INTRODUCTION to Ursula LeGuin's _The Left Hand of Darkness_

Science 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 the 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 described 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 to rationalist and simplistic to
satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or reader's.  Variables are
the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative.  If you'd 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 predicted, it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); like 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.  The 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 are 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 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 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 of Borodino with 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 the _awen_ 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 not _know_ 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 priviledged.  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 the 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 fictionk, 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 announcing that it's set
in the "Ekumenical Year 1490-97," but surely you don't _believe_ 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 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 to _say_ 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 this _in 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 sumbolic or mataphoric usage.  (They also have a sound -- a fact the
liguistic 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, introduction (c) 1976 to _The Left Hand of Darkness_ (c) 1969
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