ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem, two major figures of speculative fiction who share an interest in how cultures communicate and interact with each other. The questions of the native and the cosmopolitan, the possibilities or the impossibilities of transcultural communications, the question of language as a functioning interface between the local and the universal and ultimately the position of the cultural as “accepted difference” or “absolute otherness” are the conflicting dynamics we can find in both works. Through a contrastive analysis of these two writers’ narrative strategies and positioning, this chapter shows how their fictions reflect deeply today’s discussions on cultural communication and interpretation in the fields of translation and cultural studies.
