Sam wk 3

This week I've attempted to answer the following questions;

How is science-fiction different from fantasy according to Le Guin?

Can you identify any common fantasy meta-narratives from your own reading/viewing?

Note while you are reading A Wizard of Earthsea Le Guin's depiction of race and/or gender. Is there anything surprising in this? Why?


Fantasy, (both Attebery, 1980 and Le Guin agreeing) generally has to mitigate it’s whimsy with consistency as (for example, with Earth Sea) original universes are being established and an author cannot rely on a readers previous impressions of place; rather a reader must be taken in hand and introduced to these invented realms fully realised. Earth Sea’s introductory geographical descriptions, elaborate and consistent throughout, substantiate Le Guin’s ‘secondary world’ occasionally allowing it to touch with naturally occurring phenomena of the actual, if only to further “extrapolate” it from the real, anchoring fantastic narratives in a believably parallel world (Attebery, 1980). Tolkein was aware of this, having written pedantically about the panoramic layout of his Middle Earth before plotting or even populating it.

This then separates fantasy from science fiction in that the latter builds no alternate reality, rather juxtaposes the mundane world with supernatural happenings and, as it hasn’t constructed it’s own rules (as with the world building of fantasy), is forced to bend or break the rules frequently calling on a readers suspension of disbelief, as opposed to the initial affective ‘wonder’ of fantasy (Attebery, 1980). Meaning with this that fantasy lays it’s foundation tax of the imagination, expanding from and maintaining this while science-fiction is a succession of absurdist ‘what ifs?’.

Fantasy can also operate as allegory (which of course science fiction can too), writers utilizing these alternate realities as open spaces in which the mysterious or threatening forces of our own reality can be archetypally reconciled. Attebery (1980) identifies the moral and the philosophical as fundamental elements of the fantasy genre, most notably the thematic recurrence of ‘good vs. evil’, which can be seen in anything from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. It could even be said that many western literatures of the genre incorporate biblical threads to elevate their good/evil conflict to the status of myth or fable. Le Guin’s Earth Sea is rife with such references (debatably there to reinforce the messianic nature of her protagonist). For example, during one of Sparrowhawk’s sea voyages an unruly wind is roused by his shadow, closely resembling the story of Jonah, the stowaway fugitive from god whose ill favour with the divinity made the seas storm (until a fellow crew member kindly suggests casting him over board, successfully placating the weather).

However, in Earth Sea Le Guin seems to have unnecessarily borrowed some of the bible’s prejudices, namely those denigrating of women. For example, Duny’s crone mentor is presented as being a crooked or fickle practitioner of the craft, with the additional old Gont saying “weak/wicked as woman’s magic”. Throughout the text there’s a decided lack of women in the mage-world, as if they’re somehow unfit to wield magic, being innately impotent or amoral. Unfortunately Le Guin offers no clue as to why Earth Sea women are positioned as subordinate, or why the practice of magic is an almost exclusively male-dominated one.

This is perhaps an attitudinal by-product of the earlier time period in which Earth Sea was written, or at least Le Guin could have excused herself as such before a chapter in which the novel’s only major female character plays a role excruciatingly similar to Eve’s, the great temptress of Genesis guilty of smuggling sin into a perfect world, and single-handedly marring the moral aptitude of mate Adam. Sparrowhawk, unwittingly driven by his shadow to a mysterious stone-tower, is almost seduced into relinquishing his power to a terrible, ancient force in it’s foundation; attempted seduction committed by none other than the beautiful Serret, female agent of a nameless evil. Le Guin’s gender bias is inexplicable, and barely redeemed with the entrance of Vetch’s younger sister Yarrow, who despite being less-nefarious remains a weak, ‘Lolita’-styled representation. Again, if fantasy must labour to convince it’s audiences by intermittently curbing it’s ‘fantastic’ realms with doses of the real, then Earth Sea’s sexism might just be an un-critical reflection of that time.

Let’s hope so.