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Hul-Gil comments on Applause Lights - Less Wrong
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Really? Got any examples?
I've read some in which the transhuman technologies were ambiguous (had upsides and downsides), but I can't think of any where it was just better, the way that actual technologies often are---would any of us willingly go back to the days before electricity and running water?
I find that a little irritating - for people supposedly open to new ideas, science fiction authors sure seem fearful and/or disapproving of future technology.
Part of me thinks that that's encoded into the metaphorical DNA of the SF genre (or one branch of it) at a very basic level. It's been conventional for a while to think of SF as Enlightenment and the rest of spec-fic as Romantic, but the history of the genre's actually more complicated than that; Mary Shelley, for example, definitely fell on the Romantic side of the fence, and later writers haven't exactly been shy about following her lead. The treading-in-God's-domain motif is a powerful one, and it's the bedrock that an awful lot of SF is built on.
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