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Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: Ursula K. Le Guin

A Better Place

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

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Brian Aldiss, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Roger Penrose, Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia

Two roads converged in a dark wood.

Or, to be more accurate, two pieces of reading converged in the darkness of my mind. They are distinct pieces, unrelated, but the coincidence of reading them at about the same time untethered connections that, I suppose, have meaning to me more than anyone else.

The first was an essay in the Paris Review: Michael Chabon writing about Ursula K. Le Guin. What struck me in this essay was when Chabon talks about Le Guin’s attitude towards reading, and literacy in general. For Le Guin, Chabon tells us, literacy was “defined not simply as the capacity to read a text but as a means of training the imagination—and ultimately of constructing an authentic self—through sustained encounter with literary art.” In other words, literacy and imagination are the same thing: to read is to imagine; and it is through our imaginations that we become who we are.

Taking the next step, therefore, the function of any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, is to excite and exploit that imagination. Literature that does not engage the reader imaginatively, that does not make us think, see, wonder, learn, enjoy, is failing in its most basic purpose as a piece of literature.

Which takes me onto that second road, a novel I was reading before I chanced upon that Chabon essay, and that I have finished reading now only after having put aside the essay. This is White Mars, written by Brian Aldiss in collaboration with Roger Penrose. Now, it has to be said that Aldiss could be, shall we say, hit and miss as a writer. He wrote a number of things that were extraordinarily good: beautiful, vivid, engaging. But he also wrote a number of things that were simply bad. However, this is the only one of his novels that is not just bad, it is dull. It is only as you engage with the tedium of this book that you realise that even novels that were catastrophically bad, like The Eighty Minute Hour, were never actually boring.

But it is not the faults of White Mars as an individual novel that concern me here, but rather as an exemplar of a type of novel.

White Mars, which came out in 1999, is a utopia. In fact it is a utopia of an almost classic form, a form that generally hadn’t been written throughout the preceding century. The model of the classic utopia stems from Thomas More’s ur-text: the perfect society has been established some time before in the image of its progenitor, King Utopus or his avatar, and has since remained fairly static as a society since once perfection has been achieved there is nowhere else to go. H.G. Wells began to challenge that formulation at the beginning of the 20th century with A Modern Utopia, which suggested that utopia was not a destination but a process. Wells would continue to develop this notion in his subsequent utopia writings, such as The Shape of Things to Come, but already the environment in which utopias prospered had been changed. The technological consequences of modernism, evident in the First World War, made people start to distrust the future. And then we saw the brutal and authoritarian consequences of utopian political aspirations in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan, China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Utopia gave way to dystopia as a vision of the planned society.

One of the things that is odd about White Mars is that it is a utopia at at time when the dystopia is in full flood. The few utopias that were being written were ambivalent about the notion (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia or more tellingly “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”), or imagined radically changed circumstances, such as the universe of plenty in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Nobody was writing the sort of guided tour of the institutions that were making everybody’s life better. Oh there is some scientific hand-waving in the novel, but it is at its core the sort of political, social, cultural utopia that Wells and his predecessors used to write. The sort of book where dealing rationally with everything makes everything perfect.

Take such ideas alongside Le Guin’s dictums about how vital the imagination is, and it seems a natural fit. Shouldn’t we all find our imaginations stirred by the notion of making a better world? But in fact, it is dystopias that have better engaged with our emotions through the simple device of telling a story about someone caught in the laocoonian coils of a dystopian system. Utopias fail so often because that is precisely what they do not, what they cannot do. There is no story in utopia. There should be: imagine how exciting it is in a crime story or a science fiction story to read about someone solving a puzzle, working their way towards a position that makes sense and that makes things right. Isn’t that exactly what a utopia should be: solving a social puzzle and making it right.

But that is not the story that utopian writers (and I am definitely including Aldiss in this) have chosen to tell. Thomas More had two models to draw on for his original Utopia, the traveller’s tale typified by recent books by Amerigo Vespucci, and philosophical disquisitions typified by the work of his friend Erasmus. Those who use More as their model have concentrated almost exclusively on the traveller’s tale, and that model has barely changed in the centuries since. More presented an argument; his successors present a status quo, a fact that has to be explained, described, but not dramatised.

Aldiss (and I am assuming that Penrose’s contribution is largely connected to the handwavium concerning the search for something beyond the Higgs boson) sets the story up as if it is going to be a sort of intellectual detective story. Economic collapse on Earth leaves a small Mars colony stranded, so they have to start working out how to govern themselves. That should be fine: a succession of social issues (what to do about sex, about crime, etc) become the puzzles to which utopian thinking provides the solution. But having set the situation up, Aldiss immediately resorts to the standard utopian model of the traveller’s tale, as if that is the only way that anyone can think of presenting a utopia. So we get the puzzles, but as soon as a rational response is suggested everyone falls in with it, nothing is complexified, nothing is made dramatic. It is the besetting sin of utopian writers that they consider their own particular utopia so obvious that everyone will immediately see its rational wonderfulness. Aldiss is no different from anyone else in being unable to see why anyone might disagree with his oh-so-rational solutions.

There is imagination in utopian fiction, but the imagination is expended on the idea, not on the story. In that respect it fails Le Guin’s test: it is an engagement with the imagination of the writer, a sort of literary onanism, not with the imagination of the reader. Just as the utopian writer cannot imagine an antagonist who might, for perfectly rational reasons, work against the version of the perfect state they have just invented, so they cannot imagine a reader who will not instantly see the sense of their invention. So the classic model of a utopia is a series of showcases for different aspects of the perfect state, it does not attempt to dramatically win the reader over to the benefits of such a state. The argument is assumed to have been won before the reader even opens the book. Which is why so many utopias, and White Mars is just such a case, are dull, because the literary engagement is not an imaginative engagement.

Awards

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in awards

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Alexandra Pierce, Anne Charnock, Iain Banks, Jim Burns, Liz Bourke, Mimi Mondal, Nat Segaloff, nina allan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Victo Ngai, Zoe Quinn

Iain M. BanksHow can sitting in bed drinking champagne be so exhausting? But last night was exhausting.

It started with the announcement of the BSFA Awards. My default response when I know I’ve been shortlisted for an award is to convince myself that I cannot win. But even so there’s a rogue part of the brain that’s going: maybe, just maybe … And then I saw a tweet. I am slow and clumsy on twitter, can never really make it work for me; so it turned out that Maureen had known the result for about a minute already and was just waiting to see how long it would be before I noticed.

The upshot is, I won. Or, to be more precise, my book, Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) published by University of Illinois Press, won. It is now, what, 12 hours since I heard the news and I am still flabbergasted, surprised, delighted.

BSFA AwardFor the record, the full list of winners was:

Best Novel: Nina Allan – The Rift (Titan Books) (I am particularly pleased about this, I have been saying how wonderful this book is ever since I read it.)

Best Shorter Fiction: Anne Charnock – The Enclave (NewCon Press)

Best Non-Fiction: Paul Kincaid – Iain M. Banks (University of Illinois Press)

Best Artwork:
Joint winners:
Jim Burns – Cover for The Ion Raider by Ian Whates (NewCon Press)
Victo Ngai – Illustration for ‘Waiting on a Bright Moon’ by JY Yang (Tor.com)

My heartiest congratulations to all.

Then, less than an hour later, came the announcement of the shortlists for the Hugo Awards, and my book was on the list in the Best Related Work category. I’ve known about this for a week or so, but it was a relief that it was now out in the open (I hate keeping secrets). And coming immediately after winning the BSFA Award it was elating in a way that just learning the news in an official email from the award administrators hadn’t been.

hugo awardYou can see the full list of nominees here, but the shortlist for the Best Related Work is:

Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn (PublicAffairs)

Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), by Paul Kincaid (University of Illinois Press)

A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff (NESFA Press)

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press)

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke (Aqueduct Press)

That is some serious opposition (and isn’t it nice to see this curiously hodgepodge category given over entirely to serious critical work). I’m proud to be in this company; let’s celebrate them all.

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Reprint: Violence

13 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Anthony Burgess, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, Iain Banks, Jack Womack, Keith Roberts, Martin Amis, Norman Spinrad, Philip George Chadwick, Piers Anthony, Richard Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve nearly finished gathering together all of my Cognitive Mapping columns from Vector. This is the penultimate one, and it first appeared in Vector 193, May-June 1997. Continue reading →

Hustvedt and Tiptree

27 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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James Tiptree Jr, Julie Phillips, Robert Silverberg, Siri Hustvedt, Ursula K. Le Guin

I put Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World down late last year. I was enjoying it, but I was overloaded with other things I had to do and reading for pleasure came rather low on the pecking order. This morning I picked it up again; still too much else to do, but what the hell. And practically the first thing I read is a passage about James Tiptree.

She outlines the basic story we all know: how no-one met Tiptree, how Silverberg said the work was ineluctably masculine, the appearance of Raccoona Sheldon, etc. Then we come to this bit:

What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: ‘Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.’

Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. ‘When you take on a male persona, something happens.’

When I asked what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled, ‘You get to be the father.’

… She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man — not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her — and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

Two things struck me about this passage.

First, although this analysis of Tiptree’s suicide doesn’t conform to the story in Julie Phillips’s biography, doesn’t take into account the husband’s illness or her own, or mention that this was all a decade after her identity was revealed, yet there is something that rings true about it. Le Guin was right that there was something in Tiptree’s writing that Raccoona Sheldon’s lacked, and after Tiptree’s identity was revealed, Tiptree’s writing lacked it also. To my mind, ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’, ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’ and Raccoona Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’, which came out around the time of the revelation, were the last really significant things she wrote. The stories that came later, and all of the novels, were distinctly minor affairs when compared to the work that appeared when Tiptree was safely behind her mask.

The Encyclopedia says that the revelation killed Tiptree. That’s not strictly true, it didn’t even stop her writing; but it stopped her being Tiptree, and that took something out of the writing. And for that, Hustvedt’s point about getting to ‘be the father’, works as well as any. It may not be that she couldn’t live without the man inside her, though she certainly went into decline without him; but it is surely the case that she couldn’t write to that high and wonderful standard without him.

The second thing is that Hustvedt’s novel tells of a woman artist who calls herself Harry, and whose work is exhibited as by a succession of male front men. All the time I was reading this far I was asking myself: does she know about Tiptree. It seems to me that there is a lot of James Tiptree in Harry.

Well, now it seems I have my answer.

Reprint: The Golden Transcendence

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Isaac Asimov, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Roger Corman, Ursula K. Le Guin

Given the furore about the latest Hugo list, I thought I would post here my one and only review of a book by John C. Wright. The review appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction 188, April 2004. Continue reading →

Borderlands

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Andrew Crumey, Ann Leckie, Brian McHale, Christopher Priest, David Hebblethwaite, Hugh Howie, Hugo Gernsback, Ian Sales, J.M. Sidorova, James Joyce, John Scalzi, Karen Joy Fowler, Kate Atkinson, Keith Ridgway, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Theroux, nina allan, Paul McAuley, Ruth Ozeki, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Pynchon, Tom McCarthy, Tom Robbins, Tony Ballantyne, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson

It never goes away, does it? It’s two years now since I put into words (or, perhaps more precisely, into a word), some of my enduring dissatisfactions with science fiction. The word was ‘exhaustion’. And the debate I generated then still rumbles on. It takes other forms, of course, but at heart Nina Allan, in this excellent blog post, in turn referencing this excellent blog post by David Hebblethwaite, is making much the same point: science fiction is losing interest in the new. Continue reading →

Reprint: Meet The President

30 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Garry Kilworth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Zadie Smith

This is the column I wrote about Zadie Smith’s short story from the New Yorker. The column first appeared in Vector 273, Autumn 2013. Continue reading →

Reprint: A Doubled Life

06 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews

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Alice B. Sheldon, Barry Malzberg, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, James Tiptree Jr, Jeffrey D. Smith, Joanna Russ, Julie Phillips, Mary Hastings Bradley, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Raccoona Sheldon, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips was one of the finest literary biographies it has been my pleasure to read. Naturally, Interzone decided it should be appreciated with a double review, so Maureen Kincaid Speller and I agreed to split the job between us. First published in Interzone 205, August 2006, Maureen’s review concentrated on the life, while mine concentrated on the career (though there were inevitable overlaps). You can read Maureen’s review here at Paperknife, while mine follows the cut. Continue reading →

Elsewhere

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Arthur C. Clarke Award, Charles Stross, Jan Morris, Ursula K. Le Guin

The old and long defunct Vector website has now been archived, which means that a number of pieces are now accessible again. The whole gives a fascinating glimpse of the sf world a decade ago, and there are some good essays and reviews there. There also happen to be a few of my pieces, as follows:

Founded on the Shambles – an essay about Ursula Le Guin’s wonderful story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, that is also the direct precursor of my recent ‘In Short’ columns.

Hav by Jan Morris – a review of an extraordinary fantasy.

Accelerando by Charles Stross – a review of what is possibly one of the key texts of early 21st century sf.

Twenty Years After – a piece about the first 20 years of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

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