"It's a soft science, I would say," Lai told me.
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In Soft Science, Choi's second collection, she continues to explore these themes.
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Defining mood is still too much of a soft science for advertisers who like hard numbers.
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Franny Choi's second poetry collection Soft Science asks us to imagine a world outside of any binary.
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I really tried to keep it soft science, but I've got a feeling it's probably somewhere in the middle.
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They tend to be at a disadvantage in rankings because there are fewer soft-science or humanities journals, so hard-science papers get more citations.
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I've heard from many frustrated authors whose books are included on lists of 'soft science fiction' or 'science-fiction romance' purely because these authors are female.
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But the indisputable star of this exercise in soft science from the inventive British troupe Improbable, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater of John Jay College through Wednesday, is its charismatic title character.
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H. G. Wells, an early example of a soft science fiction writer. Poul Anderson, in Ideas for SF Writers (Sep 1998), described H. G. Wells as the model for soft science fiction: "He concentrated on the characters, their emotions and interactions" rather than any of the science or technology behind, for example, invisible men or time machines. See also the alternative Soft science fiction (n) for the second definition. Jeffrey Wallmann suggests that soft science fiction grew out of the gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley.
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The conte cruel was the standard narrative form of soft science fiction by the 1980s. During the 1980s cyberpunk developed from soft science fiction. McGuirk identifies two subgenres of soft science fiction: "Humanist science fiction" (in which human beings, rather than technology, are the cause of advancement or from which change can be extrapolated in the setting; often involving speculation on the human condition) and "Science fiction noir" (focusing on the negative aspects of human nature; often in a dystopian setting).
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Soft Science is a poetry collection published in 2019, written by poet and writer Franny Choi. It received positive reviews.
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Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the significant writers of soft science fiction. Soft science fiction, or soft SF, is a category of science fiction with two different definitions. # It explores the "soft" sciences, and especially the social sciences (for example, anthropology, sociology, or psychology), rather than engineering or the "hard" sciences (for example, physics, astronomy, or chemistry). # It is not scientifically accurate or plausible; the opposite of hard science fiction.
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Ursula K. Le Guin extrapolated social and biological changes that were anthropological in nature. Philip K. Dick explored the metaphysics of the mind in a series of novels and stories that rarely seemed dependent on their science fictional content. Le Guin, Dick, and others like them became associated with the concept of soft science fiction more than with the New Wave. Soft science fiction was contrasted to the notion of hard science fiction.
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Many of the poems in Soft Science appear in Choi's 2017 chapbook Death by Sex Machine. Choi began the chapbook without "[...] really [knowing] what it might turn into". Choi has also said she drew inspiration for the collection from a series of poems she wrote about the character Kyoko from the 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina though only one of the Kyoko poems appears in Soft Science. Choi has referred to the Kyoko poems as "bay leaf" poems.
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World of Trouble is a 2014 American soft science fiction mystery novel by Ben H. Winters and published by Quirk Books. It is the third and last installment of the Last Policeman trilogy.
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In the tall tales of Baron Munchausen, his adventures included visiting the Moon and travelling underwater This is a list of science fiction comedy works—those mixing soft science fiction or science fantasy with comedy.
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Soft science fiction of either type is often more concerned with character and speculative societies, rather than speculative science or engineering. The term first appeared in the late 1970s and is attributed to Australian literary scholar Peter Nicholls.
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Examples are seen in the works of Alastair Reynolds or the movie The Last Starfighter. At other times, space opera can concur with hard science fiction and differ from soft science fiction by instead focusing on scientific accuracy such as The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld. Other space opera works may be defined as a balance between both or simultaneously hard and soft science fiction such as the Dune prequel series by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert or the Star Wars series created by George Lucas. Several subsets of space opera overlap with military science fiction, concentrating on large- scale space battles with futuristic weapons.
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Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity. Roughly speaking, the natural sciences (e.g. physics, biology, astronomy) are considered "hard", whereas the social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, political science) are usually described as "soft".
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His research mainly covers complexity science, fictitious economy, venture capital, chemical systems engineering, soft science and management science. He has published several books, including Chromic Salts Technology, Rejuvenating Chemical Industry through Science and Technology, Soft Science and Reform, Large Linear Target Programming and Application, Research in China's Economic Development and Reform and Economic Reform and Development in China. In 2010, he began having his works translated into English and published through Enrich Professional Publishing "2102 Economic Reforms & Development in China & Book Launch", China's Sina News, Jan 6, 2012 in Hong Kong, for a worldwide readership. The books Selected Works of Cheng Siwei, Economic Reforms and Development in China: Three-Volume Set are some of his most recent works.
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Depending on whether the science fiction is hard science fiction or soft science fiction, the depictions of invisibility may be more rooted in actual or plausible technologies (such as depictions of technologies to make a vessel not appear on detection equipment), or more on the fictional or speculative end of the spectrum.
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Carol McGuirk, in Fiction 2000 (1992), states that the "soft school" of science fiction dominated the genre in the 1950s, with the beginning of the Cold War and an influx of new readers into the science fiction genre. The early members of the soft science fiction genre were Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury and James Blish, who were the first to make a "radical" break from the hard science fiction tradition and "take extrapolation explicitly inward", emphasising the characters and their characterisation. In calling out specific examples from this period, McGuirk describes Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness as "a soft SF classic". The New Wave movement in science fiction developed out of soft science fiction in the 1960s and 70s.
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The play, subtitled "A Fantastic Melodrama," offers only a general description of the process for creating living workers out of artificial tissue, and thus can be compared to social comedy or literary fantasy. George S. Elrick, in Science Fiction Handbook for Readers and Writers (1978), cited Brian Aldiss' 1959 short story collection The Canopy of Time (using the US title Galaxies Like Grains of Sand) as an example of soft science fiction based on the soft sciences. Frank Herbert's Dune series is a landmark of soft science fiction. In it, he deliberately spent little time on the details of its futuristic technology so he could devote it chiefly to addressing the politics of humanity, rather than the future of humanity's technology.
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As a discipline, psychology has long sought to fend off accusations that it is a "soft" science. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn's 1962 critique implied psychology overall was in a pre- paradigm state, lacking the agreement on overarching theory found in mature sciences such as chemistry and physics.T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1st. ed., Chicago: Univ.
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Peter Nicholls, the first person attested to have used the term soft science fiction. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Peter Nicholls writes that "soft SF" is a "not very precise item of SF terminology" and that the contrast between hard and soft is "sometimes illogical.""Soft SF," Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 1995, .
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Automan is an American soft science fiction superhero television series produced by Glen A. Larson. It aired for 12 episodes (although 13 were made) on ABC between 1983 and 1984. It consciously emulates the stylistic trappings of the Walt Disney Pictures live-action film Tron, in the context of a superhero TV series. The series was later shown in reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel.
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Technobabble also occurs in soft science fiction, although here it is frequently just a throw- away part of the world and not dwelt on. Soft sci-fi generally prefers unobtainium or handwavium to technobabble, as it is less taxing on the reader and fits with the setting of telling a story in a sci-fi setting as opposed to telling a story about partially fictional science.
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In 2015, Mudanjiang Teachers College will be renamed Normal University. On February 26, 2018, Soft Science 2018 "China's Best University Ranking" was released, and Mudanjiang Teachers College ranked 551.[12] Mudanjiang University was founded in 1983 and is the first batch of 100 local universities in the country. The school consists of three parts: the school headquarters, the Hailin campus and the industrial park training base.
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In fact, the boundaries between "hard" and "soft" are neither definite nor universally agreed-upon, so there is no single standard of scientific "hardness" or "softness." Some readers might consider any deviation from the possible or probable (for example, including faster-than-light travel or paranormal powers) to be a mark of "softness." Others might see an emphasis on character or the social implications of technological change (however possible or probable) as a departure from the science-engineering-technology issues that in their view ought to be the focus of hard SF. Given this lack of objective and well-defined standards, "soft science fiction" does not indicate a genre or subgenre of SF but a tendency or quality—one pole of an axis that has "hard science fiction" at the other pole. In Brave New Words, subtitled The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, soft science fiction is given two definitions.
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Superhero fiction is a genre of speculative fiction examining the adventures, personalities and ethics of costumed crime fighters known as superheroes, who often possess superhuman powers and battle similarly powered criminals known as supervillains. The genre primarily falls between hard fantasy and soft science fiction spectrum of scientific realism. It is most commonly associated with American comic books, though it has expanded into other media through adaptations and original works.
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S. T. Joshi, Tryambak Sunand Joshi, David E. Schultz, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003 The Iron Heel is an example of a dystopian novel that anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.Orwell: the Authorized Biography by Michael Shelden, HarperCollins London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here. The Iron Heel meets the contemporary definition of soft science fiction. The Star Rover (1915) is also science fiction.
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Audrey Niffenegger, author of the soft science fiction work The Time Traveler's Wife. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four might be described as soft science fiction, since it is concerned primarily with how society and interpersonal relationships are altered by a political force that uses technology mercilessly; even though it is the source of many ideas and tropes commonly explored in subsequent science fiction, (even in hard science fiction), such as mind control and surveillance. And yet, its style is uncompromisingly realistic, and despite its then-future setting, very much more like a spy novel or political thriller in terms of its themes and treatment. Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., which supplied the term robot (nearly replacing earlier terms such as automaton) and features a trope-defining climax in which artificial workers unite to overthrow human society, covers such issues as free will, a post-scarcity economy, robot rebellion, and post-apocalyptic culture.
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Behavioral psychologist Henry D. Schlinger wrote two critical reviews of the book that emphasized the importance of learning. Another behavioral psychologist, Elliot A. Ludvig, criticized Pinker's description of behaviorism and insights into behaviorist research.Behavior.org Philosopher John Dupré argued that the book overstated the case for biological explanations and argued for a balanced approach.Americanscientist.org Biologist H. Allen Orr argued that Pinker's work often lacks scientific rigor, and suggests that it is "soft science".
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In 1999, Netbig, or literally Net Universities in abbreviation, a higher education internet information company, released Chinese university ranking. In 2002, Chinese university ranking by Airuishen (a company) was released. The CUAA Ranking, released in the name of Chinese Universities Alumni Association, is said made by Cai Yanhou team. In 2003, a team in Shanghai Jiaotong University, later named Shanghai Ranking (Shanghai Ruanke, literally Shanghai Soft Science in abbreviation), released Academic Ranking of World Universities.
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Recently there has been interest in how the modern militaries have constructed their knowledge. Military science in modern armed forces has taken on the aura of a hard science when it is arguably a combination of hard science, sociology ("soft science"), and military history (the humanities). Postmodern deconstructions of the assumptions behind modern military science can be effective in revealing how modern militaries have socially constructed their reality.Chris Paparone (2013), The Sociology of Military Science, NY: Bloomsbury.
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MIPT was founded by the survivors and family members of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It was their intention to establish an institute dedicated to terrorism prevention. The first Board of Directors was appointed in 2000 by then Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating. The institute soon began operations conducting research and funding a wide array of projects, both hard and soft science, developing advanced tools such as explosive detection devices, and new work on the biology of anthrax.
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Viktor Dmitrievič Kolupaev (September 19, 1936 - June 4, 2001) was a Russian scientist and soft science fiction author who won the Aelita Prize in 1986 and 1988. Kolupaev was born in Nezametny, Yakutia, attended school in Krasnoyarsk and moved in 1954 to Tomsk where he attended the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute and became a member of the Siberian Physical-Technical Institute of the Tomsk State University, where he worked in mathematics and bionics. He started writing fiction in 1970.
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However, the significance of cuneiform commentaries extends beyond the light they shed on specific details of Mesopotamian civilization. They open a window onto what the concerns of the Mesopotamian literate elite were when they read some of the most widely studied texts in the Mesopotamian intellectual tradition, a perspective that is important for “seeing things their way.”Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World”, Critical Inquiry 35/4, pp.
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Producer Li Eryun said that the play is a small but beautiful, positive energy dream sweet pet love drama, which has both a soft science fiction with a big brain and a love story core that is easily decompressed, and is committed to bringing relaxed joy to the audience At the same time as the romantic innocent story, spread positive positive energy values. The show was officially filmed in Shenzhen on October 20, 2018 , ended on January 4, 2019.
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In 1984, Liu received a master's degree in optics from the Department of Physics at Peking University in Beijing. While there, he was an assistant teacher. Liu returned to work at the China Soft Science Research Institute but was also acting assistant director at the University of Science and Technology of China. In 1988, Liu became an assistant and associate researcher at the Wear- Resistant Materials Development Company of the National Ministry of Higher Education & the Dalian Institute of Technology.
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" E. Bornemann says the title-track 'is one of the best examples of expressing [my] true feelings." The album draws comparison to the music of Fazerdaze, the Primitives, the Cardigans, and Soft Science. The music video for the song "The Latter" was written, directed and edited by Dana Yurcisin, with additional production by Biff Swenson, cinematography by Greg Papalcure and art and light direction by Chris York. It was filmed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, Centralia, Pennsylvania and Beachwood, New Jersey.
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Sproll is a Canadian indie rock band that was formed in 2003 in Moncton, New Brunswick. The band Sproll consists of lead vocalist Corey Hachey, guitarist Neal MacLean, bassist Glen Austin Farquhar, and drummer Thom Cooke. Their debut EP titled "Soft Science" was released in February 2006 and garnered a nominated for an East Coast Music Award in 2007 for NEWCAP Rock Recording of the Year. The songs "More Than You" and "Nobody's Fault" have been used on the television show Whistler.
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A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 70s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes. The book is unusual among London's writings (and in the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist written by a man. Much of the narrative is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, including events in San Francisco and Sonoma County.
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She argued that the term "soft science fiction" was divisive, and implied a narrow view of what constitutes valid science fiction. The influence of anthropology can be seen in the setting Le Guin chose for a number of her works. Several of her protagonists are anthropologists or ethnologists exploring a world alien to them. This is particularly true in the stories set in the Hainish universe, an alternative reality in which humans did not evolve on Earth, but on Hain.
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H. P. Lovecraft observed of Level's fiction in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927): "This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself—the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors". Brian M. Stableford has observed that, by the 1980s, the conte cruel was the standard narrative form of soft science fiction, in particular the works of Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek.
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Countdown City is a 2013 American soft science fiction mystery novel by Ben H. Winters. It is the sequel to The Last Policeman and follows the exploits of former detective Henry Palace as he investigates the disappearance of Brett Cavatone, the husband of his childhood nanny, Martha. The book is set in a world preparing for the impact of 2011GV1, an asteroid that will wipe out humanity, which will occur in 77 days, within the archipelago of Indonesia. As with The Last Policeman, Countdown City examines the psychological, cultural and metaphysical consequences of the apocalypse.
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Tetlock has advanced variants of this argument in articles on the links between cognitive styles and ideology (the fine line between rigid and principled) as well as on the challenges of assessing value-charged concepts like symbolic racism and unconscious bias (is it possible to be a "Bayesian bigot"?). Tetlock has also co-authored papers on the value of ideological diversity in psychological and social science research. One consequence of the lack of ideological diversity in high-stakes, soft-science fields is frequent failures of what Tetlock calls turnabout tests.
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Therefore, it would be an example of soft science fiction. Star Trek could also be technical. In the episode "The Changeling," Nomad is an Earth space probe that becomes damaged, and then somehow merges with the alien probe Tan-Ru. Its programming somehow changes, and it now seeks out and destroys imperfect life-forms. Nomad destroys the Malurian System’s four billion inhabitants, and then encounters the Enterprise. Kirk and his crew discover Nomad’s past and its new programming, and have to stop it before it destroys any more races.
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In sociology of science, the graphism thesis is a proposition of Bruno Latour that graphs are important in science. Research has shown that one can distinguish between hard science and soft science disciplines based on the level of graph use, so it can be argued that there is a correlation between scientificity and visuality. Furthermore, natural sciences publications appear to make heavier use of graphs than mathematical and social sciences. It has been claimed that an example of a discipline that uses graphs heavily but is not at all scientific is technical analysis.
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Storm is a soft science fiction/fantasy comic book series originally (and for most albums) drawn by Don Lawrence. The series is primarily available in Dutch, although all the books are translated into English and German, and some in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Indonesian. The books are published by Big Balloon, Uitgeverij Oberon (both Dutch), Egmont Ehapa Verlag, Norbert Hethke Verlag (both German), Star Comics and Esperos Comics (both Greek), Incal (Polish), and Glénat (French). English copies are published in the Don Lawrence collection.
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The origin of the terms "hard science" and "soft science" is obscure. The earliest attested use of "hard science" is found in an 1858 issue of the Journal of the Society of Arts, but the idea of a hierarchy of the sciences can be found earlier, in the work of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798‒1857). He identified astronomy as the most general science, followed by physics, chemistry, biology, then sociology. This view was highly influential, and was intended to classify fields based on their degree of intellectual development and the complexity of their subject matter.
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Linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), the theory that language influences thought and perception, is a subject explored in some soft science fiction works such as Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (1958) and Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966). In these works artificial languages are used to control and change people and whole societies. Science fictional linguistics are also the subject of varied works from Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed (1974), to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" (1991), to Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash (1992), to the film Arrival (2016).
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The complementary term soft science fiction, formed by analogy to hard science fiction,) first appeared in the late 1970s. The term is formed by analogy to the popular distinction between the "hard" (natural) and "soft" (social) sciences. Science fiction critic Gary Westfahl argues that neither term is part of a rigorous taxonomy; instead they are approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful. Stories revolving around scientific and technical consistency were written as early as the 1870s with the publication of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, among other stories.
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Wave Without a Shore is an example of soft science fiction and is a philosophical story that takes place on the planet "Freedom" shared by humans and the alien "Ahnit" race which is native to the planet. Humans had been on Freedom for several hundred years and do not recognize the aliens, they do not see them, and instead use terms such as "invisibles" or "pilferage" when referring to the Ahnit. This idyllic life is shattered when a student confronts the situation and begins consorting with the aliens. As the protagonist begins noticing the Ahnit and even trying to speak about them, he finds, unwillingly, that he too becomes unmentionable.
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Shortly after, a collection of Morris' essays, Signs of Change, was published. From January to October 1890, Morris serialised his novel, News from Nowhere, in Commonweal, resulting in improved circulation for the paper. In March 1891 it was published in book form, before being translated into Dutch, French, Swedish, German and Italian by 1900 and becoming a classic among Europe's socialist community. Combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction, the book tells the tale of a contemporary socialist, William Guest, who falls asleep and awakes in the early 21st century, discovering a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.
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Cheng Siwei (June 1935 - 12 July 2015) was a Chinese economist, chemical engineer and politician. He was the Chairman of China Soft Science Research Association; President of the Chinese Society for Management Modernization; Director of the Research Center on Fictitious Economy and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Dean of the School of Management of the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Honorary President of East China University of Science and Technology. He was also an Adjunct Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of institutions including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, and Nankai University.
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In Lessing's fictional universe it is propaganda that keeps the fragile empires afloat, and when language becomes too distorted, some of her characters succumb to a condition called "undulant rhetoric" and are placed in a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases. Because of its focus on characterisation and social/cultural issues, and the de-emphasis of technological details, this book is not strictly science fiction but soft science fiction, or "space fiction" as Lessing calls her Canopus in Argos series. While The Sentimental Agents can be read as a stand-alone book, Lessing does continue with the history of the Sirian Empire, picking up from where she left off in The Sirian Experiments (1980), the third book in the Canopus series.
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Nicola Griffith, Stephen Pagel Bending the Landscape. Original Gay and Lesbian Writing: Science Fiction, Overlook Press: 1998 In comparison, Geoff Ryman has claimed that the gay and SF genre markets are incompatible, with his books being marketed as one or the other, but never both, and David Seed said that SF purists have denied that SF that focuses on soft science fiction themes and marginalised groups (including "gay SF") is "real" science fiction.David Seed Ed., A Companion to Science Fiction, "Science Fiction and Postmodernism" p. 245, Gay and lesbian science fiction have at times been grouped as distinct subgenres of SF,Brian Stableford, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, "Sex", p.
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The Dune series is a landmark of soft science fiction. Herbert deliberately suppressed technology in his Dune universe so he could address the politics of humanity, rather than the future of humanity's technology. Dune considers the way humans and their institutions might change over time. Director John Harrison, who adapted Dune for Syfy's 2000 miniseries, called the novel a universal and timeless reflection of "the human condition and its moral dilemmas", and said: Herbert said Paul's messiah figure was inspired by the Arthurian legend, and that the scarcity of water on Arrakis was a metaphor for oil, as well as air and water itself, and for the shortages of resources caused by overpopulation.
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Ilium/Olympos is a series of two science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The events are set in motion by beings who appear to be ancient Greek gods. Like Simmons' earlier series, the Hyperion Cantos, it is a form of "literary science fiction"; it relies heavily on intertextuality, in this case with Homer and Shakespeare as well as references to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. As with most of his science fiction and in particular with Hyperion, Ilium demonstrates that Simmons writes in the soft science fiction tradition of Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin.
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In the late 1970s she wrote Shikasta in which she used many Sufi concepts. Shikasta was intended to be a "single self-contained book", but as Lessing's fictional universe developed, she found she had ideas for more than just one book, and ended up writing a series of five. Shikasta, and the Canopus in Argos series as a whole, fall into the category of soft science fiction ("space fiction" in Lessing's own words) due to their focus on characterization and social and cultural issues, and the de- emphasis of science and technology. Robert Alter of The New York Times suggested that this kind of writing belongs to a genre literary critic Northrop Frye called the "anatomy", which is "a combination of fantasy and morality".
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When Lessing began writing Shikasta she intended it to be a "single self- contained book" but, as her fictional universe developed, she found she had ideas for more than just one book, and ended up writing a series of five. The Canopus in Argos series as a whole falls into categories of social or soft science fiction ("space fiction" in Lessing's own words) because of its focus on characterisation and social-cultural issues, and its lack of emphasis of the details of scientific technology. This set of writings represented a major shift of focus for Lessing, influenced by spiritual and mystical themes in Sufism, in particular by Idries Shah. She later wrote several essays on Sufism which were published in her essay collection, Time Bites (2004).
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During the winter months of 2005 and 2006, pre-production of the EP "Soft Science" took place and was subsequently recorded during the spring- summer of 2006 at Idea of East studios. The album was released Canada wide with distribution by Outside Music and online by Maple Music and iTunes. After touring throughout Canada and the North Eastern US from the summer of 2006 til the spring of 2007, the band once again enlisted the help of producer Laurence Currie to work with them on their latest full-length recording, "Turn on your radio". Recorded in Toronto, Ontario at Signal to Noise Studios and Sunnyside Studios from spring 2007 til fall 2007, the new album consists of 11 tracks and will be available in early 2008.
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The modern distinction between hard and soft science is often attributed to a 1964 article published in Science by John R. Platt. He explored why he considered some scientific fields to be more productive than others, though he did not actually use the terms themselves. In 1967, sociologist of science Norman W. Storer specifically distinguished between the natural sciences as hard and the social sciences as soft. He defined hardness in terms of the degree to which a field uses mathematics and described a trend of scientific fields increasing in hardness over time, identifying features of increased hardness as including better integration and organization of knowledge, an improved ability to detect errors, and an increase in the difficulty of learning the subject.
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Critics of the concept argue that soft sciences are implicitly considered to be less "legitimate" scientific fields, or simply not scientific at all. An editorial in Nature stated that social science findings are more likely to intersect with everyday experience and may be dismissed as "obvious or insignificant" as a result. Being labelled a soft science can affect the perceived value of a discipline to society and the amount of funding available to it. In the 1980s, mathematician Serge Lang successfully blocked influential political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's admission to the US National Academy of Sciences, describing Huntington's use of mathematics to quantify the relationship between factors such as "social frustration" (Lang asked Huntington if he possessed a "social-frustration meter") as "pseudoscience".
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However, speculative fiction (SF) and soft science fiction also offers the freedom to imagine alien or galactic societies different from real-life cultures, making it a tool to examine sexual bias, heteronormativity, and gender bias and enabling the reader to reconsider his or her cultural assumptions. Prior to the 1960s, explicit sexuality of any kind was not characteristic of genre speculative fiction due to the relatively high number of minors in the target audience. In the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy began to reflect the changes prompted by the civil rights movement and the emergence of a counterculture. New Wave and feminist science fiction authors imagined cultures in which a variety of gender models and atypical sexual relationships are the norm, and depictions of sex acts and alternative sexualities became commonplace.
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Because of its focus on characterisation and social/cultural issues, and the de-emphasis of technological details, The Sirian Experiments is soft science fiction, or "space fiction" as Lessing calls her Canopus in Argos series. Robert Alter of The New York Times suggested that this kind of writing belongs to a genre literary critic Northrop Frye called the "anatomy", which is "a combination of fantasy and morality" and that "presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern." Lessing has stated that she has used this series as a vehicle to "put questions, both to myself and to others" and to "explore ideas and sociological possibilities." While Lessing's switch to "science fiction" in the late 1970s was not well received by all, the series in general has drawn positive criticism.
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Social science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, usually (but not necessarily) soft science fiction, concerned less with technology/space opera and more with speculation about society. In other words, it "absorbs and discusses anthropology" and speculates about human behavior and interactions."Archaeology in Fiction, Stories, and Novels". about.com. May 28, 2008 Exploration of fictional societies is a significant aspect of science fiction, allowing it to perform predictive (The Time Machine (1895); The Final Circle of Paradise, 1965) and precautionary (Brave New World, 1932; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949; Childhood's End, Fahrenheit 451, 1953) functions, to criticize the contemporary world (Gulliver's Travels, 1726; the works of Alexander Gromov, 1995 - Present) and to present solutions (Walden Two, Freedom™), to portray alternative societies (World of the Noon) and to examine the implications of ethical principles, as for example in the works of Sergei Lukyanenko.
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75.43 percent of the teachers have the degree of Master or Doctor. Ten are tutors of Ph.D. candidates, 112 are tutors of postgraduates; four professors enjoy Special Grants from the State Council; 11 have been awarded the title of National or Provincial Excellent Teacher; 11 are distinguished with the title of Provincial Leading Talented Professional and 24 with the title of Young Leading Talented Professional and Leader of the Academic Field at university level; 112 have been selected to participate in the “231 Talents Project”. 55 are Adjunct and Emeritus Professors from both at home and abroad. During the past five years, 216 research projects have been undertaken; 25 of these are funded by the State Social Science Foundation, the State Natural Science Foundation, the State Soft Science Research Project or the Ministry of Education; 1 has won a State award; 41 have won awards from Shandong Provincial Government.
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Controversy continues about the study itself,Taubes (2007) and about the strength and causality of the association between dietary fat and heart mortality, particularly as the study of cholesterol has become more sophisticated.Ravnskov (2002) In 2000, Uffe Ravnskov (MD, PhD) published his book The Cholesterol MythsUffe Ravnskov (MD, PhD)Cholesterol Myths lecture via YouTube, retrieved October 31, 2017 and went on to found The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics.Teicholz, p. 45. In a 2001 article in Science magazine entitled Nutrition: The Soft Science of Dietary Fat, Gary Taubes wrote "it is still a debatable proposition whether the consumption of saturated fats above recommended levels (..) by anyone who's not already at high risk of heart disease will increase the likelihood of untimely death (..) [n]or have hundreds of millions of dollars in trials managed to generate compelling evidence that healthy individuals can extend their lives by more than a few weeks, if that, by eating less fat".
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