Ursula K. Le Blog

The following is my comment on this blog post by fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin:

I could hardly pretend to be a fantasy nerd without admitting there are those authors who know more about it than others. Tolkien and Lewis, Gaiman and Beagle: the best writers recognize that in an age where ideology is trickier, quality fantasy is not genre-driven, but has necessary tools built in. These tools are the implicit admission that anything goes, that neither the reader nor shallow, specialized criticism is the ultimate arbiter. The key is walking the tightrope of humility between existentialism and agnosticism.

Ursula K. Le Guin ranks near the top of fantasy theorists, in my esteem: on par with Joseph Campbell, and with a similar perspective. This short post of hers accurately catches why fantasy is so relevant to modern science and ideology in certain ways not even science fiction can do, but it misinterprets a handful of key points.

   I've always had difficulty grappling with speculative fiction's role as a metaphor for reality. And it is a metaphor, in exactly the same way that any fiction is a metaphor for reality. As I rant nearly constantly, the coinage of the term "speculative fiction" implies that there's fiction that isn't speculative. (The term refers to fantasy, sci-fi, horror, dystopia, or anything else that doesn't limit itself to current scientific understanding.) This split wasn't always there. Shakespeare didn't care whether fairies were real when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he needed a love potion to confuse Lysander and Demetrius. Mary Shelley was a sci-fi writer in her time because Victor Frankenstein would have lacked depth if he'd just had an ugly kid. College professors still assign these because they've been canon for so long, but a genius like Vonnegut has to be treated with the tongs of postmodern criticism, and that's because he takes the time to wink and tell the reader exactly what he's doing. Most writers just expect you to keep up.

   My only problem with Le Guin's argument is that it wavers between points of nihilism. She admits that "somebody's geometry" has to be in play in a fantasy story. That is, the reader has to understand it. But beyond that, anything goes. I disagree. I would replace her assertion, "It doesn't have to be the way it is," with a question, "Is it really the way it is?"

  Le Guin gives science the benefit of the doubt, and I find that perfectly reasonable. Science is a broad enquiry, a humble admission that we don't yet know everything. And we never will, with emphasis on the everything. The pursuit of knowledge is undoubtedly noble, but the contention that we're already there is the worst hubris I've ever seen firsthand. It's unscientific to say, "Look back at those medieval chumps, how they believed in spontaneous generation!" Science is a process, and as individual people we try to do our best with what we have. The best scientist, just like the best fantasist, is someone who always has questions. In another thousand years, 2012's understanding of the universe will seem just as primitive as people without microscopes. The potential stagnancy, the feeling that we've done it all, fits the status quo that Le Guin protests.

Interestingly, and she admits this, both of the authors she mentions were Catholic. There are many people who place religion and science as opposites, but both Tolkien and Chesterton knew that science and religion are both tools to discover deeper meaning. Le Guin, who has one of the broadest knowledges of anthropology of anyone I've ever read, probably sees religious people as those grasping at air. Some probably are. But most religions, as well as non-religious spiritualities, are not generated spontaneously, but rather founded on real experiences that clash not with science, but with old discoveries that we call "laws." The monk, the fantasy author, and the researcher are now equally Galileo.

And, as with all science or math that has any value, fantasy shouldn't exist for its own sake. Dungeons and Dragons is pure neurosis if role play isn't included. Le Guin's stories stretch beyond the Archipelago to our own fears of being locked in the dark or lost at sea, and our own hawkish pride. This is the geometry that fantasy preserves: the physics don't have to make sense when they sit on the shoulders of the moral.