1. So, a few thoughts about Ursula K. Le Guin, Boasian anthropology & trajectory of 20th century science fiction.
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5. Le Guin's anthropological imagination of course went hand in hand with her feminism, since part of what she imagined was societies without contemporary gender binary.
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6. On the whole, with a few noble exceptions, early 20th century American science fiction & fantasy was profoundly xenophobic, in ways both subtle & profound.
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7. It wasn't just the bug-eyed monsters, but also that many SF writers had a hard time imagining future or alien societies that didn't just replicate norms of 20th century America.
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8. Of E.E. "Doc" Smith, one of the great pioneers of space opera,
@john_clute wrote that his work had "a lunatic insensitivity to lifeforms (i.e. Jews)...not found in small America circa 1930."pic.twitter.com/tsx5cKNJ2H
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9. John W. Campbell, a foundational editor of sf who shaped field for decades, had a rule that no alien species could be smarter than humans (by which he meant white people, since he rejected stories with black heroes).
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10. Even someone like Heinlein, more cosmopolitan than most pulp writers, struggled with diversity. He often had people of color in books but they thought, acted & sounded like middle class white Americans.
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11. Le Guin was part of a great shift in science fiction, often called New Wave, which had many dimensions (literary, countercultural, feminist) but was also a move from xenophobia to xenophilia.
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12. It's interesting that the move from xenophobia to xenophilia all involved writers who, at an early age, had encounters with non-western cultures.
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13. Aside from Le Guin there was Paul Linebarger (a.k.a. Cordwainer Smith) who grew up in China & Alice Sheldon (a.k.a. Alice Tiptree) whose mom was a travel writer & who spent youth traveling in Africa & elsewhere.
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14. Cordwainer Smith claimed he dream in Chinese (Mandarin, I think). Mind you, he used his cultural sensitivity to dubious ends (he was a CIA expert on psychological warfare). Still, it informed his fiction
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15. And Sheldon/Tiptree (also CIA!) had ties to Africa that were redolent of colonialism, as in this photo when she was a child. But her adult work was a critique of colonial hauteur.pic.twitter.com/4f5E4sJi08
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16. Slightly tangential but Le Guin's anthropological science fiction was bastardized by Hollywood: both Return of the Jedi & Avatar are riffs on Le Guin's The Word For World Is Forest.
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18. To conclude, if we want to situate Le Guin historically, she's part of the great shift in s.f. where there is a move to genuinely imagine alien cultures and to imaginatively live inside them.
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End of conversation
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