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"... Ursula Le Guin famously argued that the goal of science fiction is not to predict. She made this argument in the context of The Left Hand of Darkness, a book which Jo Walton not-quite-so-famously pointed out “is one of those books that changed the world, so that reading it now, in the world it helped grow, it isn’t possible to have the same experience as reading it in the world it was written in and for.” Prediction, under such circumstances, becomes irrelevant. Le Guin helped readers prepare for a world of relaxed gender roles and presentations, and in so doing helped them build such a world. But this was rare at the time and remains a challenge even today, when science fiction draws as often on social science as physics. And preparation for the future was unevenly distributed even among Le Guin’s readers—as anyone can report who’s attended a talk by a man who can’t name any female authors other than Le Guin ..."
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