At first I was tempted to apologize for the number of times I have written about Ursula K. LeGuin. You may think “he’s obsessed!” Or “it’s a sickness!”
Perhaps you’re right.
My “to read” stack is deep; it includes Toole and Saramago, Corey and Saenz, Kingsolver and Russell and Munro and Gaiman. And that’s just the fiction. So why LeGuin? Well, that’s the job—the purpose—of these posts, isn’t it?
In the Afterword to A Wizard of Earthsea she writes “War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might. Or does might make right?”
As a writer, I am finding many of my fundamental answers with her. The manuscript I am currently writing includes many wars; my editor suggested I change the title because of my frequent use of the word. The manuscript waiting in the wings takes place during a single war. I want war to be a context in these books, but not the obsession. In at least one of them, and I think likely in both, the binaries of right/wrong, on/off, yes/no must necessarily collapse. Like Ged, the characters cannot learn or grow without doing away with, or at least severely questioning, dichotomies.
It doesn’t hurt that one of my current employees has been pestering me to finish the book so we can discuss it. He is very excited. Now I am excited as well.
Fundamental to my discipline is the principle that writing is a mode of thinking, not just the demonstration of thought. When Neil Gaiman admitted in 2014 that as a young writer, he could not copy LeGuin, I wonder if the challenge at the time was that he couldn’t think like her? And therefore if the above is true, and my goal is to think like her, I’d better be soaking up everything she wrote.
Of course, this isn’t to say I have no problems with A Wizard. It’s more narrative than I prefer, and I generally dislike moments when the author warns that the story at hand is not the same as another story you might rather have, or will possibly get later. Gaiman does this in Stardust, as I recall, and the convention is definitely used in the film adaptation. It’s just not a thing I like; throw me into the deep end, please, and trust me to swim. No doubt my editor will remind me of these words later—come to think of it, they may be her words from a conversation we shared two weeks ago.
So is he obsessed? Is it a sickness? Sure. Why not. When it is time for me to finish The Sparrow and A Confederacy of Dunces, then I will. But right now we live with a daily reminder that false dilemmas and a tendency to violence-first are alive and well in the minds of everyone from autocrats to academy award winners. For the sake of my writing, I needed something different. So here I am, getting ready to start The Tombs of Atuan … but if the sea changes, as it does, I’m sure it will also spend time in the stack.
Nicanor Abbott 