>soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can s

>soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies. This is a pretty unfair description of the category. Soft scifi is a story that has fantastical tech/physics that aren't completely explained. The tech is usually crucial to the story in some way, but the how of the tech's functioning is left unsaid. I find it unlikely that you've somehow lived through the entire range of events and emotions that can comprise the "human condition", but that aside: a lot of the soft scifi stories out there are focused around hypothetical inhuman conditions for which the fantastical tech is crucial. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is focused on whether artificial sentience is less worthy than organic, Whedon's Dollhouse on the potential personal and societal ramifications of being able to save/load our brains digitally, Ancillary Justice on what it might feel like to have your consciousness simultaneously inhabiting multiple bodies, "The Measure of a Man" from TNG on what it means to be sentient and if artificial sentience is possible (or even possible to measure once achieved), Her exploring how a truly sentient AI would relate to humans and impact our society. There are a lot of vague stories out there that use spaceships as an attention-grabber, but that isn't what defines the genre.