In an intriguing and beneficial notice of Changing Planes (which you can find somewhere else on the site, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean customer asserts that since Le Guin isn't a difficult sci-fi writer, "innovation is carefully avoided." I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the short article, and here is the footnote broadened - due to the fact that this company is really getting my goat.
'Hard' SF is all about innovation, and 'soft' SF doesn't have any technology, right? And my books do not have innovation in them, because I am only about psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?
Not right. How can authentic science fiction of any kind absence technological content? Even if its primary interest isn't in engineering or how makers work - if like the majority 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 describing, implicitly or clearly, its innovation?
Nobody can. I can't envision why they 'd wish to.
Its innovation is how a society deals with physical truth: how people get and keep and cook food, how they outfit themselves, what their source of power are (animal? human? water? wind? electrical energy? other?) what they construct with and what they develop, their medication - and so on and on. Perhaps extremely heavenly individuals aren't thinking about these mundane, physical matters, however I'm interested by them, and I believe most of my readers are too.
information technology is the active human interface with the material world.
But the word is regularly misused to suggest only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the previous few decades, supported by huge exploitation both of natural and personnels.
This is not an appropriate use of the word. "Technology" and "hi tech" are not associated, and a information technology that isn't "hi," isn't necessarily '"low" in any significant sense.
We have actually been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of continually broadening technical expertise that we think nothing less complex and flashy than a computer system or a jet bomber is worthy of to be called "information technology" at all. As if linen were the exact same thing as flax - as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin tablets, were natural items, born with us like our teeth and fingers - as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just chose them when they were ripe ...
One way to illustrate that a lot of technologies are, in truth, pretty "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade item, Do I know how to make one?
Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has most likely gotten some proper respect for "low" or "primitive" or "basic" technologies; any person who ever lighted a fire with matches ought to have the wits to regard that noteworthy hi-tech creation.
I don't understand how to build and power a fridge, or program a computer system, however I don't understand how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I might learn. We all can learn. That's the cool aspect of technologies. They're what we can discover to do.
And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it's composed by people who don't understand what the word means.
All the very same, I concur with my customer that I do not compose tough science fiction. Maybe I compose easy science fiction.
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