Ursula K. Le Guin

I highly recommend Ursula Le Guin's translation. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lao-tzu-the-tao-te-ching

Folks who are curious about the Le Guin angle on _Tales of Earthsea_ should read: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/adaptation-tales-of-earthsea It really is unfortunate that this went the way it did --- I'd dearly love for Earthsea to have a film version worthy of the fact that it was one of the first books to ask the question, "Can there be fantasy which is not a retelling of _The Lord of the Rings_?" and to answer with originality and a deep insight into what fantasy has to say about human nature.

This reminds me of my favorite note [1] from Ursula Le Guin on technology: > Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too. > Technology is the active human interface with the material world. [1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

Think about why your examples work: We only see the base area and immediate surroundings on Hoth, and only for a short while. These planets work in Star Wars because they're each a single small part of a whole. The planets are monobiomes, but the story moves between enough of them that while it may look silly, the setting is still varied. It's very different to a story that takes place predominantly in one biome. Note exceptions like Naboo: One of the few planets in the Star Wars movies where a story takes place across wider areas of a the planet. Suddenly there's a planet with varied biomes. The monobiomes in Star Wars are monobiomes because there was no visual reason to expand, so they just made it the same in most cases. In the case of Winter the planet is cold - in the middle of an ice age - but while the planet is all cold, it is not all identical. Ursula Le Guin explicitly drew maps [1], showing the glaciers, but also glacier free areas, mountain ranges, oceans, rivers. It's a cold world, but diverse within those limitations. It's not a single identical place. And the cold serves a purpose of setting the cities apart from the adversity of escaping over the ice shield. I'd argue it's a great example of knowing to break the rules: Make it an interesting ice planet with stark differences between different areas. The problem is not specifically that something is an ice planet or a desert planet, but that something is uniform to the point that describing one place…

What an amazingly snobby reply to an article about someone writing good fiction. I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great. Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1] > And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres. > Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery. On Serious Literature. [2] > But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? 1. https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-michael-cunni… 2.…

Link for those interested: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

I enjoyed the Le Guin quote... until I searched for its source and found her even better blog post where she demolishes it, 'The Inner Child and the Nude Politician' [0]. Every once in awhile I'm reminded that she blogged and that I owe it to myself to read her. [0] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/91-the-inner-child-and-the-nude-pol…

Maybe there's something in this essay by LeGuin that helps. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/91-the-inner-child-and-the-nude-pol…

She may be calling for zero growth or even degrowth. In her first blog post, where she fill a questionnaire [1] "Question 13: “What will improve the quality of life for the future generations of your family?”—with boxes to rank importance from 1 to 10. The first choice is “Improved educational opportunities”—fair enough, Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is “Economic stability and growth for the U.S.” That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box." [1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/in-your-spare-time

For the Wizard of Earthsea books, there's an afterword (at least in the later editions I have around the house) where she says she just sketched out the map first even before any characters, and filled it in with the stories as she went. (How many more stories would she have written in that world? I wonder) Also: collection to her maps http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Maps/Index.html as well.

Locus promises a more extensive obit later. I'll guess they don't have writers on staff whose job is to write obits in advance and update periodically. ;-) Similarly, the LeGuin site currently directs readers to the NYTimes obit: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html We shall miss her.