Interview from 2018
Here follows a written interview from 2018 with Gabe Mamola. Sadly, I kept no record of when, or even if, this interview was published. I present it as a courtesy to my beloved readers, in case any of you were curious about any such questions.
Gabe Mamola here asks me about my first trilogy, THE GOLDEN AGE, Hard SF, Utopian fiction, beauty, genre divisions, metaphysics, and Ursula K LeGuin.
- Q: In writing The Golden Age, to what degree were you imitating other writers in your invention and deployment of neologism? And which writers, if any, were you imitating?
A: The word ‘Sophotech’ is stolen, with a difference of a single letter, from the’Sophotects’ of Poul Anderson in his masterpiece HARVEST OF STARS. Aside from that, the neologisms in Golden Age are nearly all Greek and Latin terms mashed haphazardly together.
That is a commonplace among science fiction writers, as seen in words like “hyperdrive’ or ‘televection’ or ‘pantropy’. I cannot list each author who coined such words, but these, if I recalled, I first saw coined by Roger Zelazny or James Blish.
Both Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe do the opposite, and use rare but still real words to refer to some extraterrestrial or futuristic oddity.
The habit of using an ordinary word to refer to an extraordinary thing, as I use ‘remote’ or ‘partial’ in the Golden Age I learned from A.E. van Vogt.
- Q: Do you consider The Golden Age to be “hard SF” (whatever that might mean to you)? Why?
A: Well, if I may be blunt, your question has a misleading implication. It does not matter what ‘Hard SF’ means to me. In general a word or phrase only has meaning if everyone in the conversation agrees on the meaning. Within the science fiction world since at least the late 1940s, perhaps earlier, ‘Hard SF’ is a term of art referring the type of SF preferred and promoted by John W. Campbell Jr. which emphasized scientific and engineering accuracy in background and props, themes centered in the social changes new technologies create, and which de-emphasized character development & romance.
By that definition, The Golden Age certainly qualifies as Hard SF, and, if I may say so myself, the ambition, at least, was to make it somewhat ‘harder’ that is, closer to known scientific principles, than many a book celebrated as Hard SF. In particular, there is no faster-than-light travel, no time travel, no telepathy, and none of the other magic handwavium that populates much Campbellian fiction.
Indeed, the sole point at which I freely speculate about something science cannot support is the idea that human brain information could be digitized, edited, recorded, and transmitted, and that artificial intelligences might be made self aware. If there is even a single iota of real science supporting this flight of fancy, I am unaware of it.
I have had only two critics claim that the science erred in the text, but in both cases, the critic erred. One said that because I had an antimatter-fueled engine as a prop, this made the story a fantasy like STAR TREK. The poor critic is perhaps unaware that real scientists have created real antimatter in a lab, and its properties are well known.
The other critic said that additional areas of the periodic table beyond the trans-uranic element but unknown to nature and to modern science could not find a stable element. This is in contradiction to the sound scientific speculations I, at least, recall from my high school physics. Last I heard, the idea of an island of stable transuranic elements was a proper and well grounded scientific speculation. If the scientific community changed its mind on that, again, I am unaware. The briefest possible glance at the Internet shows that SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, at least, is still treating the idea with sober respect.
Are there stories that are “harder” than THE GOLDEN AGE? Most certainly. THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir is a recent example, deservedly famous. In contrast to other celebrated Hard SF works, such as RINGWORLD by Larry Niven or STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert H Heinlein, GOLDEN AGE makes fewer and more conservative counter-factual assumptions.
THE GOLDEN AGE, on the other hand, is not ‘Hard SF’ in that it is Space Opera. Space Opera is unabashedly larger-than-life and heroic, relying upon gigantism in props and setting to convey a sense of wonder, and with character untroubled by mortal human flaws, great in stature and accomplishment. The text is peopled with Greek Gods and Goddesses precisely to put across rather non-Campbellian flavor.
- Q: Is THE GOLDEN AGE utopian fiction?
A: No.
Utopian fiction follows the fashion of ISLAND by Aldous Huxley or LOOKING BACKWARD by Edward Bellamy or even THE PROBABILITY BROACH by L. Neil Smith. Utopian fiction attempts to propose or promote the idea that changes to social institutions can ameliorate or even cure altogether the evils ever-present in human history.
THE GOLDEN AGE is precisely the opposite. It says that even granting an unimageable level of wealth, scientific knowledge, and moral enlightenment, under benevolent laws and customs perfectly suited for the elevation of human liberty and greatness, the innate limitations of the universe will prevent the abolition of the innate evils of life: poverty, war, and death.
THE GOLDEN AGE, if anything, the Stoical Fiction, for it is set, not in Utopia, that land of nowhere, but in Toratopia, the land of now; it is set in world where cure the world’s ills cannot be found.
- Q: This might be an impertinent question, but imagine you were to rewrite Golden Age as a fantasy? What changes would this entail? Would it be an entirely different book or merely a revision or draft of the underlying narrative/conceit?
A: It is a perfectly cromulent question. The changes would be to props and setting only. The Sophotechs would be tame genii or else benevolent angelic powers, and the heroes would be titans, gods, and demigods. The bad guys would be Warlocks from the pit of darkness, which would involve no change at all. Phaethon would own a flying ship that threatened to rise so high that it would crack the dome of the sky.
Since, as one of the scenes in the book itself, the whole drama is portrayed by Daphne as a fantasy story, your question is not only remarkably easy to answer, it is, in fact, already answered inside the book itself.
Your second question is asking me the difference between “entirely different” and “merely a different revision” but you do not define your terms clearly enough to allow me an answer.
- Q; In your deployment of neologism in TGA, what do you think the use of Greek word-roots added? What would have changed had you instead emphasized, say, Anglo-Saxon roots? What does “sophotech” add that *quickly consults online old english dictionary* that “wittcraeft” does not?
A: The use of Greek added a flavor of classical mythology, or, at least, such was the author’s fond hope. Had I used Anglosaxon roots, the flavor would have been more Norse. Phaethon would have been called Siegfried, for example, and the whole theme of human defiance of the Greek concept of hubris (which runs through the book) would be lost. Instead of a golden ship, Siegfried would have seized upon a golden ring, and, unlike in the original, dismal myth, tamed it and put it to good use.
Since, by historical accident, Europe uses Greek and Latin roots in scientific terminology and Linnaean classification, astronomy and so on, the tone of the book would have been something more homey and rustic, more Hobbit-like, so to speak, than the classical grandeur attempted. It is the difference between German and Italian opera.
- Q: What comes first for you, the image or the word?
A: In my writing process, images of certain striking scenes are brought to me from the Hippocrene by the shining muses, and it is my task to weave them together into a coherent narrative.
- Q: Many of the images and scenes in TGA are, for lack of a better word, beautiful. (The descriptions of the Phoenix, the masquerade, etc.) Were you trying to write a “beautiful” book?
A: Beautiful is a perfectly fine word and there is no better, nor do we lack a better word. I was certainly trying to write a lyrical and striking book.
I should at this point go back and add an addendum to my answer about Hard SF. Campbellian fiction is well known for being written in a flat journalistic style, unadorned and Hemmingwayesque. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Robert Heinlein are masters of the craft of writing with the most bland and curt sentences imaginable, with no description of characters or props, and only the briefest description of scenery, and only where it directly touches the plots.
I have no skill and no talent for painting nothing but flat shots in black and white. I am closer in spirit to A.E van Vogt and Abraham Merritt, who painted astonishing and memorable pictures of scenes and events with their words, or, to the purple spirit of the ornate prose of HP Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, or the verbal nonesuches of Jack Vance
- Q: More generally, what is the role of beauty in science fiction? What does it add? It certainly doesn’t seem Or is it necessary ? (After all, your answer to What is science fiction? on your blog emphasizes the beauty of space princesses and damsels in distress.)
A: Beauty has little or no role in Campbellian science fiction, but it has a larger role in the unfairly-demeaned and dismissed masters of the Pulp Era.
Beauty adds beauty, which is the one thing in the human condition that needs no further justification.
Beauty is necessary for life and happiness, truth and virtue, but it is not necessary for Hard SF written in a journalistic style, nor is it necessary for horror stories, or dystopian stories like BRAVE NEW WORLD or NINETEEN-EIGHTY FOUR. Please note that Hard SF, horror, and dystopia are deliberately removed from the Romantic tradition and in rebellion against it. Beauty is necessary for Romanticism.
My essay on What is Science Fiction? is a joke meant to deflate the insulant pretensions of those in the modernistic, New Wave, or Damon Knight schools of Science Fiction criticism. The fools insist that ugliness be injected into art in order to grant it the stature and dignity of Soviet-era realism.
My comedic essay was a not-too-subtle reminder to my fellow science fiction fans not to lose sight of our roots, which were in the weird and wonderful Pulps, a healthier breed of writing than realist school altogether. Modernism is a morbid form of art, a sick mutation, and postmodernism is nihilist, hence dead, hence not art at all.
- Q: What benefits, if any, do writers and readers get from separating SF and fantasy, either Tolkienesque or space fantasy or whatever, into separate genres? Do they lose anything?
A: Every story presupposes an unwritten contract with the readers that stories of that genre will fulfill the reader’s expectations. Indeed, we can even take this as a definition of genre: when a large enough group of readers consistently look for stories that fill an identifiable set of reader’s expectations and protocols, the genre is given a name. When the genre is small, usually the name is merely the author’s name of the most outstanding example of the author who established the protocols.
Since Science Fiction and Fantasy are based on dissimilar, and, in some cases, directly opposite protocols, the benefit of making the distinction is that if you are in the mood for The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov, you do not pick up the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien by mistake, and work your way through it, expecting the Seldon Plan to defeat the Dark Lord, rather than the humble mystery of self-sacrifice and fate.
Likewise, in WRINKLE IN TIME, the target audience would have been startled and disappointed, if the nightmare planet Camazotz had been defeated, not by Meg’s love of Charles Wallace, but by his world being obliterated by a negaphere released by the Galactic Patrol, or if the disembodied brain-thing known only as ‘It’ had been burned to subatomic smithereens by the roaring blaze of the fierce Delameter rayguns held in the rock steady fists of Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman!
The loss of dividing works into genres comes if and only if writers attempting to adhere to the protocols of a given genre do not allow their imaginations the freedom to obey their muses slavishly. I notice that children’s stories and pulp magazines, as well as any work that follows pulp conventions, such as the original STAR WARS film, allow the audience to pass freely from fantasy tropes to science fiction tropes and back again, with little disturbance or disappointment. Superhero comics and films especially allow for both the marvels of high tech wonders and the wonders of magical marvels.
A second loss might be that if the readers get too set in their ways, they may not enough a story which seems at first as if it means to follow the protocols of one genre, but actually turns out to be of another: too rigidly insisting the writer not overstep, nor bend nor invert the expectations may lead to blandness.
One the other hand, there is the opposite danger to ignoring all expectations, ignoring all genre boundaries, and merely introducing experimental novelties for novelty’s sake. The sober horseman falls off neither to the left nor to the right.
Children’s stories, Pulps, and Superhero tales are, again, are in the romantic tradition, which emphasizes spiritual reality, heroism, truth and virtue and beauty over other things. The innovation of so-called realism in stories emphasizes the opposites of one or more of these things, and seek to desecrate, deconstruct, and disenchant the childlike wonder fantasy and science fiction readers seek.
- Q: Are metaphysical questions, for instance those concerning the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, appropriate to science fiction? What is involved in literary speculations about such questions that isn’t involved in literary speculations about, say, sentient stars, self-aware holograms, or beings like Star Trek’s Q?
A: Interesting question. The word “appropriate” means “fitted or suited for a given end” therefore we cannot know what is appropriate for a given genre unless we know for what end it aims.
Stories in general are for the purpose of entertainment, edification, and to plant in the imagination of the reader such figures and images as will be fruitful for him in his search for higher truths. Stories praise what is praiseworthy and blame what is blameworthy. The propaganda of the Enemy is the opposite: it deconstructs, desecrates, and disenchants. But it is also shelved and sold as stories, in storybooks, and so the same purpose applies, merely in the opposite direction.
Science fiction stories in particular are fit to be science fiction if they use the tropes and readers’ expectations of the genre. What are those expectations? In addition to the engaging elements of (1) plot, (2) characters, (3) setting, (4) style, and (5) theme, science fiction and fantasy readers expect one more element: (6) engaging and dramatic speculative world-building.
This is a different element from setting, albeit the two are easy to confuse. Neither a science fiction story nor a fantasy story, properly so called, can take place in a world whose rules and ways are precisely as our own.
To be fantasy, the world surrounding the action must be one where the rules and ways resemble in mood and flavor the world of our medieval or classical or prehistoric ancestors, not as we think their world was, but as they thought it was, a haunt of gods and spirits, dragons and unicorns. Perhaps there does not need to be real magic afoot in the world, but there has to have that flavor, or otherwise you run the risk of ending up writing an historical drama.
Now, as with anything, the borders are porous, and the watchmen at the borders are sleepy. While Solomon Kane or Conan the Barbarian is fighting a pirate or slaying a wicked cutthroat, he might as well be in an historical drama; but the moment he fights a vampiress or a snake-goddess, he has entered the perilous and pathless wood of fantasy.
To be science fiction, the world surrounding the action should be one where a scientific speculation (whether likely or unlikely) could explain their rules and ways. If the scientific laws of nature known to the characters is not different from what is known now, some technical application might be. Even the wildest speculations, such as psychic powers or time travel, are permitted, provided these magical things are treated as something science does not now know, but could.
If Scrooge visits the future because the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Be escorts him, that is not science fiction; if the Time Traveler of HG Wells visits the year A.D. 802701 in a machine, that is.
Generally, the story must involve something extraterrestrial or futuristic either in props, or setting, or sometimes plot. Science fiction stories talking place in the past must be a past different from what modern historians following the modern worldview would paint.
In sum, if the world has a natural explanation for it differs from our own, it is science fiction, if supernatural, fantasy. There are exceptions and overlaps, of course, but as a rough approximation, this will do for now.
A story alleged to be science fiction but which takes place in the modern setting that operates according to the common understanding of the known laws of nature and with no futuristic nor extraterrestrial elements, is not science fiction.
See the Nebula-award winning ‘If you were a dinosaur, My Love’ by Rachel Swirsky for an example. As a prose poem, it is poignant and lyrical. But it is simply not science fiction in any way.
If the story fails to adhere to the unspoken protocols defining the science fiction genre, science fiction readers expecting a story of that type will be disappointed.
If the story abides by the unspoken protocols defining science fiction, but does so without any skill, craft or art, the readers will likewise be disappointed, but only because the story telling has been unsuitable, not because the science fiction is unsuitable. See, for example PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE directed by Ed Wood, or Steve Ditko’s SPIDERMAN, or any number of superhero or horror stories. As scientific speculation, graverobbers from the stars is as silly and unsound an idea as a teenager gaining superpowers from the bite of a radioactive spider. The props and setting of science fiction in such cases is copied over from real science fiction stories, but without the underlying serious scientific speculation.
Now, if we accept this as our working definition of science fiction and therefore of the end of science fiction, we can judge what is fit to serve that end: metaphysics is, by definition, a realm where physics is helpless and naturalism is blind. The intellectual game for which science fiction is famous is one where one asks “What if such and such (which is not true here and now) were found to be so, what would change in our lives?” But metaphysical questions, by definition, change nothing visible in our lives.
Whether or not free will exists is, for example, a metaphysical question. But if we were creatures without free will living in a world where free will were impossible, all the robotlike actions of the meatpuppets of that world, even down to the expressions on their faces and the words coming from their mouths, would be identical to the smallest detail to the faces and words of living people who performed exactly the same physical actions, but in this second universe, were drawn by purposeful and deliberate behaviors.
Or, if that example is too controversial, look at the difference between a word where, on the one hand, every physical action was controlled by cause and effect without any exception, and one where, merely by statistical probability operating over a large number of instances, it merely looked as if random actions which actually were coincidences just so happened to arrange themselves to look as if particular causes caused particular effects.
Despite what you’ve heard, whether or not cause and effect exists is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one, because the visible results would be the same either way. If cause A leads to hidden cause B leads to visible effect C, and B is one of those things never to be seen by mortal eye, then saying A leads to C without any intermediate cause and saying A leads to C by a real but unseen cause, cannot be confirmed or denied by any empirical experiment whatsoever: since all empiricism can say is that A and C appear one after the other.
A world where a man with free will falls into a world with no free will, and everyone is a robot, can be written. In fact, THE SINFUL ONES by Fritz Lieber is the book. But it does not obey the protocols of science fiction. It is a philosophical or metaphysical speculation, not a scientific one. Anyone reading the book expecting a scientific or natural explanation of the wonders and horrors met will be disappointed. There is no explanation for the impossible thing the main character encounters. It is a perfectly good book, and a perfectly good creepy horror book or dark fantasy or metaphysical speculation: but the author defeats one of the prime protocols of science fiction, which is that the actions must be scientifically explainable at least in theory (even if they are not explained anywhere in the text).
God appears as the title character in STARMAKER by Olaf Stapledon. While all the other events in that amazing novel as science fictional, and, indeed, helped to define the boundaries of the genre, once God comes on stage, the book is again one of theological or metaphysical speculation. No natural explanation is offered for the actions of the Starmaker, who is portrayed as a cruel Darwinian deity, destroying and damning one universe after another, each one being better in some undefined spiritual way than the prior, and all this is being done for purposes no mortal understands or can understand.
Where it not for the twelve chapters of science fiction preceding it, no one would consider the culminating vision of the Starmaker in the last chapter of the book to be science fiction. If the same events in the same order, described in the same way, appeared as the last chapter of a story about Buddhists monks or peyote-chewing shaman, no reader would call that story science fiction. It is amateur theological speculation.
So all this makes it seem as if the reasonable answer is that metaphysical or theological speculation should not be appropriate for science fiction: but the only two books in my extensive and deep reading in the genre which contain metaphysical speculations are, indeed, shelved with the science fiction and written by luminaries of the science fiction field, men famed for their science fiction writing above all.
Now, keep in mind also that reincarnation and metempsychosis form the theme of more than one science fiction story: the MOON MAID by Edgar Rice Burroughs springs immediately to mind, the original golden-age HAWKMAN from Detective Comics, not to mention SHE by H. Rider Haggard, TWO HUNDRED MILLION A.D by A.E. van Vogt. But, again, these seem to be denizens hovering on the border of science fiction, not in its Hard SF core regions, and could be called science fantasy just as easily.
You also ask about what is present in metaphysical speculations not present in works about energy beings, godlike aliens, and so on. That answer is simple: Energy beings are natural. Psychic beings, even if their powers seem godlike, are natural. They obey the laws of nature, merely laws currently unknown to science that govern parapsychological phenomena. Gods and spirits, elfs and angels, are supernatural. They make the laws of nature, and do not obey them.
Men who use high technology to fool the unwary into calling them gods, or men with psychic powers who become indistinguishable from pagan gods, or men worshipping machines they no longer understand, are all themes so commonplace to science fiction, I am hard pressed to name a writer who has not touched on it, including me. Edgar Rice Burroughs (GODS OF MARS) to Fritz Lieber (GATHER DARKNESS), to A.E. van Vogt (EMPIRE OF THE ATOM) to Isaac Asimov (“Bridle and Saddle” reprinted as “The Mayors” in FOUNDATION) to Robert Heinlein (SIXTH COLUMN) to Roger Zelazny (LORD OF LIGHT) to at least one STAR TREK movie and several famous episodes.
So clearly any story which, like SCOOBY-DOO, based on the idea that divine and supernatural things will always eventually turn out to have a non-divine and natural explanation fall into the science fiction genre, and are perfectly apt: and it would be one sided indeed if we decided that the opposite answer (namely, that sometimes, upon inspection, what looks supernatural actually is supernatural) always fell outside the bounds of the genre.
Here, then we have an argument saying that metaphysics is not appropriate for science fiction, but the counterargument says it is. Weight both together, my answer is something of a paradox: If you start a story as a science fiction speculation but the plotline leads you into metaphysical speculation, that is certainly appropriate. Exploring the metaphysical ramifications of things like resurrection or reincarnation is appropriate science fictional exercise.
And where else can you shelve books of metaphysical speculation? What other readership is imaginative enough to find such high matters a source of entertainment and edification to read about?
If science fiction writers do not write about gods and demons, bright and dark angels, free will and determinism, causality and chaos, who will? No other genre has the stomach for it.
- Q: Finally, Philip K Dick and Ursula Le Guin are the two 20th century science fiction writers most commonly discussed by literary critics and scholars. Generally speaking, what do you think of their respective bodies of work? This is a very open question. Feel free to pontificate.
A: I am afraid you will find my answer rather curt: I have read nothing by Philip K Dick and can offer no opinion whatsoever on his work.
I have heard that he took much inspiration from A.E. van Vogt, and, having seen some movies based on his short stories, I can well believe that.
Ursula K LeGuin, on the other hand, I do know. I have read most of her published novels and short stories, but by no means all, and one or two essays I thought were insightful to the point of brilliant, including “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” a treatise on language and fantasy literature well worth looking up.
Her earlier work is superior to her later work in nearly every way. Her Hainish stories, I would promote and applaud, particularly LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and THE DISPOSSESSED.
The Hainsh stories take place in the worlds of “the Ekumen” a network of planets more philosophical than legal in its union. No faster than light drive exists, but ansibles, an instantaneous FTL radio does. Lorenz contraction of NAFAL (nearly-as-fast-as-light) ships allow travelers to visit other stars, but friends relatives left behind die of old age. She has a simple but brilliant conceit in all tales set in this background, to explain how human beings came to be seeded on far worlds: Earth is not where we evolved. Hain, a much more ancient world, during several periods of its unthinkably long history, seeded worlds with human stock, in some cases biologically modifying the colonists.
This allows her to speculate about worlds far different from earth, but with characters as human as the reader, not aliens. THE DISPOSSESSED tells the story of Shevek, a scientist raised in an ideological commune on the barren planet Anarres, exiled to the cruel capitalist totalitarian planet Urras. The book is perhaps in the genre of Utopian literature, but the subtitle warns that this utopia is ambiguous, and may actually be a dystopia.
I am not sure if it was the intention of the author to take the economic absurdities proposed seriously, or if that part of the work is fantasy. (A capitalist totalitarianism? A peaceful anarchy where all children are raised by the state?) But the anarchist ideology of Shevek leads to disaster, not enlightenment, when he preaches his doctrines to the poor on Urras. The book, if it is preaching a political message, is not preaching a simple one.
As in EYE OF THE HERON, a minor work in the same background, the author’s sympathies may or may not be where you think they are, or perhaps her understanding of the high price to be paid by starry eyed ideologues is high.
As for her fantasy, the first and third books in her Earthsea series I would hold up as equal in merit to the best of written fantasy, A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and THE FARTHEST SHORE.
The particular genius of these works is in that anthological soundness of the speculation. In Earthsea, for example, the magic works by the rules that real native tribesmen who believe in magic really believe, namely, that to know the true name of a thing is power over the thing.
Earthsea also contains a depiction of dragons in literature who were Oriental dragons, that is, supernal creatures powerful and dangerous, wise and ancient, not necessarily friendly to man, but not necessarily wicked. To the best of my knowledge, this is her innovation. All prior fantasy books copied BEOWULF or legends of Saint George for their dragons.
Earthsea also contains an idea so brilliant that is seems obvious in hindsight: if there are wizards like Merlin, where did they go to school? (She also names her wizard, Sparrowhawk, after a bird of prey, like Merlin.) This idea has since been copied so often readers might forget how original it was.
The novel LATHE OF HEAVEN and the short meditation on those who bear the costs of utopia “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” are also worthy of mention.
In all these cases, both in her SF and her fantasy, there is a distinctively Taoist flavor to the plot conflicts and the resolutions, which is so unusual that it would be worth reading for that alone. Sparrowhawk, for example, does not fight the evil shadow pursuing him; nor does George Orr, the oddly passive protagonist in LATHE OF HEAVEN, ever oppose the obstacles in his life, or, as they case may be, his lives. The revolutionaries and proponent of direct action in her Hainish novels always lead their followers to slaughter like sheep.
Sadly, at sometime at about 1985, her work shows a marked drift toward Leftwing political themes which, frankly, cannot coexist with the sense of wonder that forms the leitmotif of science fiction.
Even so skilled an author as Ursula K LeGuin, when she attempts to use her fiction as a vehicle for putting across nagging lectures about gender equality, or to make various sexual perversions seem normal or even laudable, moves ever away from any attempt to make her worlds worthy of one’s suspension of disbelief.
The later equals to Earthsea written after this period are frankly unreadable. Her attempt to return the Hainish stories of her youth were disastrous, and the worst of them simply read like typical, predictable, nagging social-justice-warrior propaganda. The subtlety and ambiguity present in her former books, showing both sides of an issue without taking sides, evaporated.
Are her later books worth reading? Well, I read them. The worst Ursula K LeGuin novel is better than most writer’s best novel. Her mastery of language did not fail her as the years grew. But you will miss nothing if you miss them.
Robert Heinlein, although occupying a different quadrant of the political scale than she, also suffered in his later years a similar degeneration into political pontification and sexual malfeasance. Whether due to age, or success, or the mysterious flight of muses away from once-fertile imaginations, I cannot say.
But I will say that there is one author whose latest books, even up to his last, displayed no loss in craftsmanship, verve, or imagination, and that is Poul Anderson, who is unduly and often overlooked with the pantheon of the biggest names in science fiction are recited.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
