Bibliopath #12: In which we get back to work
Dear reader,
Apologies for my absence. You may have already heard, but Ursula K. Le Guin died on January 22nd. Regular readers will know what this means to me: she was the closest thing I have to a muse. Someone who wrote fantastic stories, yes, but also never shirked her duty to think widely and deeply about the implications of those stories, or about diverse race and sex in protagonists, or about what it means for fiction to always drive toward 'conflict':
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win.
Her death made me think a lot of things. She died at 88, having lived a full, long life and a career to be envied. But Margaret Atwood's tribute to her put it just right: 'In all her work, Le Guin was always asking the same urgent question: what sort of world do you want to live in?'
If you've never read the questions that she asked, the Wizard of Earthsea is an unimpeachable place to begin and helped me reconcile certain invisible things within my self in the way that only fiction can. Or, if you'd like a short story taster, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is basically perfect.
The Earthsea Cycle ends with a hero from previous books looking on at those who carry on his legacy, having been empowered to do what they could not. I think a lot about that, right now. And mostly, it makes me want to get back to work: it makes me want to write.
And you, what have you loved reading?
Guan