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LONG_HARD_PURPOSE

                                             April   01, 2022
                                             January 19, 2026


Benford continues on the theme I quoted
at the close of

   HARD_PURPOSE

He expounds at some length, going in a
direction much like I would go now...                And I know I read this
                                                     essay back in 1984--
   "One of the charms of Pohl's short                this may be where I
   'Day Million' is its streetwise                   picked up some of this.
   expression of human values shifted by
   advanced technology.  He makes a                        THE_HARD_EQUATIONS
   bizarre technical future appear more
   understandable, and far less
   ridiculous, than our own times. Of
   course, some hard SF authors prefer
   to stress our continuity with the
   future, probably because this is a
   safer narrative strategy. Poul
   Anderson's moody, reflective and
   historically knowledgeable hard SF
   tales often show how certain elements
   of human behavior will continue into
   distant bizarre settings."

   "Pursuit of the
   technically complex       But you can say the same
   and aesthetically         for, for example, Bruce     (And Benford
   unfamiliar limits the     Sterling's early            criticizes some of
   hard SF audience."        cyberpunk stories,          Sterling's stuff, like
                             which have much less        "Green Days in
                             of this "hard science"      Brunei", complaining
                             approach than someone       about the accuracy of
                             like Benford employs--      its economics, and
                                                         thereby missing the
                             I think the anti-           point.)
                             romantic view (which
                             might or might not             MYSTIC_ENGINEERING
                             be anti-"humanistic")
                             may not be as tightly
                             coupled to the
                             scientific view as
                             Benford presumes.


    "This is unfortunate. For I do agree with
    Gerard Klein that hard SF, at least, is the
    underground literature of a usually silent
    class-- not merely technology hounds, but men
    and women who have seen the genuinely strange
    territory that lies beyond the slick finish of
    popularized science. It is an underswell of our
    remorselessly complex age, often fixated by
    futuristic technology and drawn forward by
    unfolding vast perspectives."



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