A Tirade About "Technology".

In a fascinating and favorable notification of Changing Planes (which you can find in other places on the website, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean reviewer asserts that considering that Le Guin isn't a difficult sci-fi writer, "innovation is thoroughly avoided." I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the article, and here is the footnote broadened - due to the fact that this company is actually getting my goat.

'Hard' SF is all about information technology, and 'soft' SF doesn't have any technology, right? And my books don't have innovation in them, due to the fact that I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?

Not right. How can real sci-fi of any kind absence technological content? Even if its primary interest isn't in engineering or how makers 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 technology?

Nobody can. I can't picture why they 'd desire to.

Its information technology is how a society handles physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their source of power are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they develop, their medication - and so on and on. Perhaps really ethereal people aren't thinking about these ordinary, physical matters, but I'm captivated by them, and I think the majority of my readers are too.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

But the word is regularly misused to suggest just the tremendously complicated and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by huge exploitation both of natural and personnels.

This is not an acceptable usage of the word. "information technology" and "hi tech" are not associated, and an innovation 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 constantly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "innovation" 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 pans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just selected them when they were ripe ...

One way to show that the majority of technologies are, in reality, quite "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade things, Do I understand how to make one?

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has actually most likely gotten some correct respect for "low" or "primitive" or "easy" technologies; anyone who ever lighted a fire with matches must have the wits to regard that noteworthy hi-tech creation.

I don't know how to develop and power a refrigerator, or program a computer system, but I do not understand how to make a fishhook or a set of shoes, either. I might learn. We all can discover. That's the neat thing about technologies. They're what we can discover to do.