In a Favorable Notice of “Changing Planes, an Argentinean Reviewer Asserts That Because I Am Not a Hard Science Fiction”

In a favorable notice of “Changing Planes, an Argentinean reviewer asserts that because I am not a hard science fiction writer, “technology is carefully avoided. I appended a footnote to that review in my translation; here it is expanded, because this business is getting my goat. Hard SF is all about technology, and soft SF has none, right?

And my books lack technology because I care only for psychology, emotions, and squashy things, right? Wrong. No genuine science fiction of any kind can lack technological content.

Even if its principal interest is not engineering or machines, but, as in most of my work, how minds, societies, and cultures work, how can anyone tell a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology? Nobody can. Technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get, keep, and cook food; how they clothe themselves; what their power sources are—animal, human, water, wind, electricity, or other; what they build with and what they build; their medicine; and so on.

Perhaps very ethereal people are uninterested in such mundane, bodily matters, but I am fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too. Technology is the active human interface with the material world. Yet the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation of both natural and human resources. That is not an acceptable use of the word.””