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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 âis it hard SF?â in a way where it seemed like it was a trapâIâd be a nerd if I said yes and a flake if I said no. Itâs a pretty orthogonal question for that book. She creates cultures.
Although maybe I deserved it since I didnât like Three Body Problem which he recommended.
Iâm not really particularly sure about what counts as âhardâ SF or not and whether itâs 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:
This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowlingâs Harry Potter. I didnât originate the idea of a school for wizards â if anybody did it was T.H. White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didnât develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didnât plagiarize. She didnât 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 wizardsâ 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 Iâve seen that essay before. Snopes also brings up how earlier, in a 2005 interview, she had stated it a liâl crisper:
Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the âwhole fantasy field a boostâ is tinged with regret. âI didnât feel she ripped me off, as some people did,â she says quietly, âthough 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 isnât one of them. That hurt.â
I think this is more right.
Itâs not JKRâs 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 wasnât 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 freshâlike K. Le Guin did, applying things from other fields combined with an ideosyncratic approach to proseâwhile others are firmly planted in a substrate of influences that they reflect back. Like Kill Bill or Sandman which both deliberately reflect culture. I donât see that as a bad thing.
I just wanna let people write without hangups or fear or having to be gracious about predecessors.
But itâs then up to critics to be educated about whatâs already out there. Any schmoe can tell you if somethingâs good or bad. Critics can put things in a bigger context.
Good people teach people who arenât 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 âKâ. Maybe that was the problem? JKR took my K awayâŠ
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 theyâre 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 PokĂ©mon 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.