THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

( LA MAIN GAUCHE DE LA NUIT )

L'histoire : Un homme est envoyé sur la planète Hiver par les autorités de son pays pour tenter de convaincre ses habitants de rejoindre la grande fratrie de l'Humanité au sein de la "confédération des mondes connus" (oui c'est de la SF). Sa mission l'amène à découvrir une culture et une civilisation indéniablement humaine mais profondément différente de ce qui est connu jusqu'alors, tant sur le point physique que philosophique. Ces êtres alternativement homme ou femme lui donnent du fil à retordre, et c'est au cours d'un long voyage initiatique qu'il va commencer à apprécier qui sont ces êtres.

Un thème qui aurait dû m'intéresser mais le roman pour moi s'éternisait dans de trop longues descriptions de paysages et considérations psychologiques qui m'ont lassée à la longue. C'est beaucoup plus cérébral que "science-fictif" à mon goût, mais bon...

J'ai par contre beaucoup aimé l'introduction à la SF de l'auteur en préface du roman.


(commenté le 07/10/2005)

Comments

[A_girl_from_earth]

Voici quelques citations d'Ursula K. Le Guin que j'ai notées dans son introduction à son roman The Left Hand of Darkness. Un point de vue intéressant sur ce qu'est la science-fiction selon elle :


"Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." [...] Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives : somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist", but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depresseing".

[...] This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment.
[...] The purpose of a thought-experiment [...] is not to predict the future [...] but to describe reality, the present world.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
[...] Predictions is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

[...] They (fiction writers) may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. [...] This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence 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.

[...] 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 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 to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

[...] 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; [...]."