In utopia by annalee newitz MY OLD FRIEND Joe Sartelle (www.sartelle.org) used to ask people what their textual preferences were. In a way, that is a far more intimate question than the commonly heard "What is your sexual preference?" One's gender choice in sex partners reveals almost nothing  save what kinds of bodies you enjoy  but one's choice of texts, of stories, can summarize an entire personality. My greatest and earliest textual love is science fiction. Nothing has the power to move me more than a well-crafted tale about an alien world or future. And in times of great stress, I turn to science fiction for solace, for alternative ways of thinking. Last week I was lucky enough to spend some time talking about alternative cultures with Ursula Le Guin, whose radical, speculative fiction has been my preference since I was a kid. Her most recent novels, The Telling (2000) and The Other Wind (2001), offer powerful stories of hope in the face of war and terrorism on other planets. Le Guin is also the author of celebrated works of social-protest science fiction, such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and Always Coming Home (1985). When the future feels horrifying, one wants to hear about utopia, and Le Guin is often called a utopian writer. I wondered what a utopian would think about America's current "war on terrorism." Laughing, Le Guin said, "Don't call me utopian. Utopia is always something you can't get to because it doesn't exist. I prefer to be called hopeful. We can hope that we might get out of this mess, or that decent behavior might take place, because, well, it does sometimes." It's hard to imagine decent behavior when Bush is threatening violence. It feels like there are no alternatives, no other ways the story could end. And that's where fiction can be useful. It invites us to speculate about other narrative options. In The Telling, Le Guin's protagonist is Sutty, a scholar who comes to a planet called Aka whose government has been taken over by ruthless, techno-worshipping capitalists known as the Corporation. Sutty is perplexed by the monoculture of Aka until she finds out that the Corporation has been violently suppressing the peaceful, spiritual people who follow the old ways of the planet. Those people have maintained an anticorporate, ecologically balanced culture in the face of brutal oppression and have even created a massive, secret library of books that contradict the Corporation's views. As Sutty learns more, it's clear that Aka's destiny is hardly in the hands of the Corporation, and resistance is not futile. More on http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/tech/78.html