"Practics"

"Soft" sf, so to call it, by Ray Bradbury, Clifford Simak or CS Lewis, does not require any scientific or technological knowledge whereas hard sf by James Blish, Poul Anderson or Larry Niven is enhanced by such knowledge. See past posts referring to Lewis' idea of the "Engineer's Story," here. (Scroll down.) Years ago, my friend, Fran Cobden, Engineering student and fellow sf reader, was able both to bodge machinery and to calculate planetary orbits. He was aghast at how little I noticed of the world around me - which was because my thought processes were almost entirely abstract. I think that I eventually inquired my way to a deeper philosophical understanding than Fran. He saw the trees whereas I saw the wood. Philosophical understanding can help with which political movements to support and which kind of meditation to practice so it does not have to remain theoretical. (Fran would say, "Let's get back to practics...")

These reflections are prompted by the immense wealth of technical information to be found in Poul Anderson's deceptively simple story, "A Tragedy of Errors." A star rover and his two wives land on a planet where they need help with spaceship repairs but there is much more going on than that. Why are the planetary environment and the current state of technology of its human colonists the way they are? These are the kinds of passages that I would once have skipped past in order to hurry on to the action, character interactions and plot resolution. On this rereading of the story, I aim to value every detail. There will be more to post about this.