“You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to
drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and
pretenses. That is insanity (189).” One of the very last lines of Ursula Le
Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, I
find it telling not only of the events that take place within the text itself
but of the genre of science fiction as I have come to understand it. Here one
of the main protagonists, Selver, refers to the introduction of killing
(specifically, the killing of one’s own kind or friends) as an irrevocable
consequence of exposure to Hainish colonizers. The potentiality for an
individual to take the life of another man, once inconceivable to the
Athsheans, cannot be unseen/unlearned
once Hainish brutes like Davidson have made it a daily spectacle at their own front
door. It (murder, violence) no longer threatens
to exist , hovering as a cautionary phantom in Selver’s prophetic dreams,
but now has a tangible, physical presence.
Likewise,
the parallel universes “dreamed up” by writers like Le Guin entertain our minds
with colorful and bizarre aesthetics – “little green men,” light-sabers,
dragons, and magic spells – that grapple with the same issues we face in our
own “waking world.” We like hearing new
stories about relatable experiences. But at the end of the day (or the end of
the book, in this context) we cannot box away those issues (political
corruption, colonization, genocide) by placing them in a fictional niche, by “dreaming
them back.” Such phenomena have long since crossed the threshold of human
imagination to lived human tradition, and we cannot take them back.
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