Ursula K. Le Guin: A Rant About "Technology" (2005)
And my books don’t have technology in them, because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?Not right. How can genuine science fiction of any kind lack technological content? Even if its principal interest isn’t in engineering or how machines work — if like most of mine, it’s more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work — still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology?Nobody can.
- ▪And my books don’t have technology in them, because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?Not right.
- ▪How can genuine science fiction of any kind lack technological content?
- ▪Even if its principal interest isn’t in engineering or how machines work — if like most of mine, it’s more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work — still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture withou
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| Original publisher | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| Canonical URL | https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:51:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T15:05:40.581Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T15:05:40.581Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | AqzMwuCzJE4I · 1 stories |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Rant About “Technology”In an interesting and favorable notice of Changing Planes (which you can find elsewhere on the site, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean reviewer asserts that since Le Guin isn’t a hard science fiction writer, “technology is carefully avoided.” I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the article, and here is the footnote expanded — because this business is really getting my goat.‘Hard’ SF is all about technology, and ‘soft’ SF doesn’t have any technology, right? And my books don’t have technology in them, because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?Not right.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ursula K. Le Guin.
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