In an intriguing and beneficial notification of Changing Planes (which you can find in other places on the website, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean reviewer asserts that because Le Guin isn't a difficult science fiction writer, "technology is thoroughly prevented." I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the article, and here is the footnote broadened - because this company is truly getting my goat.
columbia.edu
'Hard' SF is everything about technology, and 'soft' SF does not have any technology, right? And my books don't have technology in them, since I am just interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?

Not right. How can authentic science fiction of any kind absence technological content? Even if its principal interest isn't in engineering or how makers work - if like the majority of mine, it's more thinking about how minds, societies, and cultures work - still, how can anyone make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or clearly, its innovation?

Nobody can. I can't think of why they 'd desire to.

Its information technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they outfit themselves, what their source of power are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they construct with and what they construct, their medication - and so on and on. Perhaps extremely ethereal people aren't thinking about these ordinary, bodily matters, however I'm interested by them, and I think the majority of my readers are too.

Technology is the active human user interface with the material world.

But the word is regularly misused to mean just the enormously complicated and specialised technologies of the previous few years, supported by huge exploitation both of natural and personnels.

This is not an acceptable usage of the word. "information technology" and "hi tech" are not synonymous, and a information technology that isn't "hi," isn't necessarily '"low" in any significant sense.

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of constantly broadening technical expertise that we think absolutely nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber is worthy of to be called "innovation" at all. As if linen were the very same thing as flax - as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin tablets, were natural things, born with us like our teeth and fingers - as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe ...

One method to illustrate that many innovations are, in reality, quite "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gotten some proper respect for "low" or "primitive" or "simple" innovations