Tribute to Ursula Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American novelist who worked mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She died in January 2018 aged 88. While Le Guin’s future worlds were technology dependant, her writing encouraged readers to think critically about bigger questions concerning society, governance and values. Technology reporter Ariel Bogle reflects on Le Guin’s legacy in science fiction writing.
Robyn Williams: 1968, that's when the great writer Ursula Le Guin started her series of novels, A Wizard of Earthsea, with The Left Hand of Darkness, her classic, out in 1969.
The science unit's Ariel Bogle pays this tribute to her late hero:
Ariel Bogle: I grew up reading Ursula Le Guin but I'd lost touch with her work over the years. After her death, I returned to it and I found she had left all kinds of wisdom for me. Her books imagined futures and other worlds where the boundaries of gender did not exist, where political systems we only dream of were real and lived. But most importantly for me she showed how to think critically about technology. I found this short recording of her talking at a science fiction convention in Australia in 1975.
Ursula Le Guin: I've got a stone axe on my desk at home, not for self-defence but just for pleasure, my father used to keep it on his desk, it makes a good paperweight. When you pick it up you can't help but think of the human hands polishing that granite. There's a sense of solidity and community in the touch and the feel of that axe to me.
Ariel Bogle: I think this sums up a lot of Le Guin's science fiction writing. She was never just interested in the object alone, the stone axe or the shiniest new technology of the future, she was interested in the hands that touched it, how it felt to them. For Le Guin, technology meant nothing without community or context.
Audrey Watters: That's a useful way of thinking about technology, not simply as a scientific object, not simply as a product but as a practice, as something that is already embedded in systems and beliefs and values. Having that anthropological folkloric background helps me think a lot about in my work the stories that we tell about the future.
Ariel Bogle: Audrey Watters writes about technology and education. She is worried by hero worship in today's tech industry. It's hard to avoid the unquestioning worship of the new. Audrey came across Le Guin's work at university and found her story set out an alternative path, one at odds with the innovation fixation of Silicon Valley.
Audrey Watters: And I think that she liked to remind us that oftentimes the things that we praise that are technological are destructive. The stories that we still tell about tech are so wrapped up in the hero. I mean, I think of Elon Musk shooting his sports car into space…I mean, that is such a hyper-masculinised vision of the future with the heroic male figure and his penetrating toy. It's a very different story than the kinds of stories that she told that were about culture and care but that weren't centred on I think what she would identify as being really destructive rather than creative tendencies. Technologies are cultural, they are social, they can deeply reflect, for better or worse, our values.
Ariel Bogle: In her writing, Le Guin often focused on the individual experience to tease out these ideas, and in science fiction literature that often means looking through the eyes of the scientist or the technologist. Take the physicist Shevek in her novel The Dispossessed. He travels to another planet in search of knowledge, a planet with a capitalist society he disdains.
Lyn Griffiths: The main character in The Dispossessed, Shevek, is a scientist, and he's a scientist who loves his work, who's passionate about it and has a real contribution to make, but he encounters a lot of problems on the way. He encounters politics, he encounters issues in relation to funding and in relation to colleagues. And as a scientist who was studying a long time ago at university, I probably wasn't aware of all those things that come into play then, but they certainly come into play as you continue to grow in your science career.
Ariel Bogle: Professor Lyn Griffiths is a molecular geneticist at the Queensland University of Technology.
Lyn Griffiths: The question becomes how does he make sure that he can actually do his science and progress to the end, and then who should he share that science with? It's a thoughtful book that makes you think about the morals, the judgements, the ethics, and the right to proceed with science at all cost and through all difficulties.
Ariel Bogle: The Dispossessed held up a mirror to Lyn Griffiths' university life, and then to the world at large.
Lyn Griffiths: The thing that Le Guin did was come up with a different system that made you think a little bit about the systems that we have here and imagine a different system. So she actually came up with two worlds there. One was more of a patriarchal capitalist type of world, almost more like a white-collar world called Urras, but the other world where the main protagonist of the book Shevek comes from is more of an anarchist, socialist, blue-collar type of world where there is idealism and there's a different form of government and a different way of thinking. It really made you stop and question your perceptions of reality and what was perhaps the right way to live.
Ariel Bogle: Looking ahead to the future through human eyes is important, especially when it comes to the technology that may define it. Le Guin wrote once that it is a mistake to 'think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called technology at all, as if linen were the same thing as flax'.
So, how are our tech overlords shaping the new gadgets of tomorrow? What is inspiring them? Well, it turns out it's often science fiction, as Audrey Watters explains.
Audrey Watters: I find it fascinating that so many engineers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley talk about the ways in which science fiction inspires them to do work, and to do work in education. Salman Khan, for example, has talked about the ways in which he likes to think of Khan Academy as modelled on Ender's Game. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how Ready Player One might be a vision for the future of education, and in both of those cases I want to stop them and say those are really dystopian, can you please not model the future on dystopian technology.
But I think that in some ways when we think about these stories of, again, entrepreneurs and engineers coming in to rescue education, to save education, that it's often about these stories that they tell about the hero. They are there to fix things, and they are there with a weapon, they are there with a machine, they are there with all of the answers, the scientific and technological answers. And Ursula Le Guin's work I think reminds us that the technologies that perhaps we might want to think about and the people that are already within these systems.
Ariel Bogle: For scientists and entrepreneurs, and everyone really, Le Guin should be required reading. After all, she was ruthless in her search for better stories, for better worlds, for humans to be at the centre of our future, not technology alone. So I'll give her the final word:
Ursula Le Guin: Here we've got science fiction, the most flexible, adaptable, broad-range, imaginative, crazy form that prose fiction has ever attained and we are going to let it be used for making toy plastic ray guns that break when you play with them? Pre-packaged, precooked, pre-digested, indigestible, flavourless TV dinners, and big inflated rubber balloons containing nothing but hot air? Well, I say to hell with that.