Mar 13, 2021 · 1 hr 30 min[Titelbild v. Donato Giancola]
Introduction to Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula K. LeGuinn über Science Fiction [engl.]
Bildquelle: The Folio Society – A tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction isoften described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer
is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for
dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. „If this goes on, this is what will happen.“ A
prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large
doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen
to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to
be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction
generally arrive about where the Club ofRomearrives: somewhere between the gradual
extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as ‘escapist,’ but
when questioned further, admit they do not read it because ‘it’s so depressing.’
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Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game
by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the
writer’s or the reader’s. Variables are the spice of life.
This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as
a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human
being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war;
let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens… In a story so conceived, the moral
complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead
end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the
experiment, which may be very large indeed.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other
physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrodinger’s most famous thought-experiment
goes to show that the ‘future,’ on the quantum level,cannot be predicted—but to describe
reality, the present world.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee,
and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried).
Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of
novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will
tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers
of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you
what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this
moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists
say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have
seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another
third of it spent in telling lies.
“The truth against the world!”—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver
moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar
and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and
never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great
deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There!
That’s the truth!
They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the
Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought,
or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a
personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of
verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure
invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the
author’s mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the
existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle ofBorodinowith
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them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?
But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely
mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.
I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that theawen cannot come upon them, and
the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens?
if they did notknow it happens, because, they have felt the god within them use their tongue,
their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.
Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another
who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration.
As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of
dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well
as in words.
But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as
useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a
word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one
fact which is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound,
and—ideally—quantifiable.
Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who
press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have
a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust
everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically
defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science
displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be
like in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction
isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.
This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by annnouncing that it’s set in the ‘Ekumenical
Year 1490-97,’ but surely you don’tbelieve that?
Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in
a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought
to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental
manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain
weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing
certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately
circumstantial lies.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense,
and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may
find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that
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we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never
crossed before. But it’s very hard tosay just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does thisin words . The novelist says in words what cannot
be said in words.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a
symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take
no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its
meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence,
than by the attentive intellect).
All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of
fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our
contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the
historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative
society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel;
and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon
in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
wikipedia engl.
Winterplanet
wikipedia deu.
»How The Left Hand of Darkness Changed Everything« [literary hub]
Kurzgeschichte: Coming of Age in Karhide von U.K. LeGuin
Bildquelle: Spring in Karhide von Laleira Granite
History of the Hainish Universe – Ursula K LeGuin
