The Left Hand of Darkness
(Sprache: Englisch)
Ursula K. Le Guin's award-winning, groundbreaking science fiction classic takes us to the world of Winter, and introduces us to its inhabitants, the Gethenians-whose society is not based on gender roles.
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Ursula K. Le Guin's award-winning, groundbreaking science fiction classic takes us to the world of Winter, and introduces us to its inhabitants, the Gethenians-whose society is not based on gender roles.
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INTRODUCTIONScience fiction is often 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 of Rome arrives: 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.
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
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be very large indeed.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future indeed Schrödinger 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 leng
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future indeed Schrödinger 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 leng
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Autoren-Porträt von Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin, with a new Foreword by David Mitchell and a new Afterword by Charlie Jane Anders
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Ursula K. Le Guin
- 1987, 50th Anniversary Edition. Repr., 368 Seiten, Masse: 10,2 x 18,7 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Ace Books
- ISBN-10: 0441478123
- ISBN-13: 9780441478125
- Erscheinungsdatum: 20.02.2009
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for The Left Hand of Darkness[A] science fiction masterpiece. Newsweek
A jewel of a story. Frank Herbert
As profuse and original in invention as The Lord of the Rings. Michael Moorcock
An instant classic. Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own. The Boston Globe
A towering figure in science fiction and fantasy. NPR
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