Introduction to Left Hand of Darkness.

left_hand_of_darkness-intro

  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 a 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 people who do not read science fiction describe
it as ‘escapist,’ but when questioned further, admit they do
not read it because ‘it is 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
too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind,
whether the writer’s or the reader’s. Variables are the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you 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 this
laboratory; let’ 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’s 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 predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by 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. A 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 ‘re like—what’s going on—what the weather is like 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 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 tell about these
fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion,
and when they say 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 unlocalizable
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
in 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 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 so
privileged. 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 number 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 insofar as it has one single meaning, points to one
fact that 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 Sciences 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 fiction, 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 sent in the ‘Ekumenical Year 1490-97,’ but surely
you don’t believe that?

Yes, 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 elaborate 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 don 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 symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the
linguistic positives 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 [domains?] 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.