A rant about “technology” by Ursula K. Le Guin

In an interesting and favourable review of Changing Planes, the Argentine critic states that, since Le Guin is not a writer of "hard" science fiction, “technology is carefully avoided”. I added a footnote to my translation of the article, and here is that note expanded, because this subject really is bothering me.

Hard science fiction is about technology, and soft science fiction has no technology at all, right? And my books have no technology because I was only interested in psychology, emotions and other “soft” things like that, right?

Wrong. How can there be genuine science fiction, of any kind, without technological content? Even if the main interest is not engineering or how machines work (and, like most of my books, is more interested in how minds, societies and cultures work), how can anyone still create a story about the future or about an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology?

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Nobody can. And I cannot imagine why anyone would try.

Technology is the way a society deals with physical reality: how people obtain, preserve and prepare food, how they dress, what their sources of energy are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? others?), what they build with and what they build, what their medicine is like, and so on. Perhaps very ethereal people are not interested in those mundane, bodily questions, but I am 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 constantly misused to mean only the extremely complex and specialised technologies of recent decades, sustained by a massive exploitation of both natural and human resources.

That use of the word is not acceptable. “Technology” and “high technology” are not synonyms, and a technology that is not “high” is not necessarily “low” in any meaningful sense.

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We have been so desensitised by a hundred and fifty years of relentless technical progress that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology”. As though linen were the same thing as raw flax (as though paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin tablets were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers), as though copper-bottomed steel pans and wool waistcoats made of recycled glass grew on trees and we could simply pick them when ripe...

One way of showing that most technologies are in fact quite “high” is to ask yourself, in front of any human-made object: Do I know how to make one of these?

Anyone who has ever lit a fire without matches has probably developed a proper respect for “low”, “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anyone who has ever lit a fire with matches should have the intelligence to respect that remarkable high-technology invention.

I do not know how to build and power a fridge or program a computer, but I also do not know how to make a fish hook or a pair of shoes. But I could learn. All of us can learn. That is the fascinating part of technologies. They are what we can learn to do.

And all science fiction, one way or another, is technological. Even when it is written by people who do not know what the word means.

Even so, I agree with my critic that I do not write hard science fiction. Perhaps I write easy science fiction. Or perhaps the hard part is inside, hidden, like bones, rather than an exoskeleton...

— Ursula K. Le Guin, 2005

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