Search Results

“... elsewhere?’SF sometimes poses that kind of question. But in the hands of an author like Ursula Le Guin, science fiction ‘isn’t really about the future’, as she put it in The Last Interview. ‘It’s about the present.’ It changes one or two structuring facts about the world as it is and asks: ‘What ...”

“... have seriously explored what life would be like in a sexless but otherwise human society, although Ursula Le Guin, in her very effective Science Fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness has tried to do so. Whether consciously or not, Ms Le Guin set the action of her novel on a planet where ...”

“... including the bill, occupy the next 250 pages of the book and are introduced with an epigraph from Ursula Le Guin’s essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1986): ‘I now propose the bottle as hero.’ Le Guin mentions that Virginia Woolf, in her notes for Three Guineas, defined ...”

“... not the fixed points we might take them for. In a chapter on the plastic bottle, Farrier invokes Ursula Le Guin, whose ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ adapts a concept from the American anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher: that the first real ‘cultural device’ was not a weapon or a tool but a container. As Le ...”

“... seem redundant. Pew is less playful than this earlier work and wears its influences, including Ursula Le Guin and Flannery O’Connor, heavily. Pew is like O’Connor in the way a Netflix Shirley Jackson adaptation is like Shirley Jackson – which is to say not very – and its failings are only made more obvious by the ...”

“... divine Gilbert Burnet with an introduction by China Miéville and a series of concluding essays by Ursula Le Guin. Miéville decks More in punk garb while arguing, plausibly, that capitalism by its nature rules out effective curbs on anthropogenic environmental catastrophe and, less plausibly, that the latter has nothing to ...”

“... His grandly panoptic method, ranging from Parmenides to Soviet science fiction, Leibniz to Ursula Le Guin, represents a kind of transcendence of time and space, as he himself becomes a kind of science-fiction superbrain presiding over history and pulling its shattered bits and pieces into unity. There is something ...”

“... book not the expression of an ideological doctrine? In a post-feminist age, whose great writers (Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Christa Wolf) are not women writers but just writers, Atwood does not easily fit some category labelled feminist: The Robber Bride, whose male figures are mostly not even violent but simply inept ...”

“... is both more literary and more personal than Klein’s other books. She reads Freud and Poe and Ursula Le Guin and Dostoevsky, and gets over her loathing of Philip Roth’s misogyny to find a surprising richness in the Bundism-Zionism face-off dramatised in Operation Shylock (1993); her bad back, her son’s ...”

“... became the CIA. Tiptree won over SF’s feminists in the 1970s – both the irenic ones such as Ursula K. Le Guin and radicals such as Joanna Russ – even while other readers felt sure that Tiptree was a man. Sheldon held Dick’s writing in higher regard than he held it himself, though she did not take him up on his ...”

“... Flaubert, Hesse or Kafka – the most ‘impressive’ names on his bookshelf are Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and John Wyndham – but at a village meeting to discuss what to do about a proposed Gypsy campsite, he reflects that ‘the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts ...”

“... message is likely to be. After the excitement generated a few years ago by the feminist utopias of Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ, the appearance of a female dystopia by a writer as eminent as Margaret Atwood will itself be seen as a literary-political event, perhaps even as a breaking of the ranks. Certainly ...”

“... Gibson. Similarly, Murakami’s fantasy narrative is more reminiscent of the elegant allegories of Ursula le Guin than the sword and sorcery adventures of, say, Anne McCaffrey. In the parallel story, the city’s burly Gatekeeper tells the newcomer that his allotted task is to ‘read’ dreams: to trace with his fingertips ...”

“... presuppositions in language that angers the feminist Utopian novelists like Esmé Dodderidge, Ursula Le Guin or Marge Piercy. Significantly, on the very first page of 1985, the point is made that nobody can be held responsible: not even for the obstetric maltreatment which has resulted in Bev’s child being ...”

“... the singular ‘they’ as its word of the decade. It shows up in plenty of respectable places. Ursula Le Guin – who also experimented with e/es/en in her feminist science fiction – called the prohibition on the singular ‘they’ a ‘fake rule’ enforced by ‘grammar bullies’. So far, I have used ‘they’ and ...”