Ursula K. Le Guin and Science Fiction as Metaphor

"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 those 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 nonmetaphorically, 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, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

The Language of the Night, p.159

“…the truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Ursula Le Guin is specifically talking about the function and ability of Sf to describe personal truths through metaphor in this essay, and while I find this description a very satisfying and fantastic defense against those who would say Sf is useless, silly, or insubstantial, what I really take from this passage is that it points to the fact that perception of the world is subjective. If, as she says, “truth is a matter of the imagination,” then truth is an individualized experience. It is a facet of perception, inseparable from our ability to perceive and contemplate our experience of the world, and fiction becomes a medium through which this accumulated perception can be articulated.

These truths are expressed, perhaps can only be expressed with any kind of firm cohesion, through metaphor, but metaphor, like truth, is subjective, and part of the pleasure and frustration of fiction is that, if it is done well, a reader or viewer can begin to see the threads that bind the metaphors that express personal truths. We can begin to see, if we look, how all these images come together to form a tapestry that presents not just the world itself, but what we take from it into ourselves, who we become and what we are because we live in the world. It is through fiction, through storytelling that we get a glimpse of life from an alternate perspective, that we can perceive the chords that link us to other people. And truth becomes visibly malleable, personal, universal, because it is after all, “a matter of the imagination.”