two hundred public words 16/30
And, the women.
Madeleine L'Engle
Ursula K. LeGuin
Nancy Farmer
In my mind, Madeleine L'Engle goes well with C. S. Lewis. I can't get beyond her religion and her politics to appreciate her as a writer. I mean, I've read most of her stuff... not being able to forgive authors for their politics and their religious ... evangelism... doesn't stop me from reading them, and liking parts of it, evidently. But I reserve a deep well of doubt and reluctance, somehow.
L'Engle is most famous, I imagine, for A Wrinkle in Time, and I will admit that in one way, she was outstanding with this, in that the main character, Meg, a) is a girl who is a science geek, and therefore an outsider, and b) that the science is serious, and hard, and interesting. I was always very resistant to math, myself, but I bet that the notion of a tesseract deeply influenced a certain proportion of girls who might never have become theoretical physicists otherwise. Or philosophical mathematicians. I actually know of such a girl, an exact contemporary of mine, for whom this was certainly one influence on her way to being such a person -- the kind of theoretical mathematician where doing actuarial science is a summer job in college because it's so easy and remunerative. Her other influence was her early computer science father, so I'm sure she was bombarded from all sides, but still. I have no doubt that Meg was in there, somewhere.
For me, I couldn't read that book without (as with C. S. Lewis) seeing the parallels to the Cold War, which, when I was 11, 12, 13, 14 was still in full swing. In middle school social studies, 7th grade, or 8th grade, we had a Unit (everything was taught in Units... I wish I could do that) called "Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism" -- because my teacher thought that was all one continuum. She honestly did. At the time, I tended to ascribe that to her heritage as the granddaughter of a White Russian officer, in the Russian Civil War. Now, of course, I wonder whether that wasn't the Illinois state social studies curriculum during the last hurrah of the Cold War. In A Wrinkle in Time, the main character's father is a scientist working for the government (which in my household was more a scary, CIA-linked thought, than anything wonderful) and in his researches on space travel, he is caught up in a tesseract (no, I can't define that... it's... a wrinkle in time. And space, I guess) and then taken prisoner by essentially the same totalitarian disembodied-brain (Communist) villain as exists in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. But a firm grasp on love and compassion and self-sacrifice (much as in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Meg's little brother Charles Wallace being brainwashed, somewhat akin to Edmund in the Lewis story -- and Meg fulfilling the Lucy/Susan role of at least witnessing sacrifice) help to defeat the atheist and materialist forces of evil and identikit modern suburbs.
I think I probably sound somewhat mean-spirited. As I say, I've read all of the Kairos chronicles -- the Murry and then O'Keefe novels which deal with fantasy elements... and religion. And I've only read a few of the Chronos novels, which deal with the Austin family, and are more (mostly, not entirely) realistic. In fact, I may only have read A Ring of Endless Light, among those. So even if I struggle with them, and argue with them, I still engage more with the heavily religion-saturated series. The O'Keefe family books -- especially the Time Quartet -- comprise A Wrinkle in Time, The Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (though Many Waters was published well after the other three, it takes place BEFORE the finale of those first generation books). definitely caught me. Many Waters was particularly interesting to me because it came out of the immediate post-Cold War period, and was more openly Biblical -- it is set literally in Biblical times, as L'Engle conceives them, with miracles and angels, just before the Flood, with Noah. Kind of a fascinating window into that world. It is amazing to me that Christians protest her work... they're crazy.
Ursula K. LeGuin And now for someone completely different. I love Ursula K. LeGuin. She's an anarchist. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who wrote about the last Yahi Indian to grow up completely outside Anglo, white culture, Ishi (ca. 1860 - 1916). I've read LeGuin's mother's treatment of that experience, Ishi: Last of his Tribe, and given that Theodora Kroeber got that published in 1960, it is a sensitive and fascinating (and depressing as hell) piece of anthropology. Anyway, LeGuin is one of the most flexible, radical fantasists of all the ones I've written about in these LJ posts. She is amazing on gender, on anti-imperialist themes, on ecology, on political economy. And despite being fascinated by those themes, she also writes deeply engaging fantasy. In terms of YAF, undoubtedly her best known novels are the ones set in the pre-industrial (and magic) archipelago world of Earthsea: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore... and, after a long interval, a kind of feminist reinterpretation of Earthsea, with Tehanu and The Other Wind. There is a collection of short stories set in Earthsea, as well. I loved the first three books, around age 12 or whenever, but I did recognize that they were male quests. It was a great relief to read her much later addition, Tehanu. To be honest, I haven't yet read The Other Wind, though from the Wikipedia description, I want to. What has influenced me more by LeGuin, though, are her other sci-fi novels, starting with The Left Hand of Darkness, which is one of those books that produced a shift in my young mind, as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time did.
The Left Hand of Darkness was groundbreaking in that the main characters in the cold planet Winter (Gethen) are -- well, the Wiki article describes them as androgynous, but I think actually intersexed, or hermaphroditic, is closer. They are both sexes, one at a time, depending on chemistry with a partner, once a month. That's very complicated. Hm. Most of the time, they have no sexual urges or desires at all (something already almost impossible to imagine, which creates great difficulties for the Ekumenical Mobile, Genly Ai, a Terran) but once a month they are in kemmer, which means they are sexually attracted and attractive, and migrate to one or the other end of the biologically male/female spectrum. Either end. So the theme is not really homosexuality, which can't even really exist, biologically, on this imagined world, but the embodiment of both genders and thus the questioning of rights that pertain to one. Along with all of this to think about, there is also a great deal of deep emotion in the book.
I could write for a long time about LeGuin -- her meditation on anarchist society affected me for a long, long time -- not necessarily positively. That's her novel The Dispossessed. And The Word for World is Forest shows an ACTUAL anti-imperialist revolt that Cameron clearly ripped off for Avatar. Finally, her Always Coming Home is one of those future dystopia/utopia books -- this one set in a future California that is much darker yet more successfully neo-Native American than, for example, Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing -- which I read, reject, think about, read again, get more used to, then love.
Nancy Farmer brings us back more explicitly to both YAF fantasy, but remains consciously political, at least to a certain extent. Farmer is white, but because (this is according to her own interviews on the subject) she spent 17 years in Africa, at first in the Peace Corps and then because she married a (white) guy she met at the University of Zimbabwe, she set most of her earliest fiction in Africa, whether it is science-fictional future Zimbabwe (The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm), or contemporary Africa (A Girl Named Disaster), or whimsical fantasy somewhat akin to the Disney movie Madagascar, (The Warm Place). These are all compelling, well-written, fascinating reads, which take their setting for granted, in a sense, not as a place which is Other and Exotic, but as the place that simply IS, for that story. I was so used to this, in fact, that it took me a long time to recognize that her more recent dystopia, The House of the Scorpion, was more inspired by the War on Drugs and Aztlan, than Africa -- and that her most recent triumph is a trilogy of 'troll' novels pulled straight from Norse mythology.
I have to admit that I haven't read The House of the Scorpion yet, though I own it... but have devoured the first two of the troll trilogy -- The Sea of Trolls, and The Land of the Silver Apples... and look forward to getting the third, The Islands of the Blessed. I do feel a little cognitive dissonance in reading stuff taken so clearly from Norse traditions, and reconciling that with stories whose folktale allusions have more to do with southern Africa. The African stories have greater emotional depth and general intensity to them; the Norse adventure/quest trilogy has more obvious tropes, though its humor and the character development of the main female character, an orphaned Viking shield-maiden, is quite modern and relatively feminist-ish. She's a good writer, and I look forward to more of her stuff. My own students seem to prefer the troll trilogy, as it fits better with the magic and fantasy current in Harry Potter and in the Percy Jackson series.
Madeleine L'Engle
Ursula K. LeGuin
Nancy Farmer
In my mind, Madeleine L'Engle goes well with C. S. Lewis. I can't get beyond her religion and her politics to appreciate her as a writer. I mean, I've read most of her stuff... not being able to forgive authors for their politics and their religious ... evangelism... doesn't stop me from reading them, and liking parts of it, evidently. But I reserve a deep well of doubt and reluctance, somehow.
L'Engle is most famous, I imagine, for A Wrinkle in Time, and I will admit that in one way, she was outstanding with this, in that the main character, Meg, a) is a girl who is a science geek, and therefore an outsider, and b) that the science is serious, and hard, and interesting. I was always very resistant to math, myself, but I bet that the notion of a tesseract deeply influenced a certain proportion of girls who might never have become theoretical physicists otherwise. Or philosophical mathematicians. I actually know of such a girl, an exact contemporary of mine, for whom this was certainly one influence on her way to being such a person -- the kind of theoretical mathematician where doing actuarial science is a summer job in college because it's so easy and remunerative. Her other influence was her early computer science father, so I'm sure she was bombarded from all sides, but still. I have no doubt that Meg was in there, somewhere.
For me, I couldn't read that book without (as with C. S. Lewis) seeing the parallels to the Cold War, which, when I was 11, 12, 13, 14 was still in full swing. In middle school social studies, 7th grade, or 8th grade, we had a Unit (everything was taught in Units... I wish I could do that) called "Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism" -- because my teacher thought that was all one continuum. She honestly did. At the time, I tended to ascribe that to her heritage as the granddaughter of a White Russian officer, in the Russian Civil War. Now, of course, I wonder whether that wasn't the Illinois state social studies curriculum during the last hurrah of the Cold War. In A Wrinkle in Time, the main character's father is a scientist working for the government (which in my household was more a scary, CIA-linked thought, than anything wonderful) and in his researches on space travel, he is caught up in a tesseract (no, I can't define that... it's... a wrinkle in time. And space, I guess) and then taken prisoner by essentially the same totalitarian disembodied-brain (Communist) villain as exists in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. But a firm grasp on love and compassion and self-sacrifice (much as in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Meg's little brother Charles Wallace being brainwashed, somewhat akin to Edmund in the Lewis story -- and Meg fulfilling the Lucy/Susan role of at least witnessing sacrifice) help to defeat the atheist and materialist forces of evil and identikit modern suburbs.
I think I probably sound somewhat mean-spirited. As I say, I've read all of the Kairos chronicles -- the Murry and then O'Keefe novels which deal with fantasy elements... and religion. And I've only read a few of the Chronos novels, which deal with the Austin family, and are more (mostly, not entirely) realistic. In fact, I may only have read A Ring of Endless Light, among those. So even if I struggle with them, and argue with them, I still engage more with the heavily religion-saturated series. The O'Keefe family books -- especially the Time Quartet -- comprise A Wrinkle in Time, The Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (though Many Waters was published well after the other three, it takes place BEFORE the finale of those first generation books). definitely caught me. Many Waters was particularly interesting to me because it came out of the immediate post-Cold War period, and was more openly Biblical -- it is set literally in Biblical times, as L'Engle conceives them, with miracles and angels, just before the Flood, with Noah. Kind of a fascinating window into that world. It is amazing to me that Christians protest her work... they're crazy.
Ursula K. LeGuin And now for someone completely different. I love Ursula K. LeGuin. She's an anarchist. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who wrote about the last Yahi Indian to grow up completely outside Anglo, white culture, Ishi (ca. 1860 - 1916). I've read LeGuin's mother's treatment of that experience, Ishi: Last of his Tribe, and given that Theodora Kroeber got that published in 1960, it is a sensitive and fascinating (and depressing as hell) piece of anthropology. Anyway, LeGuin is one of the most flexible, radical fantasists of all the ones I've written about in these LJ posts. She is amazing on gender, on anti-imperialist themes, on ecology, on political economy. And despite being fascinated by those themes, she also writes deeply engaging fantasy. In terms of YAF, undoubtedly her best known novels are the ones set in the pre-industrial (and magic) archipelago world of Earthsea: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore... and, after a long interval, a kind of feminist reinterpretation of Earthsea, with Tehanu and The Other Wind. There is a collection of short stories set in Earthsea, as well. I loved the first three books, around age 12 or whenever, but I did recognize that they were male quests. It was a great relief to read her much later addition, Tehanu. To be honest, I haven't yet read The Other Wind, though from the Wikipedia description, I want to. What has influenced me more by LeGuin, though, are her other sci-fi novels, starting with The Left Hand of Darkness, which is one of those books that produced a shift in my young mind, as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time did.
The Left Hand of Darkness was groundbreaking in that the main characters in the cold planet Winter (Gethen) are -- well, the Wiki article describes them as androgynous, but I think actually intersexed, or hermaphroditic, is closer. They are both sexes, one at a time, depending on chemistry with a partner, once a month. That's very complicated. Hm. Most of the time, they have no sexual urges or desires at all (something already almost impossible to imagine, which creates great difficulties for the Ekumenical Mobile, Genly Ai, a Terran) but once a month they are in kemmer, which means they are sexually attracted and attractive, and migrate to one or the other end of the biologically male/female spectrum. Either end. So the theme is not really homosexuality, which can't even really exist, biologically, on this imagined world, but the embodiment of both genders and thus the questioning of rights that pertain to one. Along with all of this to think about, there is also a great deal of deep emotion in the book.
I could write for a long time about LeGuin -- her meditation on anarchist society affected me for a long, long time -- not necessarily positively. That's her novel The Dispossessed. And The Word for World is Forest shows an ACTUAL anti-imperialist revolt that Cameron clearly ripped off for Avatar. Finally, her Always Coming Home is one of those future dystopia/utopia books -- this one set in a future California that is much darker yet more successfully neo-Native American than, for example, Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing -- which I read, reject, think about, read again, get more used to, then love.
Nancy Farmer brings us back more explicitly to both YAF fantasy, but remains consciously political, at least to a certain extent. Farmer is white, but because (this is according to her own interviews on the subject) she spent 17 years in Africa, at first in the Peace Corps and then because she married a (white) guy she met at the University of Zimbabwe, she set most of her earliest fiction in Africa, whether it is science-fictional future Zimbabwe (The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm), or contemporary Africa (A Girl Named Disaster), or whimsical fantasy somewhat akin to the Disney movie Madagascar, (The Warm Place). These are all compelling, well-written, fascinating reads, which take their setting for granted, in a sense, not as a place which is Other and Exotic, but as the place that simply IS, for that story. I was so used to this, in fact, that it took me a long time to recognize that her more recent dystopia, The House of the Scorpion, was more inspired by the War on Drugs and Aztlan, than Africa -- and that her most recent triumph is a trilogy of 'troll' novels pulled straight from Norse mythology.
I have to admit that I haven't read The House of the Scorpion yet, though I own it... but have devoured the first two of the troll trilogy -- The Sea of Trolls, and The Land of the Silver Apples... and look forward to getting the third, The Islands of the Blessed. I do feel a little cognitive dissonance in reading stuff taken so clearly from Norse traditions, and reconciling that with stories whose folktale allusions have more to do with southern Africa. The African stories have greater emotional depth and general intensity to them; the Norse adventure/quest trilogy has more obvious tropes, though its humor and the character development of the main female character, an orphaned Viking shield-maiden, is quite modern and relatively feminist-ish. She's a good writer, and I look forward to more of her stuff. My own students seem to prefer the troll trilogy, as it fits better with the magic and fantasy current in Harry Potter and in the Percy Jackson series.