It's a full life, if a trifle banal

I've put off reading Le Guin's Always Coming Home for years, because I knew I wasn't ready for it. And then I knew that I was, and I loved it to bits, even though I keep waking up faintly depressed to remember that I don't in fact live in a world like that. Never mind, one day we shall have our commonwealth by the sea, where we shall gather to talk about books and cook locally-grown produce and evolve effective consensus-based decision-making processes.

I poked around online for reviews, and found this one which had various interesting things to say, but mostly I wanted to respond to the "flaws" which the review identifies in order to clarify some of my own thinking about the book. Basically, I'm going to gratuitously pick out a few choice quotes and then have a grump about them. Screw consensus-making, let's go with adversarial.

( Read more... )

Oh well, just some reflections, and surely grossly unfair to the reviewer to pick these out of context and then bounce off them. But then I like the end of Tehanu too (reviewer doesn't), so you can happily pay no attention to a word I say. My favourite bit of Always Coming Home, for what it's worth, is the list of "generative metaphors" at the back of the book.

A brief discussion elsewhere about writing dystopia had me musing about happy-world stories and sad-world stories, what you lot preferred, and why.

Here is the ever-quotable Le Guin on the subject: "It is sad that so many stories that might offer a true vision settle for patriotic or religious platitude, technological miracle working, or wishful thinking, the writers not trying to imagine truth. The fashionably noir dystopia merely reverses the platitudes and uses acid instead of saccharine, while still evading engagement with human suffering and with genuine possibility" (2004: 219).

Are happy-world tales escapism? Do sad-world stories back out on the possibility for action and change? What do you like to read? Why?

[Poll #614661]

Le Guin, U. (2004) A War Without End. In: Le Guin, U., The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. London: Shambhala Publications.