If you’re in the US, most PBS stations will be showing the documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin on August 2nd, so that’s your Friday night sorted.
Features interviews with the author, her family and friends, and the generation of sci-fi and fantasy writers she influenced, like Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon, as well as gorgeous animations illustrating her work as she reads.
One comment I noted when she passed in 2018:
One of the many, many things Le Guin gave us was a subtle one: that the “science” in science fiction could also be the social sciences, and that, indeed, without it, no science fiction could be entirely complete.
— Catherynne Valente on Twitter
And this great thread by Jeet Heer, including:
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.
I loved this from her Rant About “Technology” which, sadly, seems to have gone offline when that site was redesigned.
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
… But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.
And of course this great acceptance speech when she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
(Via Eliot Peper / Neil Gaiman.)
Tags: documentaries Ursula K. Le Guinfrom kottke.org https://ift.tt/2MuLWOX
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