All hail Ursula!

Wow, this post is almost like "the third in a series", as this interview with Ursula Le Guin touches on both of my last two topics. Her comments on CS Lewis is part of my problem with him, I think, but not all of it, so I'm still in a stew (and as I've blogged before, I can't let these things go until I understand why they bug be. It's a thing.). And of course she talks about gender in sci-fi because that's what she does. A weird coincidence, I've read all her fantasy and nonfiction books, but I've not yet read her sci-fi. Just last week I spent my entire birthday Barnes and Noble gift certificate on Le Guin sci-fi novels, so that's a situation that's about to change. The closing quote in the interview is quite lovely, so I'm going to paste it here:

Le Guin, whose fantasies are partly about the artist as magician, learning to temper power with responsibility and talent with humility, says she wrestles with the temptation to moralise. "Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it," she says. "To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible."

Which is part of what I meant about having a conversation with a book. The writer shouldn't tell you what everything means; some of it should be left to the reader to supply. The cool thing about that is your book becomes a different experience to different readers. And if your James Joyce, people can tell you what your novel means to them and then you can start saying that was always what you meant, even if it wasn't (yes, he actually did this. Don't you just love Joyce?)

And there is one more bit of Good Ursula news. I'm very excited about this one. Earthsea and Studio Ghibli are two of my favorite things.

But I haven't dug into those Le Guin books yet because I've been plowing through the stack of unread books that has been piling up in my office. I have three different "Best of" short story collections covering science fiction, fantasy, and fantasy/horror. The sci-fi one is mostly reminding me why I largely don't like sci-fi. Is it just me or is sci-fi short fiction overwhelmingly cynical, dark, and depressing? I don't need everything to end with "and they lived happily ever after", but some variation from opening with "the world sucks" and ending with "and the world still sucks" or "the world sucks harder" would be appreciated.

In general, my optimistic Pollyanna nature is better suited to fantasy. In that vein, I'm halfway through "The Year's Best Fantasy 5". Strange coincidence again, I suppose, but the Neil Gaiman story in here is a take-off from the Chronicles of Narnia called "The Problem with Susan", which I really liked but I'm sure the purists will absolutely hate. It's thoroughly pagan, and as a reader who always despised Susan's final fate, I found this Gaiman story particularly sweet. Now I have closure.

But the best I've read so far by a long shot has been "The End of the World as We Know It" by Dale Bailey, which manages to summarize not only what I hate about end of the world stories like The Stand or zombie movies, but also what I hate about women-only utopias like Herland or Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" I mean, I know I'm in the minority of my gender in not preferring the company of other women, but honestly those ideas of how great the world would be if there were no men just really blow. Honestly.

And I never got why King readers always site The Stand as the best thing he's done. I'm not saying it sucks. I'm not even saying that I didn't like it (I've read the original twice, and the uncut version once). I'm just saying Bag of Bones and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon were both much better. I'm just saying; and these things are subjective, so no, I'm not looking for an argument.

And speaking of my eccentric tastes, my new a-ha CD finally arrived. They've fallen so far out of favor I've had to acquire their last three releases as very expensive imports, and I've only managed to track down their solo work on eBay. This new one, called Analogue came with a live DVD which sadly I can't play since it's European code and my DVD players are all North America only. Bummer. But the music is good, or rather just exactly my thing. Most discs I buy I'll like one or two tracks right away but it takes me awhile to warm up to the other cuts. That's never been the case with a-ha; I always like all the tracks. It's just so perfectly me, I can't explain it. All I can say is, judging their work because you're familiar with "Take on Me" from 1984 is like someone who's never heard the Beatle's later work saying it must suck because they don't like "Love Me Do". I'm comparing evolutionary paths here not musical styles, by the way. Later a-ha bares as little resemblence to "Take on Me" as later Beatles does to "Love Me Do". And a-ha is exactly my sort of thing, that's all I'm saying. REM used to be another band where I loved all the tracks at first listen, but the last few releases from them have been really hard to get through. They're such downers. They really need to get their drummer back; I think he contributed more to the team than was apparent at the time. I don't care what you have to offer him, get Bill Berry back!