Review: The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (repost from 2018)

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book of essays, talks and introductions first published in 1979, and revised in 1989.

"From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" is an essay on style in fantasy. She focuses on three writers: JRR Tolkien, ER Eddison & Kenneth Morris. I don’t know much about the latter two; I had never heard of Morris before, and Eddison is an author I’ve attempted to read before, but I did not get very far in The Worm Ouroboros.

She also has this wonderful description of Lord Dunsany’s style:
"The King James Bible is indubitably one of the profoundest influences on Dunsany’s prose; another, I suspect, is Irish daily speech. Those two influences alone, not to mention his own gifts of a delicate ear for speech rhythms and a brilliantly exact imagination, remove him from the reach of any would-be peer or imitator who is not an Irish peer brought up from the cradle on the grand sonorities of Genesis and Ecclesiastes. Dunsany mined a narrow vein, but it was all pure ore, and all his own. I have never seen any imitation of Dunsany that consisted of anything beyond a lot of elaborate made-up names, some vague descriptions of gorgeous cities and unmentionable dooms, and a great many sentences beginning with ‘And.’ "

I’m a little skeptical about this part, though:

"The lords of Elfland are the true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth: their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness. And greatness of soul shows when a man speaks. At least, it does in books. In life we expect lapses. In naturalistic fiction, too, we expect lapses, and laugh at an 'overheroic' hero. But in fantasy, which, instead of imitating the perceived confusion and complexity of existence, tries to hint at an order and clarity underlying existence–in fantasy, we need not compromise."

This essay was written in 1973, and I wonder if she would have qualified this assertion had The Silmarillion been published by then (it was published in 1977). The Silmarillion is told in a more remote, mythic register than LotR, but if anything it has a good deal *less* order and clarity -- certainly the "lords of Elfland" have more than a few lapses...

In "Do It Yourself Cosmology" she discusses the relationship between sf and fantasy:

"The original and instinctive movement of fantasy is, of course, inward. Fantasy is so introverted by nature that often some objective hook is necessary to bring it out in the open and turn it into literature. Classically, satire provided this hook, as in Ariosto or Swift. Or the reforming impulse shaped the dreamworld into an identification with Utopia. Or identification with nature enabled the Romantic fantasist to speak, at least briefly, out of the silence of the moors. Nowadays it is science that often gives fantasy a hand up from the interior depths, and we have science fiction, a modern, intellectualized, extroverted form of fantasy. Its limitations and strengths are those of extroversion: the power and intractability of the object.

The strength of fantasy is the strength of the Self; but its limitation or danger is that of extreme introversion: left to itself, the vision may go clear out of sight, remaining entirely private to the fantasist’s consciousness, or even remaining unconscious, exactly like a dream. The purer the fantasy, the more subjective the creation, the likelier this is to happen. It is a miracle, and pretty much a modern one, that we have any great non-satirical fantasies in print."

"American SF & the Other" is a short essay about elitism and the portrayal of aliens in sf. This one is available online, you can read it here:
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues...

"Science Fiction & Mrs Brown" is an essay on character in science fiction. Le Guin uses Virginia Woolf’s essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown," essay on the role of characterization in the novel, as a starting point to discuss character in fantasy and science fiction. I am not sure exactly what to say about this one; I'll have to come back to it some other time.

"A quite good simple test to detect the presence or absence of Mrs. Brown in a work of fiction is this: A month or so after reading the book, can you remember her name? It's silly, but it works pretty well."

"Is Gender Necessary, Redux" is an annotated essay about The Left Hand of Darkness. The essay was written in 1967, but the annotations are from a revision in 1988. It’s really interesting, but will make more sense in context, so if you haven’t read the novel you might not understand this one.

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Review: Lavinia

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In The Aeneid, Virgil’s hero fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes us to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills.

Lavinia grows up knowing nothing but peace and freedom, until suitors come. Her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus. But omens and prophecies spoken by the sacred springs say she must marry a foreigner—that she will be the cause of a bitter war—and that her husband will not live long. When a fleet of Trojan ships sails up the Tiber, Lavinia decides to take her destiny into her own hands. And so she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life. (description from GoodReads)
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I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story. Anger, in part, perhaps. But not an easy anger. I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you made betrayal inevitable.

Lavinia begins in the character's childhood, following her as suitors seek to marry her to gain her father's crown and her mother pressures her to marry Turnus of Ardea. She speaks with the poet Virgil in a vision. They discuss many things: the fated arrival of Aeneas, religion, the nature of war. The metafictional element used here is not something I read very often, but Le Guin pulls it off.

I recommend reading The Aeneid first, but that's mostly so that you can read the epic without knowing too much about it. You can only read Virgil for the first time once, after all. If you insist on reading Lavinia first, I don't think you will be too lost, though.

This is a short novel, but I read this one slowly so that I wouldn't read too fast for the group I was reading with. I remember struggling a little with the domestic focus of Le Guin's Tehanu when I read it years ago, but here everything held my interest, including the slice-of-life stuff: farming, herding, weaving, caring for the hearth gods and singing.

In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. Yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right.

This book won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Book Beginnings is hosted by Rose City Reader. The weekly post goes up every Thursday and bloggers can add their links all week.

I have this checked out from the library as an ebook. This is one of my favorite science fiction novels. I have read it twice before. Synopsis:

While on a mission to the planet Gethen — a world whose inhabitants can change their gender — earthling Genly Ai is sent by leaders of the nation of Orgoreyn to a concentration camp. The exiled prime minister of the nation of Karhide tries to rescue him.

The beginning:

From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2-Gethen: To the Stabile on Ollul: Report from Genly Ai, First Mobile on Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93, Ekumenical Year 1490-97.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter when one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. 

The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact that you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story. 

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice

56% in the ebook:

As I knew later, we were crossing the Sembensyens that night, and must have gone up over nine thousand feet on the passes. I was not much troubled by hunger. The last meal I remembered eating was that long and heavy dinner in Shusgi's house; they must have fed me in Kundershagen, but I had no recollection of it.  Eating did not seem to be a part of this existence in the steel box, and I did not often think about it. Thirst, on the other hand, was one of the permanent conditions of life.

The Sunday Post

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer.

Some of the stuff I've been up to:

On Friday, I finished The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates and On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. I'll have reviews for both up soon, I think.

I enjoyed reading the responses for the Tolkien blog party tag over at The Edge of the Precipice.

I have just posted The Monday Poem for All About Books, a GoodReads group I'm in. I've done this a few times before. This time I picked Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare.

I am now on Archive of Our Own as AssamTeawithBooks, a name I came up with after getting the response "that name is already taken" for a few other names. I just realized a few weeks ago that you don't have to be a writer to have an account. (I have written fanfiction before, actually, but I'm not interested now. I still read & comment sometimes, though.) So I've been bookmarking stories and saving some for later that I had meant to read.

I've also signed up for a tumblr account (under the same name, except in lowercase), for the same reason: it's a way for me to keep track of stuff written by other people. I don't know if I'll post anything. I'll probably focus more on this blog.

Yesterday I listened to the Mission Log Star Trek podcast. I've been following them for a while, through most of TNG and now DS9. (They were already doing TNG when I discovered the podcast, but I went back and listened to a few of the Original Series episodes as well.) The most recent podcast is "Necessary Evil" -- an excellent discussion of a great episode, I thought. (Also check out "Melora," another recent podcast, for an excellent discussion of a very flawed episode.)

At the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship today, the service was about the work of Ursula LeGuin. Works mentioned:

"The Creation of Ea," the epigraph to A Wizard of Earthsea. 

"Solitude" -- I can't remember what the quote was that was shared, but I know this story, although I haven't read it recently. This one is about the differences between generations and cultures on an alien world: a world where solitude is very important, and adults usually lead fairly solitary lives. 

Tehanu - the storytelling for children today was adapted from Therru's story in Tehanu.
"Unchosen Love" - Well, I thought I recognized this one, based on the excerpt that was read. Actually, what I'd read was "Another Story OR A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," as I figured out when I looked at the program. The two stories are set on the same planet, hence my confusion. "Another Story..." is earlier of the two, but it seems like you can read them in either order. I will try to look for a collection that has this one when I get a chance. 

Five Ways to Forgiveness - This one was new to me. The description at GoodReads says: "First published in 1995 as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and now joined by a fifth story, Five Ways to Forgiveness focuses on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe, two worlds whose peoples, long known as "owners" and "assets," together face an uncertain future after civil war and revolution."

My personal favorite book of hers, though, is The Left Hand of Darkness. My favorite of her short stories might be "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," but I didn't think of that one until I got home today, for some reason.