"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand Of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by annnouncing that it's set in the 'Ekumenical
Year 1490-97,' but surely you don'tbelieve that?
Yes, indeed 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 elaborately
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 done 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 tosay 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 thisin 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 positivists 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 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.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
1. A Parade in Erhenrang
From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2-Gethen: To the Stabile on
Ollul: Report from Genly Ai, First Mobile on Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93, Ekumenical Year 1490-
97.
I'LL MAKE MY REPORTas if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is
a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling:
like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn
by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls
are. But both are sensitive.
The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can
judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice,
why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one
story.
It starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in the nation Karhide


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