Ursula K. Le Guin accepts the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19, 2014: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine rights of kings.”
Via Noah Berlatsky, at the Atlantic, dyspeptic about “When Science Fiction Stopped Caring About the Future“:
Most people think of science-fiction as being about the future; it’s a genre that explores possibilities, from Dr. Frankenstein’s invention of artificial life to Ursula K. Le Guin’s world populated by humans who have all evolved into single-gendered hermaphrodites. What might happen if? What could happen when? Sci-fi thinks about new technologies, new societies, and new ways of being, good or bad.
And then science-fiction fans turn to the new Star Wars trailer, and find, not the future, but a reshuffling of 30-year-old detritus. There are the storm troopers, there’s the Millennium Falcon, there’s Tatooine, there’s one of those cute droids we’re always looking for. There’s nary a pretense that we’re actually supposed to be imagining a different world. Instead, the pleasure is in reshuffling the old, worn-out bits…
It’s no accident that the most ubiquitous, overwhelming sci-fi sub-genre around is the one that has the least to do with the future: superheroes. Much of the superhero genre, in fact, is devoted to the fantasy that we don’t need to wait for technological marvels, but can experience them right here, right now. More, we can do so, magically, without the comfy old familiar world we know changing that much at all.
Tony Stark invents new magical energy sources three times before breakfast, but he uses them mostly to punch Thunder-Gods in the head, rather than, say, to completely transform the world’s technology and economy. Aliens land on earth, and rather than conquering England with H. G. Wells or forming an utterly new human race through tentacle-sex gene splicing a la Octavia Butler, they perform minor acts of altruism while taking their shirts off to reveal the pecs of Henry Cavill. Superheroes are sci-fi wonders without consequences, the future resolutely flattened by today…
I have been reading sf since I started ‘borrowing’ my dad’s pulp paperbacks in the early 1960s. (Groff Conklin‘s effect on my budding imagination cannot be overstated.) I came to science-fiction fandom in the early 1970s, when the genre was being invaded by alien minds — women (like LeGuin!), gays, people of color (Samuel R. Delany); the resentment of the white male Trufen ran deep and wordy. The one thing that unified our entire tribe, however, was the burning awareness that “real writers” considered all sf as a mental ghetto (Kurt Vonnegut: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since [Player Piano], and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”) The very idea that the author of Rocannon’s World or even Lathe of Heaven (serialized in Amazing Stories) might eventually be cited for her “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” would have been considered as unlikely, as implausible, as FTL travel. Things keep changing, whether or not we like the changes…
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