…that one of the things I’ve always admired about Ursula K. LeGuin is her steadfast refusal to perform the dance of genre disavowal every time the mainstream tries to claim her for one of their own.
I Just Want to Say…
…that one of the things I’ve always admired about Ursula K. LeGuin is her steadfast refusal to perform the dance of genre disavowal every time the mainstream tries to claim her for one of their own.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 
Reblogged this on Madhouse Manor.
Le Guin is just the best. Hard to say anything more than that without going on for pages.
A couple of decades ago, thesf field was full of writers and critics asking the question, “Who’s going to be the next Robert A. Heinlein?” and nobody listened to me when I said, “Ursula K. LeGuin.” They’d just look at me funny, even when I’d go on to say, “Writer in the genre most likely to be spoken of respectfully (or at least, known by name) by critics outside the field? Largely responsible for shaping the discourse of the genre in the latter years of the 20th Century? Tremendously influential on an entire generation of younger writers? Does any of that sound familiar?”
Well, now I can rest my case. Of course, that probably means that in another decade or three the genre will be filled with die-hard old-line LeGuin fans on the one hand, and a crowd of young insurgents who find all of her stuff retrograde and icky in ways we haven’t even thought of yet, and there won’t be anyone left who can remember reading A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time in the old Ace Special paperback edition and feeling the top of their head come off.
Agree 100%.
And since you mention A Wizard of Earthsea, now I know what I’m sending my niece for her birthday present.
I agree! Conversely, it’s one reason I’ve been known to get quite snippy about Margaret Atwood. (Yes, I have at least one other reason.)
I am morally certain that Atwood has a stack of old Heinlein paperbacks hidden in the far rear corner of her genre closet. The Handmaid’s Tale is so patently in dialogue with If This Goes On and the unwritten stories in his Future History sequence that it isn’t even funny.