Dr. A. Waller Hastings
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401
Study Questions for the Introduction to
Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness
- This book is not extrapolative. If you like, you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. What does she mean by this? What is “extrapolation”? What is a “thought-experiment”? In what way are these two terms distinguishable from one another? What are the possible uses of “thought-experiments”?
- The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future. . . but to describe reality, the present world. How can an account that is clearly not true (imagined) “describe reality”? Consider various examples of non-realistic storytelling: The X-Files, Star Wars, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Animal Farm, the Iliad, the myth of Persephone, the “Big Bang” theory.
- . . . [W]hile we read a novel, we are insane – bonkers. We believe in the exis-tence 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. Do we ever refer to fictions as if they were truth? When? Why? What is the value of such imaginative “madness” in helping us to make sense of “the real world”?
- The only truth I can understand or express is, logically, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol, aesthetically defined, a metaphor. This appears to be a paradox – how can a lie express the truth? We get hints from her further comments. Think about symbols, or metaphors. Are they true? A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is equated with something else – something that it is not, in a literal sense. So, if it is untrue, how can a metaphor help us to find the truth about that which it describes? (What if the United States really were a “melting pot”?)
- All fiction is metaphor. . . . A metaphor for what? If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel. . .
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Last updated September 7, 2001
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