail?
We used to have things, but everytime you say we don't have something reality rewrites itself to deprive us of it. It's not fun!
Dear Universe: The Leafs are out of the playoff picture, that means it's time for Spring goddamit.
Also because they were in the part of the island that's a six-digit population centre and political capital.
Likes, yes, winter is cold when you expect balmy Texas, but no, you were not in fact reenacting Lost but with climatologically appropriate Polar Bears.
thebookseller ig account saying NEWS: some editors uploading confidential manuscripts to ChatGPT to read quickly, agent claims
the guardian: I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence – but we are as valuable as ever | Stephen Marche
the walrus bsky account: Authors are using AI. Publishers know it. And now, says publishing consultant Thad McIlroy, authors are being forced to lie about it. One cancelled horror novel didn’t just end a career—it exposed an industry-wide reckoning.
idk guys when i see a lot of similar headlines insisting that editors & authors are all already embracing AI, i don't assume these things are true. i assume there are a lot of very rich people with an unpopular product pushing a particular narrative in my industry!
from tumblr user exeggcute: I need a polite and effective way to say "hey your heart is truly in the right place and your anger is often righteous but I think sometimes you’re getting recreationally mad about things that are frankly not worth the amount of energy you’re spending on them, and every time you do this you're driving yourself slightly more insane with nothing to show for it," and then I need a way to broadcast that message through a loudspeaker to roughly 30,000 people at once, and THEN I need a time machine to send that message to my past self lol. and maybe a second time machine in case past me tries to be clever and sabotage the version of me who comes through the first time machine
good post
Fly true, huntress. #ArtemisII