Le Guin, “Vaster Than Empires”; Russ, “When It Changed”

Today

The New Wave’s second turn · Le Guin · Russ

1929–2018

Daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber — a household in which describing an unfamiliar culture was the family trade.
The Hainish novels and stories imagine worlds seeded long ago by a common ancestor species, which lets each one be a controlled experiment in difference: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974).
The Earthsea books do the equivalent work in fantasy — worth holding against Tolkien from lecture 12.
“Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” first appeared in Robert Silverberg’s original anthology New Dimensions 1 (1971).

Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (c. 1650s):

“My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow”

The joke is exact: Marvell’s speaker offers a love that is enormous and unhurried as a figure of speech. Le Guin’s story supplies one literally.

The Extreme Survey crew is assembled out of people who do not work well with others. Why send the unstable to the far edge of the surveyed galaxy?
Osden’s empathy is a receiver, not a gift — he gets other people’s feeling and hands it back. What does that do to the idea of sympathy?
World 4470 has no animals. What is the difference between a world with one mind in it and a world with none?
The emotion the forest returns is fear. Whose fear is it?

1937–2011

“When It Changed” appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) — so the story reaches us through the same editor we read on Tuesday.
It won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story.
Whileaway, the world of the story, became the basis of Russ’s novel The Female Man (1975).
Russ was also one of the genre’s sharpest critics: How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).

The story opens in a marriage and a car, and withholds the premise. When did you work out what Whileaway is, and what did the delay do?
The men arrive speaking entirely in courtesies. What is the story doing by making them polite rather than hostile?
Question to carry into Tuesday: Le Guin’s story ends with a man giving himself to an alien world. Russ’s ends with a woman refusing to be given.

Unit 6 begins — cyberpunk and beyond.