Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Rant about "Techonolgy"

Ursula's list

Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.

Ursula K. Le Guin — The Dispossessed

A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

Joanna Russ- SF and Technology as Mystification

Talk about technology, long familiar to science-fiction readers and writers, is getting popular in Academia too. Particularly interesting to humanists is the connection between technology and whatever their own particular subject happens to be; I've attended three such formal symposia in the last five years, six including SF conventions, and including informal discussions among students, in writing classes, SF classes, and elsewhere, somewhere between fifty and sixty.

Ursula Franklin

Ursula Martius Franklin was a Canadian metallurgist, activist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes. She wrote and spoke extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice. Franklin received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights. In 2012, she was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. A Toronto high school, Ursula Franklin Academy, as well as Ursula Franklin Street on the University of Toronto's St. George campus, have been named in her honor.

The 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Real World of Technology"

Technology has always been a part of human existence. Today though, says the experimental physicist, Ursula M. Franklin, technology has large-scale effects on culture itself. Ursula Franklin is an experimental physicist, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a former board member of the National Research Council and the Science Council of Canada, and a companion of the Order...

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…

Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem | Aeon Essays

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future

Pluralistic: Ellen Ullman’s “Close to the Machine” (16 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Close To the Machine is Ellen Ullman's classic memoir of writing software in Silicon Valley at the start of the dotcom bubble; it was originally published in 1997 and reprinted in 2022 for the 25 anniversary by Farrar, Straus and Giroux's MCD books:

James Vincent on Twitter / X

at what point does the concept of a technopriesthood move beyond mere metaphor? i would argue, yes, when we're able to test the relative capacity of different books of the bible to improve virtue-reasoning benchmarks https://t.co/SHqOzhGcnH— James Vincent (@jjvincent) May 7, 2026

Rhetorics of the technological sublime | 13 | The paradoxes of technic

The terminology in my title derives from Leo Marx, who introduces the phrase ‘The rhetoric of the technological sublime’ in his book The Machine in the Garden

Studi0xAlasky | Creative + Innovation Strategist

Alexa Chirnoaga | Interdisciplinary Strategist ✶ Creative + Innovation ✶ Visual Storytelling

Technological Metamodernism | Hilma Church-Turing | Substack

Click to read Technological Metamodernism, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Kate Angelopoulos – Medium

Read writing from Kate Angelopoulos on Medium. I'm a passionate software engineer, former microbiologist, amateur farmer and lifelong health nut!