In the “Introduction” to the 1975 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes: Science Fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writers is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify if for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is make. Methods and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it small quantities over a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. 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. (The Club of Rome is an organisation that began in the 1960s trying to use computers to model humanity’s future–economically, ecologically, etc.–it delivered its first major statement, The Limits of Growth in 1972, which was highly pessimistic and cautionary about the ecological damage humanity was doing in the name of ever-increasing productivity and industrialization.) How might we fit Le Guin’s statement here into our discussions/efforts to define SF?
