Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Articles Languages 2014-10 Family Frontiers: The Spage Age Fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula K. LeGuin Sue Norton Technological University Dublin,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/aaschlanart Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Norton, S. : Family Frontiers: The Spage Age Fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula K. LeGuin, Vector, The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association, Issue No. 277. 2014. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Languages at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License Family Frontiers: The Space Age Fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Le Guin Sue Norton There is a short but striking passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness that relates to the artificiality of culture. It is written in the voice of Ai as he contemplates the political caginess of a Karhide demagogue. The demagogue had ‘talked a great deal about Truth…, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization”’ (91). His rhetoric prompts Ai to ruminate that: it is a durable, ubiquitous, spacious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once.