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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I completely understand what you're saying, but I have no idea how to reformulate this in a way to cannot be pulled apart by an unsympathetic audience. Every single piece of criticism is not really damning by itself. You write yourself she's not a bad writer, she's not even bad at the science part of sci-fi, like Koval. Everything else is a matter of taste: who says a good novel needs a violent resolution of the central conflict? Who says the omnipresence of LGBT is worse than Nautilus (long, hard and full of seamen)? Who says lactating breasts are worse than Kirk chasing alien pussy?

There must be something more tangible that makes me enjoy The Tombs of Atuan (woman writer, girl protagonist, minimal violence) and hate most sci-fi/fantasy written by women starting from Blackout/All Clear.

There must be something more tangible that makes me enjoy The Tombs of Atuan (woman writer, girl protagonist, minimal violence)

Because not alone was LeGuin a good writer as regards her prose, she understood what the fuck the purpose of a story was about. Not to be a sermon, even if you do introduce themes of social importance in your day, but to be a story:

Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream?

So while the later Earthsea stories did unhappily succumb to the preachiness, The Tombs of Atuan isn't about girl power or anything like that, not so crudely; it's a story about that Earthsea culture and the monsters and what the hero/heroine does to beat them.

Emrys' story is about gender and non-binary and anti-capitalism and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The SF part isn't really the point, the point is the MORAL MESSAGING ABOUT DON'T BE BINARY BIGOTS GENDER ESSENTIALISTS.

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