Once I had a handle on the alternating chapter timeline structure, and that I had started on the last book of the sequence, I thought it was great.
Ursula K Le Guin
“Takver looked at him with mistrustful curiosity…”
“She was four years old. She had a round head, a round face. She was round.”
“A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel…”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, 1976 Foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness (via Nearlya)
Paul Greer 