In article
<e98ee070-edce-4eb3-8175-51a953a8dbf0@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Damien Valentine <valends3@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 19, 9:46 am, Ben Crowell
> <crowel...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > But, hey, the people doing the research were mostly
> > psychologists, and psychology just isn't a hard science -- by their
> > standards, it wasn't at all unusual for experiments to be hard to
> > reproduce, to be impossible to connect to underlying physical
phenomena,
> > and to be statistically messy.
>
> Maybe this should branch off into another topic, but: do stories based
> entirely on the non-"hard" sciences (such as psychology, or sociology,
> or history, or biology, or ecology) count as sci-fi? If so, that
> raises the rather absurd notion (at least to me) that "Watership Down"
> and the works of Jane Austen are in the same genre as "Tau Zero" and
> "I, Robot".
Now I'm completely confused. History isn't a science to start with, and
plenty of genuine science fiction stories deal with the other stuff you
mentioned. Just looking at my own shelf, _The Space Merchants_ is
mostly about psychology and sociology, Philip K. Dick deals with . . .
mmm, all of the above mentioned soft sciences. Heinlein too. In fact, I
think all the futuristic gadgets and spaceships and whatnot in
Heinlein's stories are mainly there just as tools to put the characters
in situations where Heinlein can tell a story about psychology,
sociology, and biology.
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