A Rant About “Technology” (2005)

Le Guin is a master of fiction, period. While she's very different from modern sci-fi/fantasy, her work is almost as foundational as Tolkien, Lewis, or Asimov.

Take her Earthsea series (which was very loosely adapted as a Studio Ghibli movie). It's much slower paced than modern fantasy. Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here), and it almost reads more like an extended fairy tale.

But when you start reading it you can see how it influenced so much modern stuff (eg. she was telling stories about going off to wizard school decades before Harry Potter existed) and both the story and the writing itself are both so well crafted that (in many ways) no one who's come after has managed to surpass it.

If you like either sci-fi or fantasy, do yourself a favor and read some of the amazing writing this titan of an author created.

> I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.

What a wonderfully humble sentiment, and so plainly said. It's disarming to hear an idea stated so precisely which you've treated largely as subintellectum, despite its truthiness having a foundational effect on how you move about the world [0]. This so perfectly distills my (and I suspect others' here as well) draw toward all things technical. They are all mysteries, whose workings we must largely abstract away for the sake of our own sanity. But they are categorically products of our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is out there for anyone to claim, or to extend! Looking at my surroundings, I see thousands of objects which I could not today begin to re-create myself, and for each object, thousands of questions which could be asked - all of which have at some point been answered, and whose answers await those who are interested to ask. What an endless and delightful thing for the curious! A lovely thought.

[0]: Perhaps this feeling is why Le Guin is such a celebrated author, and I am not ;)

I find the most practical distinction of scifi vs fantasy is that scifi calls it credits and fantasy calls it coin. This classification has never steered me wrong.

But honestly categories never quite work at the edges. Some of my favorite books are post apocalyptic fantasy where the characters are definitely using scifi technology that I recognize as advanced versions of existing technology but they just think of as magic.

> 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 sentiment reminds me of the email steve jobs sent himself shortly before he died:

> I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

> I do not make any of my own clothing.

> I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

> I did not discover the mathematics I use.

> I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

> I am moved by music I did not create myself.

> When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

> I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

> I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Indeed, it seems to me that true technologists do not take for granted a book of matches, or a simple garment, or music, or law. Innovation is innovation

Along somewhat similar lines, my main division between the two is that sci-fi generally touches on the interaction between "people" (often the main characters, but not usually limited to them) and the world's systems (politics, war, how future tech changes society, etc), while fantasy generally focuses on individual's internal struggles (how they deal with the violence in their swords and magic world, how they get along with their squad, how they deal with the politics they're stuck in).

Which isn't to say one is more personal than the other, just that the focus is different. How the world as a whole handles something can easily be covered with a single character's thoughts, and they can be worried about how they interact with the world that surrounds them.

No division is perfect of course, but I think it fits pretty well with a lot of the genre-bending works, and better predicts who will like what book. Some are totally in X genre because of the setting itself, but more often I find people sticking to one or the other because they like that kind of story.

(Also Le Guin is fantastic, very obviously an exceptional author, and you should absolutely read some of her works)

To wit, LeGuin is the one who originally coined the term "ansible," which is about as hard sci-fi as you can get.

Science fiction, even more than historical fiction, is always about the present, which is why SF novels rarely age well.

But good literature is good literature and she sure had the knack, which is why I believe her work will continue to be read for quite some time to come.

In her brief essay (more of a note), she uses the word “technology” to invoke its own root: τέχνη, just means practical art (hence artifact).

The inclined plane is as much technology as the lithographed transistor. Yet when I was on a school board 15 years ago the teachers and in particular the heads were quite concerned that the kids be tought “technology” by which they meant Word and PowerPoint, lest the kids be left behind in the technological future.

I’m sure those hours helped exactly zero of the students who could have spent the time on something useful, like mathematics, painting or recess. At least the classical Greeks understood that better than the pedagogues of today. Le Guin did too.

Technology is not only "computery" electronica. A lever is technology. So is writing. Fair point, and I don't think anybody was arguing otherwise.

Sci-fi has elements other than technology, such as how the humans interact with the technology. Sure! Again, I can't imagine anybody's arguing that Sci-fi is only when you write about technology and any mention of feelings or other human stuff disqualifies it.

But what a non-sequitur to say that therefore, _science_ isn't the main focus of Sci-fi. It's fiction about _science_. If the story isn't centred around the science, then the Sci-fi is the backdrop and the genre is something else you've chosen.

The most famous example is Star Wars. You can take that trilogy and replace every spaceship with a ship, every planet with a country, and lose nothing other than fun visuals.

>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.

I think this goes too far and then everything is science fiction? She talks about low tech. Is Hatchet science fiction?

I have great respect for her but this isn't the only essay she's jarringly defensive (imo) in response to a critic. Ok sure, a sock is "technology"...

I've only read "The Left Hand of Darkness". It's a very well written book, but it didn't emphasize enough technology/science/engineering for me to consider it even soft science fiction. I guess she's doing the work of expanding the scope of what technology could be used in science fiction. I'm not sure that's super useful, since by her definition, almost every work of fiction will involve technology.

Now I want to write a science fiction story where the core technology is never written about explicitly and can only be inferred from its effect on the characters :P

Fine. Sci-fi is a broad genre that intersects at the edges with fantasy, alternate history, magic realism, and all kinds of other very imaginative styles.

The hard/soft axis is fuzzy. The extreme of hard is "known physics only" and generally modest technical leaps or changes (e.g. solarpunk imagines known physics but a very different technical vocabulary for how it's used).

The extreme of soft becomes fantasy with sci-fi veneer, like Star Wars.

Fiction is art. It's all valid. It just depends on the style you're going for and what kind of story you're trying to tell.

I like hard SF because I'm an engineer, but I also think there's not a lot of well written hard SF in terms of prose style and character development. I wish there was more.

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.

This is a bit of a strawman argument. Hard SF is not just "about tech", it is about making sure the tech agrees with scientific principles and is not just an ad hoc method to make some story possible. Soft SF can be about tech and its (social) implications (like her work) but is not written in this sort of spirit. This is why she has written "soft SF".