In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [47]
Rearranged human societies have been a constant in the tradition as well, and they have been used both to criticize our present state of affairs and to suggest more pleasant alternatives.… The nineteenth century, cheered on by its successes with sewage systems and prison reform, produced so many earnestly hopeful speculative fictions that the vogue was satirized not only by Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Utopia Limited but also by Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, where illness is a crime and crime is an illness.
However, as the optimism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Procrustean social dislocations of the twentieth—most notably in the former Soviet Union and the former Third Reich—literary utopias, whether serious or sardonic, were displaced by darker versions of themselves.… Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are of course the best known of these many prescient badlands, with Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. and the nightmarish fables of John Wyndham running close behind.
It’s too bad that one term—science fiction—has served for so many variants, and too bad also that this term has acquired a dubious if not downright sluttish reputation. True, the proliferation of sci-fi in the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to a great many bug-eyed-monster-bestrewn space operas, followed by films and television shows that drew heavily on this odiferous cache.…
In brilliant hands, however, the form can be brilliant.…
Which brings us to Ursula K. Le Guin. No question about her literary quality: her graceful prose, carefully thought-through premises, psychological insight, and intelligent perception have earned her the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, a Newbery, a Jupiter, a Gandalf, and an armful of other awards, great and small. Her first two books, Planet of Exile and Rocannon’s World, were published in 1966, and since then she has published sixteen novels, as well as ten collections of stories.
Collectively, these books have created two major parallel universes: the universe of the Ekumen, which is sci-fi proper—spaceships, travel among worlds, and so forth—and the world of Earthsea. The latter must be called “fantasy,” I suppose, as it contains dragons and witches and even a school for wizards, though this institution is a long way from the Hogwarts of Harry Potter. The Ekumen series may be said—very broadly—to concern itself with the nature of human nature: How far can we stretch and still remain human? What is essential to our being, what is contingent? The Earthsea series is occupied—again, very broadly speaking—with the nature of reality and the necessity of mortality, and also with language in relation to its matrix. (That’s heavy weather to make of a series that has been promoted as suitable for age twelve, but perhaps the fault lies in the marketing directors. Like Alice In Wonderland, these tales speak to readers on many levels.)
Le Guin’s preoccupations are not divided into two strictly separate packages, of course: both of her worlds are scrupulously attentive to the uses and misuses of language; both have their characters fret over social gaffes and get snarled up in foreign customs; both worry about death. But in the Ekumen universe, although there is much strangeness, there is no magic, apart from the magic inherent in creation itself.
The astonishing thing about Le Guin as a writer is that she managed to create these two realms, not only in parallel, but at the same time. The first Earthsea book, A Wizard of Earthsea,