[monkeyking]

Thanks for the review, Malcolm!

Budman, I'd be happy to clarify things for you. I don't remember, or maybe didn't know about, the thread you're talking about. PM me and we'll talk about it.

Veiltender, as RabidLurker says, "Social Science Fiction" is a subgenre of science fiction. How "hard" the fiction you create is, is up to you as a group. What it encourages, though, is an exploration of what happens at a societal level when Things Change.

A literary example is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. She posits what a society would be like without (or nearly without) gender. I've played games where government-controlled Samsara is a method of control of the population, another where people cloned multiple spouses from themselves in defiance of polygamy laws and monogamist taboos, and another where religion was a deliberate construction to create a work ethic among vacuumorphic slaves (the example in the book).

The theme of these games are not the special effects of Samsara control, human cloning, and vacuumorphic humans, but government control of citizens' lives, romantic taboo, and religious manipulation of people. That's what makes it Social Science Fiction. And you build your fictional world out of those thematic questions, which is how the game generates it.