Not really a rant? She’s just clarifying a reasonable difference between different types of technology to explain how her work qualifies as science fiction without being all about what she calls “hi-tech” technology.

Sounded pretty reasonable to me anyway.

> Submission title is a bit misleading.

It's the original title, she labeled it a rant herself.

EDIT: The person I replied to has significantly edited their comment since my original reply so my comment now appears as a non sequitur. This is why I quote people, or wait a couple hours to reply once I know they're the sort to do this kind of thing.

By the standards of someone as articulate as Le Guin it's definitively a rant.

It’s a rant, but not about technology. It’s a rant about her chosen genre being maligned unfairly.

I think a more interesting tack on this argument would be to say that hard sci-fi tends to be more pro-technology and soft sci-fi tends to be more technology-critical. But some soft sci-fi is genuinely technology-neutral, using futuristic settings for aesthetic reasons only, not for any kind of investigation or argument either way.