I read Planet of Exile the other day and loved it. Talking about it to a friend, he had never heard of Ursula K. Le Guin, which is fine, but he asked me “is it hard SF?” in a way where it seemed like it was a trap—I’d be a nerd if I said yes and a flake if I said no. It’s a pretty orthogonal question for that book. She creates cultures.
Although maybe I deserved it since I didn’t like Three Body Problem which he recommended.
I’m not really particularly sure about what counts as “hard” SF or not and whether it’s even a good thing. (I think of Star Wars, which I love, as fantasy.)
Today Snopes for some reason [brought up an old essay of hers][buaoioh].
| [buaoioh]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jk-rowling-ursula-le-guin-quote/ “Ursula Le Guin Once Said She’s ‘Rankled by JK Rowling’s ‘Reluctance’ to Credit Other Writers? | Snopes.com” |
This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H. White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.
I think I’ve seen that essay before. Snopes also brings up how earlier, in a 2005 interview, she had stated it a li’l crisper:
Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the “whole fantasy field a boost” is tinged with regret. “I didn’t feel she ripped me off, as some people did,” she says quietly, “though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. That hurt.”
I think this is more right.
It’s not JKR’s fault for writing. Writing and being inspired by is fine. X-Men is inspired by Doom Patrol. Star Wars is inspired by Dam Busters, Flash Gordon, and The Hidden Fortress. The Sandman starts out as pretty much a Swamp Thing fan fic before it finds its own voice. The Lord of the Rings wasn’t the first fantasy book. And would we have Spider-Man without Batman and Batman without Die Fledermaus?
Some authors seemingly do seem to pop up out of nowhere, being so original and fresh—like K. Le Guin did, applying things from other fields combined with an ideosyncratic approach to prose—while others are firmly planted in a substrate of influences that they reflect back. Like Kill Bill or Sandman which both deliberately reflect culture. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
I just wanna let people write without hangups or fear or having to be gracious about predecessors.
But it’s then up to critics to be educated about what’s already out there. Any schmoe can tell you if something’s good or bad. Critics can put things in a bigger context.
Good people teach people who aren’t good yet;
the less good are the makings of the good.
The first time J K Rowling came up with a male pseudonym (I know at least two times; “Robert Galbraith” was the second) they added an extra “K”. Maybe that was the problem? JKR took my K away…
Most people have a time in their life where they realize things can be uncool and they cynically hate everything. Later in life, and only if they’re lucky, they can recapture a little bit of that spark of wonder, that appreciation for amazement. For me, that time was shorter than most, but Harry Potter and Pokémon both came out smack dab in that sliver of time. I saw them as cynically pushed consumerism-for-kids when I was trying to grow up. That was a degree of awareness I only managed to hold on to briefly as I quickly lapsed back into just awe and wonder when the best movie year in history, 1999, rolled around.
Many years later I found out that Pokémon Red actually is a pretty good video game, while I really did dodge a bullet with Harry Potter, especially now that J K Rowling has become tangled up with far-right politics. But I want to review books or ideas, not people.