Both Ms Le Guin’s parents, Alfred Kroeber and Theodora Quinn Kroeber, were eminent anthropologists: questioning what constituted the idea of society was in her blood.
There’s no getting away from human nature, whatever shape that nature takes. But that does not mean it is an ideal culture, merely one with different challenges. Each being is capable, at different times in their life, of being mother or father to a child, or taking on any role in this society. What is most striking about Gethen is that its otherwise human inhabitants are genderless, neither one biological sex nor the other. In Ms Le Guin’s vision, Earth is now a world of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets it is Genly Ai’s mission to convince the Gethenians to join this organisation. Genly Ai, the protagonist, is an envoy sent from Earth to the chilly planet of Gethen. In 1969 came “The Left Hand of Darkness” a novel as timely now as it was when it first appeared thanks to its themes of international cooperation, internecine warfare, political wrangling, the effect of climate on society and, most notably, gender roles. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers.”įrom the beginning of her career she produced work in a steady stream-novels as well as short stories, poems, essays and criticism. “Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. “She didn’t copy anything,” she wrote of J. In later years some would argue that a certain British writer copied this idea for a magical academy Ms Le Guin herself never made that claim. It was the first of five novels in the “Earthsea Cycle”, now considered cornerstones of fantasy children’s literature, though Ms Le Guin knew that the young imagination could be just as sophisticated at that of adults (and often more receptive). It follows Ged, a young mage of Earthsea-an archipelagic country reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest-who discovers his true powers, and the cost of those powers, when he attends a school for wizards. “Rocannan’s World” was her first science-fiction novel, published in 1966, but it was “A Wizard of Earthsea” (1968) which first brought her great acclaim. Her writing never ceased to investigate how societies might be structured if we threw away the expectation that things had always been this way, and could be no other.
She understood that story was about possibility. Her creations had as much solidity as any realist fiction, although her work could usually be found on the science-fiction shelves.
0 kommentar(er)
