"...[I]t's simply that I came on the 'Tao te Ching'...and began reading it. It was one of the books in our house when I was a kid. And it answered my need."
"...Philip K. Dick is one of the science fiction writers who I think is a really good American novelist. They never compare him to Fitzgerald; they compare him to other science fiction writers. There is where there's a barrier that needs to be crossed."
"I think magical realism is one of the better names not only for what Garcia Marquez and other South American writers do, but for what a lot of us are doing. I think of Italo Calvino....I think some of what I write and some of what other science fiction and fantasy writers in America and England write is magical realism. I think it's a worldwide movement, a way of trying to write about the modern world using literary devices that are shifty and tricky and surprising enough that they catch how v more...
"I think magical realism is one of the better names not only for what Garcia Marquez and other South American writers do, but for what a lot of us are doing. I think of Italo Calvino....I think some of what I write and some of what other science fiction and fantasy writers in America and England write is magical realism. I think it's a worldwide movement, a way of trying to write about the modern world using literary devices that are shifty and tricky and surprising enough that they catch how very complicated our world really is."less...
"[T]he fad now is to have the hero be a girl, armed to the boobs with all sorts of weapons. It's extremely stupid--not real gender reversal, but kind of girls acting like men. They tend to be sexually very promiscuous, like guys. It's a guy's fantasy of a busty woman hero slashing and killing people. It's a change and it isn't any worse, but I don't know that it's much better."
Born in Berkeley, California to an anthropologist father and a writer mother, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote her first story at the age of 9. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1952. The next year, she met her future husband, Charles A. Le Guin, while on the Queen Mary passenger liner en route to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship--they married in December of 1953. While she is known as an author of science fiction, fantasy, and children's books, Le Guin's more...
Born in Berkeley, California to an anthropologist father and a writer mother, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote her first story at the age of 9. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1952. The next year, she met her future husband, Charles A. Le Guin, while on the Queen Mary passenger liner en route to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship--they married in December of 1953. While she is known as an author of science fiction, fantasy, and children's books, Le Guin's stories and novels supersede the genres; she uses science fiction conventions to explore vast human issues such as sexuality, human relations, gender politics, and war. Her writing has been widely embraced by readers and critics, winning a number of awards including both the Hugo and Nebula awards for two of her books, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969) and THE DISPOSSESSED (1974). Le Guin has been greatly influenced by Taoist philosophy, and her vast body of nonfiction has included a retelling of the Lao Tzu's TAO TE CHIONG. In 1998, the Colorado School of Mines' Mobile Robots Project named one of its newly designed robots after her, along with ones named after fellow authors Lois McMaster Bujold and Connie Willis. She has received two lifetime achievement awards, including The Los Angles Times' Robert Kirsch Award in 2000 and the 2004 Margaret A. Edwards Award.less...
Fascinating; a very good successor to the Earthsea trilogy, and deals directly (as Tehanu does) with the misogyny of the first 3 books. In both Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea, women who become dragons - or women whose dragon nature becomes apparent, it's not clear - are the ones who are abused, specifically sexually abused, in childhood, by people who include close family members. Dragons and dragon's fire seem to be many things at once - enormous power, beauty, anger and sexual desire. As if it's only women who have been seriously abused who may be liberated from the social expectations on women sufficiently to actually feel their own anger and their own desire. But these women are then impossible for society to control, so dangerous; and powerful.
And she also makes clear that wizards are celibate not because magic requires it but because the misogynists managed to get control and wanted wizards to stay away from women because they stink. And because if you actually taught women anything they might get power and that would be bad because they stink. But if you don't teach women anything then you can tell everyone they're inferior because they don't know anything. I have seen this so often before. There's good reason to think it happened in the early church, and in every other sacred organization - women are important to begin with; then the men take over, and kick them out, and tell everyone it's because they're inferior and don't belong in the very organization they built.
Fascinating; a very good successor to the Earthsea trilogy, and deals directly (as Tehanu does) with the misogyny of the first 3 books. In both Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea, women who become dragons - or women whose dragon nature becomes apparent, it's not clear - are the ones who are abused, specifically sexually abused, in childhood, by people who include close family members. Dragons and dragon's fire seem to be many things at once - enormous power, beauty, anger and sexual desire. As if it's only women who have been seriously abused who may be liberated from the social expectations on women sufficiently to actually feel their own anger and their own desire. But these women are then impossible for society to control, so dangerous; and powerful.
And she also makes clear that wizards are celibate not because magic requires it but because the misogynists managed to get control and wanted wizards to stay away from women because they stink. And because if you actually taught women anything they might get power and that would be bad because they stink. But if you don't teach women anything then you can tell everyone they're inferior because they don't know anything. I have seen this so often before. There's good reason to think it happened in the early church, and in every other sacred organization - women are important to begin with; then the men take over, and kick them out, and tell everyone it's because they're inferior and don't belong in the very organization they built.