Clearly, this is bothering me way too much.

From past experience with the obsessive part of my brain, letting out whatever I'm obsessing on makes it go away, so here it goes, and I hope it works.

This whole "you don't know what science fiction is, you silly girl" thing is keeping me from concentrating on the book I'm reading, which isn't actually science fiction, of course, because the writer doesn't do anything interesting with the technology, and what he does is just mundane FTL stuff, and nobody has tons of implants and body mods, and I don't think this David Drake fellow really wants to write science fiction, anyway. It could really just be set in the Age of Sail and be better for it. And aside from that, his Hammer's Slammers books could just as easily be set in Vietnam for all the same reasons (mundane technology, no mods).

And all those Vorkosigan books by that Bujold woman. They ought to just be set in Imperial Prussia or Czarist Russia for all they interact with the technology (which is just a bunch of mundane stuff, really, wormholes and uterine replicators, yawn).

Let's not forget CJ Cherryh. I don't think she really wants to write science fiction. She could set Foreigner and its successors in colonial Africa or the Afghan/Pakistan region, since there's not really any technology beyond mundane FTL ships. And Mospheira is just like Earth! The colonists even set up ski slopes on the tallest mountain and have pizza joints. And the Alliance-Union books could just as well be set in the Age of Sail, though the azi are kind of an interesting thing with the psychological programming & genetic engineering.

Then there's Ursula LeGuin. Sure, she invented the ansible, but there's nothing particularly whiz-bang done with it, just mundane things like FTL communication and encouraging people to join the Ekumen via conference call.

At least my non-science-fiction book is in some damn good company with other not-really-science-fiction writers.