In an intriguing and favorable notification of Changing Planes (which you can find elsewhere on the site, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean reviewer asserts that considering that Le Guin isn’t a tough science fiction writer, “innovation is thoroughly prevented.” I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the post, and here is the footnote broadened – because this organization is really getting my goat.
‘Hard’ SF is all about technology, and ‘soft’ SF does not have any innovation, right? And my books don’t have technology in them, due to the fact that I am just interested in psychology and feelings and squashy stuff like that, right?
Not right. How can of any kind lack technological material? Even if its primary interest isn’t in engineering or how machines work – if like most of mine, it’s more thinking about how minds, societies, and cultures work – still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without explaining, implicitly or clearly, its innovation?
Nobody can. I can’t picture why they ‘d want to.
Its technology is how a society manages physical truth: how people get and keep and prepare food, how they outfit themselves, what their source of power are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine – and so on and on. Perhaps really heavenly individuals aren’t thinking about these ordinary, physical matters, however I’m amazed by them, and I believe the majority of my readers are too.
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
But the word is regularly misused to imply just the enormously complicated and specialised innovations of the previous few years, supported by huge exploitation both of natural and personnels.
This is not an appropriate usage of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and an innovation that isn’t “hi,” isn’t always ‘”low” in any significant sense.
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of constantly broadening technical expertise that we think nothing less complex and snazzy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “innovation” at all. As if linen were the very same thing as flax – as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural things, born with us like our teeth and fingers – as if steel pans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just selected them when they were ripe …
One method to show that most innovations are, in fact, quite “hi,” is to ask yourself of any manmade item, Do I understand how to make one?
Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has actually probably acquired some proper regard for “low” or “primitive” or “basic” innovations; anyone who ever lighted a fire with matches ought to have the wits to respect that significant hi-tech invention.
I do not understand how to construct and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t understand how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could find out. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can find out to do.
And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it’s composed by individuals who do not understand what the word means.
All the exact same, I concur with my reviewer that I do not compose tough science fiction. Maybe I write easy science fiction.