A Rant About “Technology”

[EndtheMadnessNow]

In an interesting and favorable notice of Changing Planes (which you can find elsewhere on the site, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean reviewer asserts that since Le Guin isn’t a hard science fiction writer, “technology is carefully avoided.” I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the article, and here is the footnote expanded — because this business is really getting my goat.

‘Hard’ SF is all about technology, and ‘soft’ SF doesn’t have any technology, right? And my books don’t have technology in them, because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?

Not right. How can genuine science fiction of any kind lack technological content? Even if its principal interest isn’t in engineering or how machines work — if like most of mine, it’s more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work — still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology?

Nobody can. I can’t imagine why they’d want to.

Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

This is not an acceptable use of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn't “hi,” isn’t necessarily '“low” in any meaningful sense.

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...

One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty “hi,” is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for “low” or “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.

I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.

And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it’s written by people who don’t know what the word means.

All the same, I agree with my reviewer that I don’t write hard science fiction. Maybe I write easy science fiction. Or maybe the hard stuff’s inside, hidden — like bones, as opposed to an exoskeleton.…

— Ursula K. Le Guin, 2005

A Rant About “Technology”


Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018 in Portland, Oregon) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Influenced by Victor Hugo, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Boris Pasternak, and Philip K. Dick.

In December 2009, Le Guin resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project. "You decided to deal with the devil", she wrote in her resignation letter. "There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle."



Many more books includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Bio & Everything else

[stilhuman]

thank you for this. i have been reading sci-fi since i was old enough to read and choose books. it appears i have never read any of her books, maybe its time to do so.

[Snarl]

"... these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle."

Corporations are as damned dangerous as Communist 'belief'.

[Ninurta]

"... these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle."

Corporations are as damned dangerous as Communist 'belief'.

Corporations ARE Communism.

They are a collective, a subset of yet another collective, that seeks to exploit the masses solely for the benefit of their own subset of the Collective writ large... while themselves doing practically nothing to produce or assist the production of the masses other thn to make authoritarian demands of the producers.

That is pretty much textbook Communism of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the end result of every implementation of it in the Real World ™ .

Corporatism, Communism, Socialism, and pretty much every collectivist "ism" is at it's most basic a "hurray for me and to hell with you!" proposition.

Ursula K. Le Guin is right u there with Ayn Rand (and most authors and really any worker) in the camp of the "I should benefit from my own labors" crowd. That's the exact opposite of Corporatism and Communism, where the producer of a thing is practically the ONLY one to derive no benefit from it, and it's fun to watch the two grapple and try to catch one another by the gonads!



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