Science fiction that focuses on social sciences, psychology, and human impact rather than technical accuracy.
Soft science fiction cares more about people than physics. It draws from anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and linguistics to explore how technology and change affect human societies and relationships. The science might be hand-waved or theoretical, but the human truths are deeply researched. Some of the most celebrated works in the genre fall here.
If you care more about characters and societies than engineering specs, soft SF gives you permission to write science fiction without a physics degree. It's also where the genre's most powerful social commentary happens. Understanding the hard-soft spectrum helps you decide how much scientific rigor your story actually needs.
An anthropological study of an alien society with no fixed gender, using science fiction to interrogate human assumptions.
Time travel as a device to force a modern Black woman into the antebellum South. The mechanism doesn't matter; the human experience does.
Post-pandemic fiction focused entirely on culture, memory, and human connection rather than the science of the plague.
Invent an alien society with one fundamental social difference from ours (no concept of individual ownership, no spoken language, no parent-child bonds). Write a 500-word scene showing a human character encountering this difference for the first time. Focus on the cultural collision, not the tech.