Tag: ursula K. le guin

anthro-shorts | 2019.08.22

Agatha Agnus BlacLeave a comment

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin | Review

Le Guin, Ursula K_Changing Planes

Publication: Orlando : Harcourt, ©2003

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 246

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook

Source: MCL

“Wish I’d thought of this story-format!” As a lover of anthro-fiction, this was the first cry that inevitably sprang from my lips upon opening this short story collection. Pure genius! Le Guin, my darling and fearless author of all things anthropologically poignant, you’ve done it again. The premise of the stories encapsulated in this collection is explained in the first chapter of the book, and explained with all the fierceness and beauty Le Guin’s most polished writing can offer. With such a premise as offered in this book, the stories that follow it quickly become a practice in imaginative descriptions of our known reality’s most subtle elements while simultaneously carrying the reader to other worlds emanating with possibilities.

The premise? How does one pass the seemingly endless hours of waiting out an airport’s or airplane ride’s drudgery of boredom? Well, of course! Just turn a bit this way and sway slightly in that other direction until you’ve slipped onto another plane of existence. And voila! The universe of endless anthropological study questions is suddenly your oyster, baby. Le Guin makes sure that these cultural quandaries hit pretty close to home, I have to say.

On such a stage set as this, the book’s narrator is taught all about the mystical magical “Sita Dulip’s Method” of changing planes between various realities. Through this method, the narrator is able to take the reader through the Le Guin’s anthropologically-primed mind. The social structures Le Guin poses within the variable “planes” in this book become absolutely limitless with cultural observations and wonderings. What would a society look like if its inhabitants ceased all forms of communication after age six or seven? How would capitalistic initiative change a world that was previously devoid of such endlessly “gainful” ambitions? What would the second, third, or even hundredth rebirths and subsequent lives lived of each individual within a community do to the voting rights of such a community? If a planet’s years spanned 24 of those familiar to earthlings, with built-in migration patterns dictated by unconquerable weather, how would this change ideas of marriage and family, home and time? What would a society predicated on letting rage rule within strict codes of conduct look like exactly?

I was pleasantly surprised to learn (albeit and sadly after Le Guin’s death last year) that the “K” she insisted on keeping attached to her name was a nod to her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, a cultural anthropologist who is still quoted to this day in archaeological reports on a regular basis. Having grown up with such a father, it stands to reason Le Guin’s literary endeavors would match the cultural interests that permeated her household during her youth. Arwen Curry’s film The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin showcases this influence beautifully, giving animated visualization to how Le Guin was “one of the very finest explorers of questions.” Truly, Le Guin’s stories, especially in this book, invite the reader to fill in the answers for themselves as she presents her endless questions about what makes civilization truly tick.

Changing Planes is not only a collection of short stories about fantastical and scientifically fictionalized worlds, but is at its heart a collection of “what if we really saw ourselves” quandaries. And herein lies the greatest appeal of the rawest kind of science fiction and fantasy storytelling. The cultural exploration in this book is as boundless as the author and reader could ever imagine. Le Guin writes elsewhere that “the purpose of a thought-experiment . . . is not to predict the future . . . but to describe reality, the present world” because “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” (from Le Guin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness) And it is through the multitude of questions, so masterfully spun story upon story in this book, that Le Guin is able to describe the reality of our world’s internal workings and desires.

This is true anthro-fiction at its best, in that the text challenges the reader to take a closer look at the world in which they truly inhabit and ask the hard “what if” questions. And not so much “what if the world looked this way or that,” but more in line with the “why” that may lurk behind our most-ingrained snap judgments of the cultural subtleties we might not at first understand. Take another look at the questions noted above that come out through the short stories within this book, and consider the implications of their actually being a quandary-based commentary on our here and now. You might be surprised at the similarities you find when thinking of these questions in the context of human history and even some of our cultural-nows.

overgrown anger | 2019.07.13

Agatha Agnus BlacLeave a comment

The Power by Naomi Alderman | Review

Alderman, Naomi_The Power

Publication: New York : Little, Brown and Company, [2017]

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 386

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook

Source: MCL

“Feminism is a science fiction enterprise.” Alderman stated during the PBS interview she gave in March of this year. She went on to say that, “female advancement comes from recognizing equality.” With this in mind, I dearly hope the true goals of feminism don’t get stuck forever in the realm of fiction and pure speculation.

Alderman’s book works hard to be a warning of what could happen if the power of existing in a male body while living in a male-dominated world was merely flipped on its head. (Opinions about the male versus female brain may bulk at this conjecture, but I’m still intrigued by this thought experiment, so . . . let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and go with this perhaps tenuous premise for the duration of this review, shall we?)

As you may have noticed from some of my recent posts (not that this hasn’t been a common thread since I began this book review website), I’ve been wrestling with ideas of feminism. How can feminism encourage true equality instead of simply generating a space for more violence, for more emulation of the bad behavior that women so often have to fight against in the midst of the patriarchal world we currently inhabit?

As part of my reading and thinking about Alderman’s book, I did a very quick preview of Merlin Stone’s When God Was A Woman. Interesting food for thought, especially as I’ve always been of the opinion that the history we ascribe to with regards to our currently male-dominated culture has its roots (or some of them at least) in the patriarchy of our religious perspectives. While Alderman utilizes the influences of religion in her novel, I’m going to take this book review in a different direction (mostly because I’m still chewing on this concept, so I’ll probably return at a later date). The concept of how power seems to inherently breed religious fervor is not lost on Alderman in her book’s narrative, for sure. Again, interesting food for thought.

Also while traveling through Alderman’s story, I reread several times Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “About Anger” in which Le Guin talks about the anger and rage that first initiated the feminist movement. It’s true that to feel angry about an injustice has immense power. But then Le Guin also makes the genuinely beautiful, and terrifying, point that a rage exercised to the point of becoming a very powerful and effective weapon can quickly lose its effectiveness if those welding it do not know how or when to put that same weapon down when the initial need for indignant rage has begun to subside.

Both Alderman and Le Guin seem to be exploring a similar message about feminism here, that being “if feminism was the baby, she’s now grown past the stage where her only way to get attention to her needs and wrongs was anger, tantrums, acting out, kicking ass.” (This quote is from Le Guin’s essay mentioned and linked above. I didn’t find any online responses to Alderman’s book directly from Le Guin, but many articles push the two authors together for the themes they most obviously shared in their fiction.)

Throughout her novel, Alderman tempers the rage of women with the backlash of having that same rage, in its rawest form, run rampant, no matter the sex or gender of the person who is carrying forward into “the battle” that weapon of anger-infused indignation. She mentions in her interviews with both BBC and PBS that she didn’t want her book to be saying that women are intrinsically better than men or vice versa.

And Alderman is right, I believe, in presenting this idea, because whenever there is a winner, there will also always be a loser, and that is not equality. That is just a power structure being inverted so that all of the advantages of one portion of society become the disadvantages of another portion of society.

If feminism’s true goal is to fight against the injustices that women have been subjected to for far too long, then a complete eradication of those injustices, no matter who the inflicted or the initially powerful party may be, needs to be at the basis of any social justice action. By keeping this goal of true equality at the forefront of our minds, maybe we can continue to pull the empowerment of women out of the realm of SciFi and categorically “speculative” fiction.

books on writing | 2018.07.24

Agatha Agnus BlacLeave a comment

Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin | Review

Le Guin, Ursula K_Steering the Craft

Publication: Boston ; New York : Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015

Genre: Authorship, Narrative Writing

Pages: 141

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Source: MCL

Let’s talk about writing exercises. Le Guin packs this modest-sized book full of lunges, squats, and sometimes gut-wrenching sit-ups all the way through. As a result, you’ll want your favourite writing tools nearby while diving into this one. But it’s not exercising because it’s the fashionable thing to do or because you don’t have any of your own writing topics to play with.

Le Guin states in the book’s opening lines that she composed this “handbook for storytellers — writers of narrative prose.” She further explains in her introduction that the book is for those who know how to write at least competently, and perhaps even rather well, but who also want to hone their talents around the more technical waters that can often throw even a great writer somewhat off course. When we write, we want to be heard, and to be heard is to be understood. Writing is our medium toward spiritual (the term being used generally, rather than with religious specificity) connection. To connect with another sentient being is to strive towards clarity, and not even clarity in the puritanical sense, but simply as a meeting of all the elusive mind-and-emotive-stuff we couldn’t otherwise hope to express.

It’s no pun that Le Guin uses the word craft in her book’s title, because writing is just that. Because just like the products of a master musician or painter, we’d expect the finished pièce de résistance to be the result of years of practice. And who knows? Maybe you’ll get a few usable story-gems out of the writing exercises she gives at the end of each chapter. But please don’t be surprised if many revisions prove needed after each painstaking draft. As mentioned, this is a book to help aspiring writers stretch and practice the artistry that is prose writing. Failing at any endeavor is part of the comparable success story in the end.

If you’re truly going to approach your writing with the concentration of a master, Steering the Craft is a wizard-of-word’s spell book detailing the “practice in control” of bending “the pleasure of writing, of playing the real, great word games” toward usable production. Understanding how to use point of view, verb tenses, short and terse versus long and wandering sentences, as well as the benefits of extricating all those pesky adjectives is how the game is played. (Yes, I’m wringing my hands that “pesky” snuck into that last sentence.) This book provides a sandbox for aspiring writers to root around safely, the only ramifications being to gain a more objective view of their world-building efforts.

Le Guin left such a legacy of word-spun anthro-fiction in her much-missed wake for many of us, and we still have much to learn from her generous advice on the art form she knew best.

Just a quick note: I love that the original version of this book, published in 1998, had the subtitle of “Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Mariner and the Mutinous Crew.” Lots to pull out of that one.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King | Review

King, Stephen_On Writing

Publication: New York: Scribner, 2000 | Republished in 2010, 10th Anniversary Edition

Genre: Authorship, Narrative Writing, Memoir

Pages: 288

Formats: Paperback, eBook, Audiobook

Source: MCL

I can’t spout enough praise for this one. King gives not only the most humorous advice about the tireless (and more often exhausting) work each writer puts him or herself through, he also offers a memoiristic curriculum vitae to inspire (or perhaps frighten) other writer-wannabes. After the first section of his book opens the blinds of his youth, filled with farting babysitters and countless rejection letters that he pins to his teenage bedroom wall with pride, King gets down to the business of explaining the business of writing.

While we may all want to skip straight to the last section of the book, which details his surviving a van that misplaced its heaving mass into his person while he was walking on the roadside in 2000 (no, the experience wasn’t his inspiration for Misery, which he actually wrote back in 1987, closer to the beginning of his now well-publicized career), the bits of the book I found most inspiring were those focused on his honest assessment of what being a writer takes in the long run.

The surprising answer to this enduring question we who are just beginning the writer’s journey can’t seem to get out of our heads is that the secret to becoming a writer is, quite simply, to write.

King is maybe somewhat harsh in his estimation that bad writers will never improve, and that great writers are born and not made, yet he seems to have a fondness for helping competent writers blossom into good writers. So, there’s hope! Maybe. But who is ever going to tell a bad writer that they’re prose stinks? I’ve never had a composition teacher dare utter such a judgement, but maybe that’s just due to our overly sensitive and politically-steroided culture. I’ve had writing teachers beg me to be on the school newspaper staff or to take up positions as a writing mentor, but the former scared the shit out of me because talking face-to-face with strangers sounds like torture, although I endured with some ecstasy the latter for a couple years in college.

What’s the line between bad and competency when we’re talking about writers? Incompetent writing (to me this equates to bad writing, and maybe King would agree) seems to imply you just don’t understand how to effectively expose your thoughts to an absentee audience, grammar eludes you, and organization is certainly not your forte; but mostly the first of these three. As if you need the crutch of hand gestures and facial expressions to help your actual words get your point across the chasm of understanding. Writing doesn’t allow for visual crutches, as we know all too well from the magical chaos that can destroy relationships and even governments in our world of text messages, email, and Twitter (America has a prime example of this last one at the moment, and if that statement baffles you, well god bless ya for having successfully hidden your head in the sand for the last 24 months). A good writer, according to what I’ve gleaned from King’s book, seems to be someone who is both competent at the composition of written communication and an artistic weaver of tales.

King’s book deals exclusively with writing fiction, but if we’re going to expand his assessment of writing skills to formats such as essays, memoirs, and historical investigative journalism, then I’d say the story weaving criteria still holds true. An essay is a story that follows the meandering yet formulaic thoughts of the writer, thinking specifically of Virginia Wolf’s expanded book-sized essay A Room of One’s Own or Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection Words Are My Matter. As far as historical investigative journalism goes, while The Lost City of Z made for an okay movie version of the historical events it recounted, I’d argue for skipping the televised rendition and just plunging straight into the pages to consume the (here it is again) story just as it was originally laid out by the book’s author. And then we have memoirs like Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors and Kate Chirstensen’s Blue Plate Special, which are themed glimpses into the writers’ lives where the chorus of events are carefully orchestrated until the scenes virtually sing in the readers’ minds.

King also spends time waxing philosophical in his advice to ambitious writers to also read read read. How can you know what’s good, or bad, if you’re locked in a vacuum? Maybe you too wanna write a memoir about all the crazy terrifying things you’ve faced in your short life (even if you’re 107, it’s still relatively short in the grand scheme of our universe’s history, mind you). The best place to start is in front of the autobiography section of your local library or bookstore, baby. As Jo Walton has pointed out, “We all remake our genre every time we write it. But we’re building on what’s gone before.” (https://www.tor.com/2018/01/24/bright-the-hawks-flight-in-the-empty-sky-ursula-k-le-guin/#more-331580) Even the greats of the writing world had influences. And, as a result, even the most individualistic writer’s voice is the product of a literary stew.

The takeaways from King’s book on writing? Write and read like your life depends on it. Guard time for both as you would a scrap of driftwood in a storm-torn sea.

A friendly note to the reader who prefers listening: The audiobook for King’s book does not include the postscript that gives a visual example of what should happen to a first draft after it’s rendered subject to the writer’s critical pen of edits and, hopefully, improvements. Just thought you should know. Nor does it include the two additional postscripts (the second was tacked on in the 2010 republication edition) listing what King was reading while writing On Writing. Just a friendly heads-up. If you’re serious about your writing, get the print version and keep it handy next time you’re sweating over that manuscript that’s been kicking your ass.

Note: Yes, I know some of the words above are made-up. Agatha asks that you kindly engage your sense of humor and imagination. It’s more fun that way.