The Mumpsimus

The Eye of the Heron (1978) often gets lost in discussions of Ursula K. Le Guin's novels, for though it is a planetary science fiction story, it is not part of the Hainish cycle, thus unconnected to her most famous SF. The novel's separation from Le Guin's various series lends a sense that it is a minor work, but it is only so in the best sense: a variation on ideas treated more grandly elsewhere, a delving into a particular niche, a meditation on a single facet of an epic. As such, The Eye of the Heron is a triumph. (Note: The Library of America just announced their Spring 2024 releases, and Eye of the Heron will be included in their seventh Le Guin collection, this one devoted to the "stand-alone novels": The Lathe of Heaven, The Eye of the Heron, The Beginning Place, Searoad, and her final novel, Lavinia .) Le Guin has spoken of Eye of the Heron as a transitional work — the book in which she embraced writing a female protagonist instead of writing male...

1. I am writing this on Virginia Woolf's 136th birthday. Ursula K. Le Guin , who died a few days ago, was a lifelong reader of Woolf's work, and the trace of Woolf's writing and thinking can be found not only throughout Le Guin's essays, but also in her fiction, different as it is in style and substance from Woolf's own. Le Guin not only read the famous novels, but she also cherished some of the works that get less notice these days, including Three Guineas , a fierce critique of patriarchy and militarism, the Woolf book that I think most deserves a revival in our cruel, murderous era. It's likely that I started reading Woolf because of Le Guin. I was probably 12 or 13 years old, I had heard that Le Guin was among the greatest of science fiction writers, so I sought out her work, and the library had some anthologies with her short stories in them ( The Hugo Winners  volumes, Again, Dangerous Visions , etc.) as well as her essay collection  The Language o...

Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore. Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's .  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back .  I covet Liz's shirt. And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

For my first bit of venturing back into 1990 , two stories offer not only a good place to start, but an interesting pairing: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Shobies Story" (first published in Universe 1 ) and John Kessel's "Invaders" (first published in F&SF , October 1990), both of which were reprinted in Dozois's best-of-the-year anthology . (By the way, in these posts I plan to discuss the entirety of the stories, which means that if you don't like to have plot elements revealed, you should not read here about stories you have not read.) David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have offered a good basic summary of the ideas Le Guin is exploring in her story: "The Shobies' Story" describes a society in which consensus matters more than individual viewpoints. [... It] posits a reality that emerges as the sum of what all the participants say: a meta-narrative, a democratically constructed myth.  Le Guin tells us that the observer is part...