#brian attebery

[garadinervi]

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest (1972), in Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2: The Word for World Is Forest / Stories / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling, Edited by Brian Attebery, Library of America, New York, NY, 2017, p. 8 [© Estate of Ursula K. Le Guin / The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation]

«"Right, but this isn't slavery, Ok baby. Slaves are humans. When you raise cows, you call that slavery? No. And it works."»

[libraryofamerica]

Ursula K. Le Guin

Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, Ursula K. Le Guin redrew the map of modern science fiction.

The complete Hainish novels and stories are collected in a definitive two-volume Library of America edition, with new introductions by the author.

[twelvemonkeyswere]

But fantasy’s main claim to cultural importance resides, I believe, in the work of redefining the relationship between contemporary readers and mythic texts. It shares that work with such enterprises as depth psychology, religion, and popular media. Unlike those institutions, fantasy claims no authority nor exerts hegemony. It denies its own validity; the one characteristic shared by all fantasy narratives is their nonfactuality. The fundamental premise of fantasy is that the things it tells not only did not happen but could not have happened. In that literal untruth is freedom to tell many symbolic truths without forcing a choice among them.

Brian Attebery, “Stories about Stories"

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #317

An end of week recap “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.” – Virginia Woolf (born 25th January 1882) To all those celebrating Chinese New Year, I wish you a peaceful and prosperous Year of the Rabbit, which, of course, begins tomorrow, on Sunday 22nd January. As ever, this…

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[twelvemonkeyswere]

Fantasy is fundamentally playful—which does not mean that it is not serious. Its way of playing with symbols encourages the reader to see meaning as something unstable and elusive, rather than single and self-evident.

Brian Attebery, “Stories about Stories"

[isaacwritesfantasynovels]

“...all the closely observed characters and finely tuned prose in the world won’t make a dull story readable...”

Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy

[elderlingacademic]

Both gender and science fiction are rather vexed terms: each is marked by rancorous debate over what it means, how it came to mean what it seems to mean today, what is allowed to count as part of it, how it ought to be studied - and who gets to speak to these issues. In his study of 'Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy', Gary K. Wolfe lists thirty-three definitions for science fiction, many of them directly contradictory. Some, for instance, consider it a subset of fantasy, while others see fantasy as a branch of science fiction. Definitions of gender are equally controversial. Is it a grammatical term, a synonym for sexual differentiation, a class system, or, as Kate Bornstein has suggested only half facetiously, a cult?

Brian Attebery, Decoding Genders in Science Fiction. 

[elderlingacademic]

Like individual speech sounds, one gender is meaningful only to the degree that it differs (or is treated as if it differs) from another. Speech features are conveniently sorted into binary oppositions: voiced and voiceless consonants, active and passive verbs. Likewise, gender is usually conceived as a pair of mutually exclusive "opposites": masculine and feminine. Such a schematic diagram is just about as true to the range of individual expressions of gender as a structural diagram of phonemes is to the ful range of sounds people actually produce. If you are from rural Georgia and I from Northern Ireland, our versions of the word "bird" will hardly resemble one another, even though most speakers of English will understand them as variations on the "same" sound. Just so, my way of expressing masculine gender barely overlaps with those of a Masai warrior or a Mormon patriarch. We all act out the signifiers "man," "husband," "father," and "son," according to our own refional and personal dialects. Most of what we have in common is the degree to which we differ from our various cultures' definition of the feminine.

Brian Attebery, Decoding Genders in Science Fiction