Because she deals with many of those issues in her writing. I think this is a good way to think about Ursula Le Guin, specifically, too. The chapters are organised around questions where those connections are particularly prominent and necessary today things like decolonisation, climate change, environmentalism, robotics and automation, synthetic biology and the microbiome… What do they really mean for our understanding of ourselves, our world, our political systems and our ethics? That’s the work science fiction is doing, thinking things through in those spaces. It’s thinking through how science and technology intersect with human social, cultural and political relationships. The book is really about science fiction as a way of thinking, a genre that’s doing something in the world, rather than just a set of icons: robots, spaceships or aliens, etcetera. Ideally, I hope there’s something for people familiar with the genre too. It’s meant to be accessible to people who don’t necessarily know anything about the genre, to introduce them to the scope of the conversations going on in the field today. With that in mind, maybe this is a good point to talk about your new book, Science Fiction, in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. I’ve begun to think of it as not so much a mode of entertainment but as a genre with explicit allegorical or analytical aims. Le Guin was one of the people who opened the genre to contemplating these kinds of perspectives.Ī lot of what you said there reminded me of why I’ve enjoyed doing science fiction interviews for Five Books it’s made me look afresh at the genre.

Writers from many countries are now participating in science fiction, and there are strong traditions of decolonising, feminist and queer science fiction. So a lot of things that are really prominent today, in a more diverse genre, were part of her work decades ago. Ursula Le Guin was also one of the first writers to be thinking about other species and our relationship to ecology. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

The dispossessed by ursula k le guin