How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #1
"You know there's two hundred sixty kids in that one complex suffering from kwashiorkor? All low-income or Basic Support families, and they aren't getting protein. And what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I've put in five different reqs for Minimal Protein Ration for those kids and they don't come, it's all red tape and excuses. People on Basic Support can afford to buy sufficient food, they keep telling me. Sure, but what if the food isn't there to buy? Ah, the hell with it. I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy.... " (1.33)
Kwashiorkor is a form of malnutrition that results from eating enough calories, but not enough protein. It causes swelling, irritability, anorexia, an enlarged liver, and a bunch of other not so good things. But it's not something that happens in the developed world, so what's up? The mention of this disease occurring in Portland lets us know that the future is not a good place: if Portland is having these kinds of problems, then imagine how bad things must be elsewhere.
Quote #2
Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the cumulative trends already at work in the mid-Twentieth Century; it would take several centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air, if it ever did. (3.2)
In the future, global warming has destroyed the environment, and humanity has polluted the air. It's kind of an environmental warning in novel form—and this was written back in the '70s. Have things changed since then?
Quote #3
There was more scurvy, typhus, and hepatitis in the Old Cities, more gang violence, crime, and murder in the New Cities. (3.4)
In this world, even though disease has been controlled in the new cities, lots of new things have stepped in to kill off the inhabitants. It's as if in this novel, no matter how good the technology looks, there will be consequences for it that no one really imagined. Is the technology at fault? Or are humans at fault for always leaping before they look, never thinking through anything before they slap on some new tech like a Band-Aid?
Quote #4
To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river, something is involved which is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back. (3.73)
This is talking about the future, but if you think about it, it's also applicable to today. By displacing this image into the future, Le Guin gives us a glimpse of how absurd everyday life really is. It is kind of weird that we take tunnels under bodies of water, right?
Quote #5
At one time indeed most of downtown Portland had consisted of places to park automobiles. At first these had mostly been plains of asphalt punctuated by paybooths or parking meters, but as the population went up, so had they. Indeed the automatic-elevator parking structure had been invented in Portland, long long ago; and before the private car strangled in its own exhaust, ramp-style parking buildings had gone up to fifteen and twenty stories. (4.1)
Okay, so it wasn't invented in Portland, but this description of what happens with cars is creepily accurate. Why do you think Ursula Le Guin believed this would happen? How do you feel knowing that it has?
Quote #6
All the floors had a curious slant, a skewness, due to the basic helical-ramp construction of the building; in the offices of Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti, one was never entirely convinced that one was standing quite upright. (4.1)
The converted parking structures are an apt symbol for the uncertainty of George's Portland. Technology literally made these people unstable, but the image works on a metaphorical level as well. No one is very certain about the future, and the world in this novel seems to be very precarious; life changes dramatically minute by minute sometimes.
Quote #7
"Overpopulation."
"Mhm, that was the word you used. That's your word, your metaphor, for this feeling of unfreedom. (5.33)
Dr. Haber is being kind of nasty about it, but he's hit on something important. Technology and modernization don't just have physical ramifications; they have emotional ramifications, as well. Technology can be a double-edged sword: it may make the world safer, and it may make life easier in certain ways, but it can also lead to things like overpopulation, pollution, and that feeling so many modern people have of being totally adrift, cut off from life and from each other. Why do you think this happens?
Quote #8
He didn't wake until nearly noon on Saturday. He went to his refrigerator and looked in it; he stood contemplating it a while. There was more food in it than he had ever seen in a private refrigerator in his life. In his other life. (6.39)
In this scene, George directly experiences the benefits of Dr. Haber's world modification. Before that, improvements in health care led to longer lives, which led to overpopulation. On an everyday, practical level, that meant that George, like others, was forced to eat things like soyloaf, made from a plant that is very cheap and easy to grow. In a way, Dr. Haber's modification is actually a step back in the modernization of the food chain. But which is better?
Quote #9
"It isn't evolution. It's just self-preservation. I can't— Well, it was a lot worse. Worse than you remember. It was the same world as that first one you remember, with a population of seven billion, only it—it was worse. Nobody but some of the European countries got rationing and pollution control and birth control going early enough, in the seventies, and so when we finally did try to control food distribution it was too late, there wasn't enough, and the Mafia ran the black market, everybody had to buy on the black market to get anything to eat, and a lot of people didn't get anything. [...] One of the African states came in on the Arab side, and used nuclear bombs on two cities in Israel, and so we helped them retaliate, and...." (7.141)
The traditional Western view of history is one of progress. The more you go in the future, the more technology you get, and the better things become. But the way that George is telling it, technology is actually what destroyed the entire world in 1998. Instead of making things better, things got progressively worse. It was just that nobody noticed that until it was too late.
Quote #10
"So now there's nothing to fear, and it's all out of your hands. I know, scientifically and morally, what I'm doing and how to do it. I know where I'm going." (9.128)
Dr. Haber's point of view is basically that we should trust him because we trust science and we trust technology. But in the context of the novel, does that position make any sense? Are science and technology ultimately good? Or is the picture more complicated than that?