The open universe
In her 1974 essay “Escape Routes,” Le Guin addresses a common criticism of science fiction: The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist. This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit an ideological canon and so forth, that’s not criticism, it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer was given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison: if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can. Le Guin, The Language of the Night , page 221 But, she continues, “from what is one escaping, and to what?” Evidently, if we’re escaping a world that consists of Newsweek, Pravda, and the Stock Market Report, and asserting the existence of a primary, vivid world, an intenser reality where joy, tragedy, and morality exist then we’re doing a good thing, and Tolkien is right. But what if we’re doing just the opposite? What if we’re escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don’t have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured —like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn’t take us in the direction of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness. Le Guin, The Language of the Night , page 221 That word “phony” is an interesting one. We might think the word comes from telephony, but the OED has that it may have been borrowed from the Irish fawney , referring to a gambling trick in which someone passes off a gilded ring for much more than it’s actually worth. Something is phony when it’s a fraud, a trick intended to deceive; and not only to deceive but to fleece, to take something of value without giving anything in return. A machine transmitting sentences that purport to be spoken by a thinking mind is phony, and what’s taken is not only the cash from our pockets—what little there is—but also our skill and capacity for the messy, complicated, and joyful experience of being with other human beings. And the real trick, of course, is that the fraudster has maneuvered himself out of the scene. If science fiction has a major gift to offer literature, I think it is just this: the capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut. What science, from physics and astronomy to history and psychology has given us is the open universe: a cosmos that is not a simple, fixed hierarchy but an immensely complex process in time. All the doors stand open, from the prehuman past through the incredible present to the terrible and hopeful future. All connections are possible. All alternatives are thinkable. It is not a comfortable, reassuring place. It’s a very large house, a very drafty house. But it’s the house we live in. Le Guin, The Language of the Night , page 223 Too much of our technology—and I reach here, as I often do, for Ursula Franklin’s definition of technology as practice , as how we do things—is oriented towards giving us a comfortable, reassuring place to be. A phony place, that is. This is not to say that we should not seek, or that we do not deserve, comfort. But that the only way to achieve unending comfort is to wall ourselves in, close up the doors, lock them inside and out. When we train ourselves to expect easy and efficient answers to every question, to tolerate only smooth, vapid dialogue, we refuse the glory and necessity of escape. When, instead, we reach for that terrible and hopeful future, when we notice the seeds of it in the present, we break out. Out into the unlikely and the uncomfortable and the unyielding, the doors wide open, the wind urging us on. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .
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