There's been a few scifi authors who've won the Booker Prize for non-scifi; at least Atwood and Ishiguro. And both the Handmaid's Tale and Never Let Me Go were shortlisted for the Booker. But they didn't actually win it.
EDIT: Oh, actually, missed that Atwood won it for The Testaments! Yeah, I mean that is clearly scifi.
Margaret Atwood did not win the Booker Prize for Oryx and Crake and sequels, the "arguably SF" ones mentioned above, but for other novels. IDK if "The Testaments" qualifies though.
This might make MJH the first Sci-Fi author to win a Booker prize for a Sci-Fi novel.
I would have a hard time countenancing an argument that The Handmaids Tale (and by extension, The Testaments) is not sci-fi, in a world where Heinlein's "If This Goes On—" is widely regarded to be sci-fi.
On the other hand, if Atwood doesn't wish to be regarded as a sci-fi author, so be it
> Atwood doesn't wish to be regarded as a sci-fi author
She's repeatedly said she doesn't. Indeed her dismissive remark that "SF is that 'squids in space' stuff, isn't it?" is what inspired the great Ken Macleod to write his "Engines of Light" trilogy which starts with Cosmonaut Keep.
Due to her attitude I've never even tried to read any fiction of hers. Macleod is a genius nearly on a level with his close friend Iain Banks.
I am with the other commenter in this thread: I've read quite a few (usually very highly-regarded) alleged SF novels by literary authors who say they don't write SF. I have hated pretty much every such book.
As one of very few women in the field, and one of even fewer who writes primarily about women, I tend to think a lot of this attitude is a reflection of the extent to which sci-fi has been an "old boys club" for most of Atwood's career, more than it is about the genre itself
All of literature can be regarded as an "old boys club" if you squint, but it's not like she'd have been unique. "The Left Hand of Darkness" was published before I was born, but I was old enough to read "The Handmaid's Tale" by the time that was published, albeit not quite old enough to properly understand it.
In fact I don't think "The Handmaid's Tale" really makes sense without the context of the AP feminists. Gilead comes about, as I understand it, because the AP feminists think they can use the Religious Right to achieve their goals and unsurprisingly that goes badly for them. AP feminism doesn't even exist when "Left Hand" was published.
I saw her talk once and I thought this statement was more about her being glib. If I recall what she said correctly, it was “I don’t consider what I write to be science fiction, because something like it has already happened.”
But maybe that’s just post-hoc rationalization for a reactionary stance, idk.
> I recall what she said correctly, it was “I don’t consider what I write to be science fiction, because something like it has already happened.”
AFIAK, this is about The Handmaid's Tale - all of the terrible things in the story had happened somewhere, sometime, to someone, just not "here and now" in the (near future) USA.
Oryx and Crake is a different matter, in speculates on genetic engineering. The case that it's "definitely not sci-fi" is much harder to make. IMHO it is, because it is fiction that speculates on a scientific topic.
It's also certainly not a boy's own space western story of heroics, sure. And it's OK for the author to want to be distanced from that genre stereotype. Of course, not all Sci-Fi is that. Ursula Le Guin has already been mentioned sometimes as a counterexample. But I get her antipathy towards the label because of it
One of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time is a woman. Most consider her to be the best. Ursula LeGuin.
And she absolutely is not the only one. There are plenty of very talented and very popular women authors in the genre.
Margaret Atwood just wants to be thought of as literary.
The handmaid's tale is without a doubt speculative fiction (SF), the umbrella term for writing that includes sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, etc.
Margaret Atwood likes to position herself as a champion of values such as equity, justice, and progress, while using her clout to oppose a multi-family condo development close to her multi-million dollar mansion [1]
Needless to say, I will also never read any of her work.
I would say that Atwood's "The Handmaids Tale" is as much Sci-Fi as similar low-tech dystopias, e.g. "Parable of the Sower" (Octavia Butler), "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (Walter Miller).
But the difference is that Atwood was, when she wrote "The Handmaids Tale" an author but not a Sci-Fi author. Whereas Butler and Miller were Sci-Fi authors.
And yes, "is this book sci-fi?" is a fuzzy category, and of no great importance.
I respect Margaret Atwood's opinion here but I don't quite hold it myself. More so about Oryx and Crake and sequels.
By "IDK if "The Testaments" qualifies though" I mean that I have not read it, just "The Handmaids Tale" so I'm not going to opine on something that I don't know about.
It doesn't beg the question, "begging the question" is a type of fallacy in which we insist upon presuming X and then rely on that to prove X which is a waste of everybody's time. But yes, it is reasonable if we notice that Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" is Science Fiction to expect that awarding a Booker to its sequel "The Testaments" would constitute a Booker for Science Fiction.
I would imagine the distinction attempted here is that despite writing those novels, Atwood doesn't consider herself to be an SF author, perhaps Harrison says he is an SF author. Atwood also won for "The Blind Assassin" which very much is not Science Fiction, it's historical fiction, it's not history but all the stuff happening in the background was real.
This shades over somewhere. If your story features an England ruled by literal Nazis it's Science Fiction (alternate history is a type of SF, "What if the Nazis won?" is a fairly popular theme) but if your England just has some Nazi sympathizers and your story is set in the 1930s it might just be historical fiction.
I think people are talking about two different kinds of drag-and-drop. There is dragging external items (files from the OS, for example) onto the app surface from outside. And there is a list of items, each with its own UI component, being dragged within an app to either change sort order or otherwise change data state. Both complex, and have a lot in common, but many comments here seem to be talking about one or the other without specifying.
I love the way all incident reports tell you the attack was sophisticated and highly targeted, as if those words actually mean anything. Nobody wants to admit they were DDOSed by a script kiddie just randomly trying exploits. The subtext is: well, we expected hackers; just not really good ones.
The instant value I got from this is actually something that resembles journalism and editing, even if it’s just an LLM doing the job: the rewriting of headlines along with a half-decent editorial summary paragraph gives me a clear overview of what each link is actually about without the usual puzzling over what the cryptic HN headline is trying to say.
Yeah. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321605 — what the hell is this? Why do people click on random links allegedly belonging to no name projects? What are these projects about? Fascinating.
Respectfully, it sounds as if your assumptions about the market for LLM/Agent tools is out of date by a long way. I don’t have any stats but it’s easy to observe that Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT et al are aggressively marketing their products to non developer business users, and pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work.
They said Claude. I'm pretty sure most normies have never heard of Claude. ChatGPT, yes. It's shortened to just "chat" now. But most people have no idea what Claude is.
> pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work
Rather than using this as your world-view, I think you should take this as a signal to expand the current bubble you live in. I'm guessing most of these people you refer to as "non technical" are still white-collar workers or similar?
Most people in the world, even with all the marketing towards "non developer business users", has never heard of "Claude", "Gemini", "Grok" or anything else LLM-adjacent like that, but will have some light understanding of "ChatGPT", and might actually be using some AI service via their phone or whatever, but still call that "ChatGPT" as that's essentially synonymous with "AI" in common parlance.
Great idea, let’s counter the power of a handful of large private organisations by putting that power in the hands of a single large government. What could possibly go wrong?
There are lots of governments around the world - some big, some small. Lots of discussions around digital sovereignty are framed in this manner - a model for Brazil, a model for Japan, etc. There certainly could be coalitions of governments or governments could strike out on their own. Whatever floats your boat.
Correct, here's an implementation example using the Claude SDK [0] but it's the same approach on other platforms: you tell the model what tools it has available, it sends back a response saying it wants to use a specific tool with given parameters, your code executes that tool then sends the output back to the model on the next turn.
Just trying to be helpful. I couldn’t see any other way to interpret the question below except as someone who doesn’t know how tool calls get done and who might therefore value a little insight. Didn’t mean to be patronising, apologies if I misinterpreted your question.
> So if I understand it correctly, the tool calls are not actually done by the model?
In no sense is that true of a Catholic Mass. Nor, from what I hear, of an Orthodox liturgy though I’m no expert there. It might be true of some Evangelical Sunday worship services but they cannot be called a “Mass”
Sorry, can you help me understand what you mean here?
I attended a Catholic mass from 1-18 (and occasionally since then), and there was definitely a bunch of moral reflection from the readings, gospels and the sermons.
So I'm struggling to understand how this would differ across other Christian denominations, so I'd really appreciate a better awareness of what you mean here.
> I attended a Catholic mass from 1-18 (and occasionally since then), and there was definitely a bunch of moral reflection from the readings, gospels and the sermons.
Have you ever gone to a mass on random Thursday? There is often no sermon during daily, non-Sunday mass. Yes, there are readings, but the central part of the mass is the Eucharist, which the Catechism (¶1324) calls the "source and summit of the Christian life".
> Yes, there are readings, but the central part of the mass is the Eucharist, which the Catechism (¶1324) calls the "source and summit of the Christian life".
Again, super confused. Like yeah the Eucharist is clearly the most important part for many Catholics, but the notion that the readings don't contain moral teachings is very strange to me.
The mass and the preaching are two separate things. The mass is the ritual liturgy part and can be performed without the preaching. It is not some kind of rare thing either.
Yes, they tend to be combined on Sundays, because that is practical and many believers want both on Sunday anyway. But that does not make them the same thing.
For the same reason people say "Greta Gerwig made this film" even though it took literally hundreds, or even thousands, of individuals to bring her or any other director's vision to life. Unless you've got a super tiny magnet to flip the individual bits inside your RAM, there's always been some chain of tools that translates your intent into an actual running system. You can't even hand-write assembly language without having to rely on an assembler to convert that into actual machine code that is executed by your CPU. Writing in any high-level language, like we all did three years ago, relied on an entire stack of tools to convert that into something that was compiled, deployed and executing somewhere. Would you say "Visual Studio built it" rather than "I built it"? Even if you did, Visual Studio, or whatever IDE/compiler/etc you are relying on, is only the top level in that very deep stack. Claude is just another layer on top of that, which converts your intentions and ideas into code that still has to go through all those other layers before it does anything useful for anyone.
reply