The writer Ursula K. Le Guin, best known for her science fiction and fantasy, once pushed back hard against a reviewer who claimed her books avoid technology because she writes about minds and feelings rather than machines. Her reply is worth remembering, because the misunderstanding is everywhere.

We tend to reserve the word “technology” for the flashy, complicated stuff of recent decades: computers, jets, anything with a screen. Everything older gets quietly demoted to “simple” or “primitive”, as if it barely counts.

Le Guin’s point was that technology is simply how a society deals with the physical world – how people grow and cook food, make clothes, find power, build shelter, treat illness. A linen shirt, a paper page, a wheel, a knife, a clock, an aspirin: every one of these is technology. None of it grows on trees ready to pick.

Her test for this is neat. Pick any human-made object and ask yourself: do I actually know how to make one? Most of us couldn’t build a fridge or write a program – but we couldn’t make a fishhook or a pair of shoes either. That’s the thing about technologies: they’re skills we can learn, not gifts we’re born with.
Anyone who has lit a fire without matches gains a healthy respect for so-called “low” technology. And anyone who lights one with a match ought to respect what a clever invention the match is.

So the idea of science fiction “without technology” makes no sense. You can’t imagine a future or an alien culture without describing, one way or another, how it copes with material life.

source: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/