in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear voices, we watch the battle 
of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity return (in most 
cases) when the book is closed. 
u] 
I am 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 novel- 
ist's way, which is by inventing elaborating circumstantial lies. 
L..J 
Ihe artist deals with what cannot be said in words 
Ihe artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in 
words what cannot be said in words. 
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semi- 
otic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound — a fact that 
inguistic 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 
‘he 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 tech- 
nology, 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 
(uture 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.« 
From: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), 
Introduction written in 1976, Ace Books 1987, xiv-xix