Science fiction has nothing in common with the Trump administration’s “alternative facts”, distinguished sci-fi novelist Ursula Le Guin said this week.
The hugely influential author dismissed claims of a relationship between the two after the Oregonian newspaper published a letter that said that the “alternative facts” of the US president and allies including press secretary Kellyanne Conway – who first coined the phrase – had much in common with sci-fi and fantasy writing.
“The comparison won’t work,” Le Guin wrote to the paper in reply. “We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real – all invented, imagined – and we call it fiction because it isn’t fact,” she added.
The 87-year-old author, whose bestselling novels include The Earthsea Chronicles and The Left Hand of Darkness, called out the phrase alternative facts as a disguise for lies that “are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous”.
She added, in what appeared to be a direct reference to the new president, that peddlers of alternative facts were liars, whom most people consider “contemptible”. (bolding mine)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/ursula-le-guin-rebuts-charge-that-science-fiction-is-alternative-fact
