Science & Tech Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin flips a familiar compliment into a warning: calling science fiction “mythology” sounds like an elevation of the genre, but she insists on the kind of myth it has become. Not heroic, not redemptive, not even comfortably cautionary. Tragic. That single adjective drags in a whole worldview about modern technology as a force we both worship and cannot steer.

The line works because it’s a neat syllogism that turns the reader into an accomplice. If you accept the first clause - science fiction as the story-system we use to explain the machine age - you’re almost forced to confront the second: our foundational story about tech is structured around inevitability, overreach, and belated remorse. Tragedy isn’t just “sad.” It’s destiny with a human face: choices made inside a system that punishes you for believing you’re in control. That’s the subtext in so much canonical sci-fi, from Frankenstein’s lineage to dystopian futures where the gadgetry is dazzling and the social imagination is cramped.

Context matters: Le Guin wrote from the vantage of an anthropologically informed writer suspicious of “progress” as a default moral good. Her work repeatedly asks what gets erased when technology becomes the main plot - community, ecology, alternative ways of organizing life, the unquantifiable. She’s also quietly critiquing a genre tradition that often treats technological escalation as narrative gravity: faster, bigger, colder, more total.

Calling the myth “tragic” isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-fetish. It pressures science fiction to do what myth once did: tell the truth about power, hubris, and the costs we pretend are externalities.