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

A working life in two genres

• 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).

The title

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.

Reading notes: “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow”

• 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?

Critic as much as novelist

• “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).

Reading notes: “When It Changed”

• 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.

For Tuesday

Unit 6 begins — cyberpunk and beyond.

• “New Rose Hotel” by William Gibson (BBSF 794)
• “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler (BBSF 755)