Comments

  1. says

    If that was written today, by a well known author, it would be plastered all over the ‘net, being drowned out by the howls of outrage and wounded privilege.

  2. says

    Ugh. Le Guin’s “Disease” is an invented syndrome by people who resent feminism/social justice concepts in their fiction, while sailing blithely through the introduction of right wing politics into other stories. Fuck ’em.

  3. says

    PZ:

    Ugh. Le Guin’s “Disease” is an invented syndrome by people who resent feminism/social justice concepts in their fiction, while sailing blithely through the introduction of right wing politics into other stories. Fuck ’em.

    Oh. I had no idea, but I’m not surprised. I am surprised anyone here felt it necessary to bring up that bullshit. I’m with you, Fuck ’em.

  4. laurentweppe says

    Huuuuh… Context?
    I mean, I have no idea what book whose “tone is so self-contendly, exclusively male” Le Guin is talking about. I tried googling the name “john radziewicz” up, but all I got was a bunch of hyperlinks about a criminal defense attorney, and I doubt that’s the same radziewicz.

  5. jerthebarbarian says

    laurentweppe @10

    Found this blog post about the same letter: https://literaryames.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/ursula-k-le-guin-confronting-sexism-in-sci-fi-publishing-since-1987/

    They suggest a collection called “Synergy” from 1987, though the sourcing appears to be just a “I think she might be talking about this” speculation rather than firm knowledge. I haven’t read it, but given the authors involved I wouldn’t be surprised if the stories lacked female viewpoints.

  6. says

    Laurent @ 10:

    It’s been suggested that it’s this anthology: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/z/george-zebrowski/synergy-new-science-fiction-volume-1.htm

    That said, I’m not sure why anyone would think it’s necessary to know exactly book is being referenced. I was an avid reader of SciFi as a child, and that has carried through all my life, and perhaps you had to be a girl, then a woman, to grok the continual tone of the self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club or a locker room, which pervaded all of SciFi for decades.

  7. says

    The picture is from a Guardian article, here. The caption reads:

    In 1987, multi-award winning author Ursula K LeGuin was asked to supply a blurb for Synergy: New Science Fiction, Volume 1, the first in a new four-part series of anthologies edited by George Zebrowski which intended to showcase science fiction stories from authors both established and up-and-coming. For her, however, the book was notable not for its stories but for its complete absence of women’s voices. She reacted with this stinging letter.

  8. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    LeGuin is famously a lover of Portland, and she was still riding the bus around town in the 90s. One day I was in her neighborhood, and when I caught the bus back downtown this smallish, white-haired, white woman got on a couple stops later. being a gimp I was on the front of the crowded bus and when someone next to me (but farther from the door) got up to give the woman a seat, I moved over so that she need not move quite as far through the crowd before sitting down.

    As I often do when I make room for someone, I make just a tiny bit of friendly talk so that the person feels welcomed to the space rather than afraid that someone resents them. [I know how I feel when others are tolerating me instead of welcoming me.] She chatted me up after this minor exchange. When I mentioned I was writing and playing around with feminism she mentioned that she likes doing that her own self. We never mentioned names. I got home and was thinking, “What a spectacularly nice person, and some good observations she made as well!” I’ve had lots of conversations with lots of people on lots of buses. I don’t generally go home and think about them that night, but the sheer, genuine friendship, the optimistic intelligence, and the disarming insight that she showed stuck with me. [Indeed, I still have the emotional memory of the experience long after I’ve forgotten our exact words.] So there I was, thinking about this positive, random conversation, when it struck me that something she said was reminiscent of something I’d read in LeGuin once…and holy crap, didn’t LeGuin live in that particular neighborhood? I went digging through my books and – living in the same town as Powell’s – their old, used editions mostly had pictures that were from decades before and maddeningly inconclusive. Then I grabbed a newer edition and there it was: a picture probably no more than 5 years old, though the photographer had made her look a bit younger than she looked rain-soaked on a crowded bus: Ursula K. LeGuin.

    My one interaction with her (she rode the bus often, apparently, I’m kind of surprised i didn’t have more) and she made an impression on me without her fame or her books assisting her in any way. She did it with sheer kindness and conversation.

    If I ever had to define “magical” I would think, “Ursula K. LeGuin,” should suffice.

  9. frog says

    Crip Dyke, RRFToD&HH @15: What a wonderful story! Would it be okay for me to tweet a link to your comment?

  10. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    PZ,
    A source would be appreciated.

    —-
    Le Guin is awesome.

  11. AMM says

    If Ursula LeGuin’s writing is a consequence of her having some sort of disease, I hope I catch it. Even when I’m not entirely wild about the subject matter, it is still a joy to read. For some reason, when I think of her writing, it somehow reminds me of a mountain brook in a birch forest, trickling over its gravel creek-bed in late summer.

    Naturally, since I’m something of a radical feminist and a SJW-wannabe, I heartily approve of the politics in her stories, too.

  12. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @frog and opposablethumbs:

    Thank you. Of course you should share it as you like, frog!

    cd

  13. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @AMM,

    If Ursula LeGuin’s writing is a consequence of her having some sort of disease, I hope I catch it. Even when I’m not entirely wild about the subject matter, it is still a joy to read. For some reason, when I think of her writing, it somehow reminds me of a mountain brook in a birch forest, trickling over its gravel creek-bed in late summer.

    If it was as virulent as I could wish, open mike poetry in Portland would not have had quite so many painful moments.

    Naturally, since I’m something of a radical feminist and a SJW-wannabe, I heartily approve of the politics in her stories, too.

    As I heartily approve of your comment.

    Yeah, one of the things that really stood out for me as a kid was reading stories about Black folk that broke molds. You can be as smart as you like, but your body of knowledge will still greatly constrain your thoughts. My first Luke Cage, Power Man comic was an amazing and disorienting experience. As a white kid that people pushed to be boy-like, and who did indeed like many boy-gendered things*1, I was decidedly pushed to a cultural center where I wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t yet understand myself as having other options. Luke Cage was decidedly a character in the Blacksploitation mode, but having Black folk centered at all, even if still employing heavy stereotypes, was radical for me.

    Not long after that, I came across Wizard of Earthsea, in which being a black human being was normalized and centered – if, indeed, people from magical imaginary planets can be assumed to be human beings and assumed to have categories such as “Black”. I swear I had to read Ged’s description at least 5 or 6 times the first time I read the book. I kept going back and re-reading it. Why? Because even with the description of his hair and skin tone, I didn’t “get” that Ged was being written in such a way that in the culture in which Wizard of Earthsea was being read (rather than in the culture internal to the book, in which Ged lived his life) until some barbarian raiders were specifically described as “white”.

    I kept doubting my own memory, turning to the back where LeGuin’s picture was and seeing a white woman staring back, and I was asking myself, “Why would she write this book this way?” The racism of my surroundings made me doubt not that Ged was “Black” (or meant to be read as such by us), but that this book which seemed so very mainstream in so many ways, which was written by a white woman, would have the whites be barbarians and evil witches while the civilized school of magic, the wise, thoughtful Ogion, the turn-by-turn playful and serious Vetch, and Ged himself were all “Black”. I thought so fucking hard about metaphor reading that book for the first time*2, and the ease with which one could make Ged white in opposition to Ged’s shadow-stalker. I was 7 years old and re-interpreting everything on the page 3 and 4 times, trying my best to understand with my limited experience that the Black character reconciling with the black shadow-stalking spirit was meant to be more universal than it would have been possible to write with a white Ged.

    I would say that I heartily approve of her politics, except that she gave me some significant part of my own politics. Saying I approve would be mere tautology.

    *1: tree climbing and, um, um, I’m sure there were other things. Oh, bike riding – though even in the 1970s that wasn’t quite as gendered as tree climbing. I’m sure there was something else, anyway. I read the Hardy Boys more than I read Nancy Drew. I only read 2 or 3 of the Frank Baum Oz books. I read all the Encyclopedia Brown books, though my favorite character was Sally. Hrm. Oh! No makeup! I hated make up and sequins and if that can be defined as “boy” rather than “not girl” then, yeah, totes masculine here. Tomboy forever!

    *2: if it can even be said that there was a first time reading it: by the time I read the last page, I’d read so many of the previous pages more than once that Ogion, significant only in the first third, Ged’s aunt (who’s name I don’t remember, more’s the pity) barely a character at all in the book, and Vetch/Estarriole who mainly figures in the last third were all familiar friends. The Dragon’s elbow-as-ruined-tower image was also fixed in my brain for all time.

  14. rq says

    Rob Grigjanis @12
    Oooh, thanks for that! I’ll be look into that one, too.

    +++

    Anyway, LeGuin, Atwood and Tepper were basically my triumvirate of feminist (and feminist-like) science fiction when I was younger. The boys’ club only had so many ways to tell the same story.

  15. qwints says

    Does LeGuin get criticized as an overly didactic writer? I always thought of Heinlein as the classic example of political lectures overwhelming storytelling.

  16. John Harshman says

    I think the comparison between Heinlein and LeGuin is informative. Both of them got a bit preachy (though in radically different ways) late in life. Heinlein became thereby unreadable, LeGuin not so much. But I do think The Dispossessed, for example, suffers a bit from the author fixing the plot to make a point.

  17. NitricAcid says

    @Crip Dyke. You know, I don’t remember even noticing a description of Ged’s skin colour. Of course, I read it nearly 30 years ago.

    Then again, I also read the Lando Calrissian Star Wars books, and I remember finishing one of the books, looking at the cover, and suddenly remembering that Lando was black. So I wasn’t particularly bright or perceptive when it came to skin colour.

  18. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @qwints, #25:

    Does LeGuin get criticized as an overly didactic writer?

    In a word?

    No.

    That her politics is represented in her storytelling does not mean that political harangues (or even moderately interesting lectures) are present in her storytelling.

  19. chrislawson says

    Yeah, whoever invented the term “Le Guin’s Disease” was just running a prototype of the “SJW” tag. Le Guin is most emphatically NOT a didactic writer. The fact that her political thoughts shine through in her fiction is a testament to the clarity of her fictional universes, not her breaking into explanatory moralistic passages.

    Plus, I agree with Joanna Russ that science fiction is at root a didactic genre. So when you hear people complaining about Le Guin’s politicking in her fiction, what they are really objecting to is the particular political platform she is taking. After all, if you really really hate didactic political messages in your fiction, you’d have to choose dozens of people ahead of her: Heinlein, Pournelle, Ringo…and many, many others.

  20. says

    I have to out myself as a dumb white guy here. When I first read the Earthsea books in my teens, maybe 35 years or so ago, and on subsequent rereads, I managed to miss the fact that Ged was Black. I guess I looked at the map in the front and fixed on Earthsea as being a stand-in for the Aegean or maybe the Mediterranean, and Ged being merely as dark as a Greek or Italian. I guess about twenty years or so ago I read an article somewhere that mentioned that he was explicitly Black, and I kind of adjusted my mental picture of Ged… no, I didn’t, he still looked Greek in my mind’s eye when I read the more recent sequels. But I accepted that he was Black, in fact, and my brain was just being stupid.

    But the thing that makes me really dumb? It wasn’t until I read Crip Dyke @23 just now that it occurred to me that of course if Ged is Black, so must be everybody else on Gont (and further afield). I may have to go back and do a complete reread, with some active imagineering to redo my mind’s eye images.

  21. says

    The letter:

    John Radziewicz
    Senior Editor
    Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
    111 5th Ave
    New York NY 10003

    Dear Mr Radziewicz,

    I can imagine myself blurbing a book in which Brian
    Aldiss, predictably, sneers at my work, because then
    I could preen myself on my magnanimity. But I cannot
    imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of a new
    series and hence presumably exemplary of the series,
    which not only contains no writing by women, but the
    tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively
    male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not
    be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just
    don’t belong here.

    Yours truly,

    [signature]
    Ursula K. Le Guin

  22. anat says

    Re: Earthsea – wasn’t Ged’s skin supposed to have reddish-brown skin? His best friend from school was described as black IIRC.

  23. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @anat:

    You may have noticed that the people in real life that we call “Black” actually have a variety of skin tones. There isn’t a category equivalent to “Black” in Earthsea, not least because “Black” is inseparable from the history of Blackness and Earthsea has a completely different (and, yes, imaginary) history. That’s why I kept putting “Black” in quotes in the earlier comment. I wasn’t referring to a skin tone that absorbed all visible wavelengths relatively equally and quite thoroughly. I was referring to the political and cultural category that LeGuin references through her use of physical descriptions.

    In fact, centering “Black” people requires actually paying attention to real skin tones instead of merely dismissing all the skin tones darker than a tanned Italian as “black”.

  24. says

    I just tracked down something I vaguely remembered reading a while back in the subject of skin color in LeGuin’s work. She says, and she should know, that in Earthsea,

    everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black.

    From this article in Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/12/a_whitewashed_earthsea.single.html .

  25. runswithscissors says

    Le Guin is the reason, 40 years since I first read The Day Before the Revolution, that I set my alarm at 6.00 am every morning to write.

  26. zetafunction says

    To those who wondered whether UKL’s writing is too didactic, I’ll answer with her own words: For a serious writer seriously concerned about any moral, social, political, environmental issues, [being too didactic] is a major concern. I’ve been wrestling with it ever since I was 18. Crudely, it comes down to: “There are some things I believe need saying, that I’d like my story to say — but it’s not a lecture, it’s a story.”

    Context here.

  27. katybe says

    I haven’t read nearly enough Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness is sat waiting on my to-read shelf to start remedying this) but yesterday I went to a talk on literary heroines at the local lit festival. One of the audience questions that came up was how many of the typically-heroic heroines the panel named came from fantasy and science fiction, and whether it was easier to write a heroic female lead when you weren’t tied to the rules and problems of the real world. One of the panelists, Samantha Ellis, responded with something that immediately became obvious, but I’ve not heard it expressly articulated before, even during the Hugo discussions this year. Quite simply, women have always been attracted to writing speculative fiction, precisely because it gave them a chance to change those rules. It seemed like one of those “of course” moments, so I thought I’d share (it may be an obvious truism to everyone else – if so, sorry for the digression).