Ursula K le Guin RIP

[Hobbit]

Lots of links being collected by Tor here: https://www.tor.com/2018/01/24/the-science-fiction-and-fantasy-community-remembers-ursula-k-le-guin/

 

[Hobbit]

On the value of reading versus viewing:

"A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. Reading is an act, a creative one. Viewing is relatively passive. A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it – to participate in it – be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books. Film eats viewers.

This can be wonderful. It’s wonderful to be eaten by a good movie, to let your eyes and ears take your mind into a reality you could never otherwise know. However, passivity means vulnerability; and that’s what a great deal of media storytelling exploits.

Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader. The text is under the control of the reader – she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story or refuse to go along with it, make judgments, revise her judgments; she has time and room to genuinely interact. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader. "

 

[kennychaffin]

Exactly! Thank you Ursula!

 

[Hobbit]

Think she got that one right.... not necessarily bad, but different. The book's full of these.

 

[Fish Owl]

I think to pay homage to this acknowledged author I will at last read all Earthsea novels in English.

A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it – to participate in it – be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books. Film eats viewers.

This is definitely not true. Good movies are open to debate, interpretation and personal reflection/awareness as much as good books. Or as any other form of art.

 

[Hobbit]

I think it's about the immediate process, FO: Reading as opposed to Watching.

Totally accept that both are open to debate, but usually we watch/read first, then discuss later.

 

[kennychaffin]

I think it's about the immediate process, FO: Reading as opposed to Watching.

Totally accept that both are open to debate, but usually we watch/read first, then discuss later.

Yes it's about the process and participation in the present moment.

 

[Jennifer P]

I never meant to denigrate her, I was more going for how much I respect her contribution even if I didn't always enjoy her work.

 

[jackdaw]

I never meant to denigrate her, I was more going for how much I respect her contribution even if I didn't always enjoy her work.

That’s precisely how your original posting came across.

Bit of a tangent, but I find my own enjoyment of some favourite authors really mixed. And Ursula Le Guin is one such, I’ve really, really enjoyed some of her work, and others much less so. Alan Moore’s comics are another example.

Other favourite authors I’ve found much more consistently entertaining...but those two became favourites, because some of their work rang the personal “wow-meter”.

 

[Hobbit]

That’s precisely how your original posting came across.

Not here, though things can be so misinterpreted when in type.

Bit of a tangent, but I find my own enjoyment of some favourite authors really mixed. And Ursula Le Guin is one such, I’ve really, really enjoyed some of her work, and others much less so.

Here it's Philip Jose Farmer & Neil Gaiman: same here.

 

[jackdaw]

Not here, though things can be so misinterpreted when in type.

They can be so easily. And actually looking at my latest reply to Jennifer, I realise it was itself ambiguous!

I was meaning to “say” that (to me) her very first posting in thread came across as having an admiration for Ursula’s work, although some of it wasn’t to her taste...it never occurred to me for a second that any denigration had been intended.

 

[Jennifer P]

That's what I was aiming for.

And I get a lot of mix too, with two extreme cases: Margaret Atwood and Orson Scott Card.

Even more so with Atwood. I love The Handmaid's Tale, but find everything else I've picked up by her to be completely unreadable.

With Card, I just feel he had one good book in him: Ender's Game.

 

[kennychaffin]

Agree about Ender/Card.

 

[Av Demeisen]

Brian Attebery • Harold Augenbraum • Harold Bloom • Michael Chabon • Karen Joy Fowler • Neil Gaiman • Jonathan Lethem • China Miéville • Joyce Carol Oates • Ada Palmer • Julie Phillips • Elaine Showalter • Zadie Smith • Jo Walton • Gary K. Wolfe

https://loa.org/news-and-views/1375-fellow-writers-remember-ursula-k-le-guin-1929-2018

 

[StarbaseOne]

Sorry to see Ursula go. I still remember reading the Earthsea books way back in my youth....

RIP, you'll always be remembered.

 

[Hobbit]

I still remember reading the Earthsea books way back in my youth....

Certainly for a lot of UK readers, the Earthsea books were what was read before Left Hand or The Dispossessed (which usually came later). They were a staple YA read, like The Hobbit or CS Lewis in the 1970's & 80's. Mind you, there was little else!

M.

 

[kennychaffin]

Certainly for a lot of UK readers, the Earthsea books were what was read before Left Hand or The Dispossessed (which usually came later). They were a staple YA read, like The Hobbit or CS Lewis in the 1970's & 80's. Mind you, there was little else!

M.

Pttttt! There was tons of stuff to read in the 70's and 80's ... maybe not specifically marketed as YA ... that category probably hadn't been invented by the marketing yahoos yet. Andre Norton for example... Marian Zimmer Bradley...Anne McCaffrey...C.J. Cherryh...

 

[Hobbit]

Let me clarify that, Kenny: I was talking of young readers in the UK of the 70's and early 80's, and no, Bradley, McCaffrey, Cherryh and others were not available to most readers of that ilk in the 1970's.

Most bookshops/libraries that I knew, for example, had Tolkien, Lewis & Earthsea for young readers and Mike Moorcock. That was about it, in my experience. And many other people I know had a similar experience, whose experience of Fantasy up to that time was Tolkien, Le Guin & Lewis. Because that's what we could get.

Admittedly I'm not talking London or the big cities, but for most readers to get the books/writers you mention you had to go to specialist bookshops (not always available) and buy them, not borrow them. Most readers at that time borrowed from public libraries, where the choices were limited. Even Lord of the Rings tended to be a less common book. The arrival of Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks in the late 1970's meant that there was more, though it really took until the mid 80's for the market to grow. Even when they were bestsellers, Donaldson & Brooks were not easily seen until after 1980.

 

[KatG]

Certainly one of those writers predominantly associated with fantasy/SF genres where there’s a strong case for wondering why they don’t/ didn’t win major literary awards outside the genre itself.

She did win major literary awards outside the genre -- she won the Newberry Silver Medal Award, a National Book Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, two American Library Association Honors, the Margaret Edwards Award for Children's Literature, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Library of Congress' Living Legend designation in Writers and Artists, and a number of others. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and non-fiction work is a regular of academic curriculum, she published fiction and non-fiction in publications like The New Yorker, appeared on NPR, etc. and had one of her works made into an opera. She was highly acclaimed in non-genre circles. Her novel, Lavinia, was part of the Canongate Myths series for Harcourt started by her pal, Margaret Atwood, which was partly meant for high school and academic sales.

But she is associated with SFF because that's what she wrote and she never separated herself from the category market, regularly schooling those outside genre fields on SFF as part of the literature. (Her brief but hilarious take-down of a pretentious reviewer of Michael Chabon's SF novel is one of the best things ever and is on her website.)

There was tons of stuff to read in the 70's and 80's ... maybe not specifically marketed as YA ... that category probably hadn't been invented by the marketing yahoos yet.

YA developed as a sub-category market of children's fiction in the late 1950's. Le Guin was specifically asked to write something for teens in that market and so she wrote the Earthsea trilogy in 1968, starting from a short story she had done earlier. YA was developed to help keep/get older kids and teenagers reading fiction so they'd be adult fiction readers as well. Le Guin considered it very important and wrote quite a bit of children's and YA fiction that received many awards.

The arrival of Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks in the late 1970's meant that there was more, though it really took until the mid 80's for the market to grow. Even when they were bestsellers, Donaldson & Brooks were not easily seen until after 1980.

It was difficult to get most types of fiction done in the U.S. picked up for publication in the U.K. or other countries, especially in the category genre markets (and to a lesser extent, vice versa.) Unless the SFF books were bestsellers, they seldom had much of a shot at foreign publication sales, and not even necessarily then until they were very globally known. U.S. publishers and literary agents seldom bothered to try to make foreign rights licensing sales on genre titles, plus for the U.K. Commonwealth there were disputes about publishers in those countries doing their own editions and having to compete with copies of the U.S. editions being imported in. The magazines for short fiction did better globally, but it could be limited.

That all started to change once the multi-national giant corporations started buying up and consolidating media companies and global trade improved with production and printing being more global as well. Publishers started buying more rights to books from other territories and they were able more and more to coordinate book releases between countries. Once the Internet got into it and helped with global publicity and contact with authors, then you had a way wider distribution and mid-list SFF authors were getting a lot more foreign rights sales. The expansion of the middle grade and YA fiction markets in the late 1990's was global and so greatly increased what was available to teens in many countries.

Le Guin's work will be with us a long time, but I will miss the pithy commentary.

 

[farseer2]

With Card, I just feel he had one good book in him: Ender's Game.

This would merit another thread, but I can't agree that Card only had one good book in him. The thing with Card is that at some point his writing degraded. To look for a SFF explanation, maybe he was abducted and replaced by an alien or a faerie. But the early Card... he definitely had more than one good book in him: the first two in the Ender saga (Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead), the first few in the Alvin maker saga, Songmaster (what a wonderful book), Lovelock, Pastwatch, his early short story collections...