 Hello, everybody, and welcome to Stage B. I'm Tia Fforddigill, I'm your Herald at the moment, and this could change at any moment, you never know. We're going to have a talk by Jane Charlesworth on Ursula K. Le Guin, but first, I would like to say, if you are in the first two rows, there is every chance that you might end up on the stream, and if you don't want your likeness to be used, please move out of the first two rows. And then also, please, please, please consider volunteering to be a Herald, or to park other people's cars, or to do other very exciting things for EMF camp, because it is volunteer run and we'd be very grateful for some help right about now. At any rate, without further ado, Jane Charlesworth on Ursula K. Le Guin. Thank you. Hello. I'm afraid I forgot to buy pickles. My plan was to buy some free pickles and pass them around, and I completely forgot, and I'm really sorry. Anyway, why have I talked about a science fiction writer at a sort of hackerspace festival? Well, my argument for that is that obviously science fiction helped us imagine different worlds and different possible futures, and I think Ursula Le Guin is a writer who really exemplifies that role that science fiction can play in imagining different societies. I also think that she was a very curious person, not just as a writer, but in general, and that she's someone that would have probably really enjoyed an event like EMF. So I thought it was fitting to do a tribute to her work here. So obviously I haven't read everything that she's written, and I hope there are lots of undiscovered gems that I won't be talking about here today. But she's one of my favourite writers, and I just thought it would be nice to do a talk celebrating that. So I'm going to talk about some of her works that I've really enjoyed, and a few quotes, and hopefully illustrate why I think she's a great writer, why I think she's very relevant for people who are very curious, and why everyone should read her work. So hopefully her words will really speak for themselves in this talk, and I'll do a little bit of comment. So the first book that I read by Eslil Gwyn was A Wizard of Earthsea, and I read a lot of fantasy... I think that. Do you want to take this mic for now? And I'll take this mic. Sorry about that. I read a lot of fantasy books as a child, but this was one that really stuck with me, because it felt like the characters were much more sort of complicated human characters than in a lot of fantasy books. In most fantasy books you basically have someone fighting a big bad, and you have good guys, and you have bad guys. It's all really clear cut, but in A Wizard of Earthsea it really isn't, because the main character is fighting a big evil, but it's a big evil that comes out of himself, so it's a little bit different. It really subverts those fantasy tropes. So without being too spoilery, it's kind of the story of this boy called Ged, who was born as a goat herd, living in a very rural location in a sort of island archipelago, and he turns out to be very talented at sorcery. He starts learning magic from his aunt, who is the local witch in the village, and then goes away to train at a wizard school. So it's similar to some other popular books there. So anyway, he's sort of top of his class at the wizard school, but like a lot of geeks, he's not very good socially, so he's really awkward and he's plagued by jealousy, and in particular he's jealous of this other boy that he thinks is better than him, he's a bit older, he's a bit posh, and this whole horrible jealous mess winds up into Ged casting a spell that is a very poor decision and releasing this evil onto the world, and the rest of the book is him sort of dealing with that. So just, I think this really sums it up, it's that he didn't lose or win, but he, by naming the shadow of death with his own name, had made himself whole a man who, knowing his true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin or pain or hatred or the dark. So he's really goes through this whole process and it's learning about himself, it's not this very black and white, good and evil narrative. And she even goes on and explains this as a deliberate choice in the sort of afterward of the book, so again I'm just going to read these quotes in case anyone can't read them on the screen there. So war as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to a war against whatever it is, you divide the world into me or us good and them or it bad and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to yes, no, on, off. This is prayer all misleading and degrading. In stories it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the right side and therefore will win, right makes might. And I think this is just a really important message to consider, especially in a world where we seem to be bombarded by people who are trying to position us as good or bad and them or us. The other thing that Ursula Le Guin did right from the beginning of her works with us is that her protagonists have deliberately described us non-white. So she said she was in an interview that she was tired of all these white heroes and she wanted to write characters that represented the diversity of humans that live in the world. And that's something that I think she was one of the first writers to really do and talk about as a deliberate choice. The earlier Earthsea books are kind of not without their problematic elements. So in a Wizard of Earthsea in particular the women are generally in helper roles. The women's magic has described us less than the men's magic, a bit problematic, and it falls into those traditional masculine tropes. But this is something that she came back to in the later Earthsea books in particular in Tehanu where she is in the same world but she's considering things from the women's perspective. And thinking about what women's magic looks like. And I think that's really a reflection of her thinking about feminism and gender and how she moved on in her and thinking that she did that. I'll come back to that a little bit later. But in Tehanu she's talking about the women and what the women's magic might be like. So here's one quote that I really liked. Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs, Moss said, but it goes down deep. It's all roots, it's like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard's power is like a fir tree maybe, great and tall and grand. It'll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble. I really like that description there. So another thing that I'll try and come back to because it's what Ursula Le Guin really comes back to in a lot of her works is talking about trust and power and the balance of trust and power and what these things look like. So in this case talking about men and women and I just thought this was very interesting coming back to this. Why are men afraid of women? If your strength is only in the others weakness you live in fear, Gedd said. Yes, but women seem to live their own strength to be afraid of themselves. Are they ever taught to trust themselves, Gedd said? And as he spoke, Therou came in... Sorry, I should explain that the three characters here is Gedd, who is the main character of the Wizard of Earthsea. Tenar, who is a high priestess and was in I think the second Earthsea book and Therou, who is a child that she's caring for. As he spoke, Therou came in on her work again. His eyes and tenars met. No, she said, trust is not what we're taught. She watched the child sack the wood in the box. If power were trust, she said, I like that word. If it weren't all these arrangements one above the other kings and masters and majors and owners it all seemed so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom would lie in trust and not force. And I think these are really interesting ideas that she talks about and comes back to in a lot of her works. So the next book I'm going to talk about a little bit is The Left Hand of Darkness which kind of made Ursula Le Guin's a reputation as a feminist writer. So this book is set on a ice planet. So it's part of a cycle of books called the heinish cycle. They are lovely, lovely books and you can buy a lovely hardback collected edition of all of the books and stories that are loosely grouped into the heinish cycle which I highly recommend because some of her earlier books are out of print but are very much worth reading. So her parents were anthropologists and she kind of grew up I think in Berkeley, California surrounded by these anthropologists and people and I think a lot of that comes into her books. So a lot of the books in this heinish cycle are about people from different worlds going and making contact or different societies meeting and trying to understand each other and in The Left Hand of Darkness we have a human sort of envoy ambassador called Genle I and he's come to this world called Gethen which is an ice planet and the kind of notable feature about the people on this planet is that they are mostly without gender so most of their life cycle they don't have a gender and then they go into a mating phase where they kind of randomly become male or female but it can happen to anyone so the consequences of this sort of randomness of it is that essentially anyone could end up becoming pregnant so at one point in the book the king becomes pregnant and so this is a really useful framework that she uses to think about what this kind of society would look like so for example in this society sex can only occur when both partners are in this chemo or mating phase so all sex on this planet is consensual and if you go into this chemo phase you then can go to a chemo house and find a partner and it's just very different although in some cases there are some people that have different issues with this and those are I would say looking at it now some of those things maybe strike us as a bit problematic so some people have differences in this cycle and they get described as outcasts or perverts and on this planet there also hasn't been any war which gennally the visitor attributes to their lack of sort of masculine nature but it could also be that they live on this icy planet and the rate of progress in their society is very slow because of the climate they live in so this is from a quote from a previous visitor to the planet who's just sort of describing the inhabitants so the cathenians do not see one another as men or women this is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept after all what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby there is no division of humanity into strong and weak hearts protected or protective one is suspected and judged only as a human being you cannot cast a Athenian in the role of man or woman while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the interactions between persons of the same or opposite sex it is an appalling experience for a Terran personally I think that would be lovely but that really seems like it would be absolutely brilliant but the fact that everyone between 17 and 35 or so is liable to be as an input tied down to childbearing implies that no one is quite so thoroughly tied down here as women elsewhere are likely to be psychologically or physically burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make there for nobody here is quite so free it's a free male anywhere else I think that sounds lovely so I think that I really like this book for a lot of reasons but I think the best part of the book comes for me when this chap Genly is visiting and he's really struggled to fit in his name sounds like someone crying out in pain in their language and he looks different he's taller and he's darker skin than the average Athenian on this planet and he just really struggles with all of his interactions because he is thinking in this very gendered framework so he he can't interpret people's behaviour except through this gender binary and so he he gets into all kinds of awkward situations but the latter half of the book is really describing him kind of going on a journey with this other guy and their sort of deepening relationship and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it but it's he suddenly comes to an understanding about how to view these people and it's just really lovely so I just want to illustrate it with this quote here sir and then I saw again and for good what I had always been afraid to see and pretended not to see in him that he was a woman as well as a man and he need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear what I was left with was at last acceptance of him as he was until then I had rejected him refused him his own reality he had been quite right to say that he the only person on Gathen who trusted me was the only Gathenian I distrusted for he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition of acceptance I had not been willing to give it I had been afraid to give it I had not wanted to give my trust my friendship to a man who was a woman a woman who was a man and then this just changed shifts everything in their relationship and it's really beautiful so the next book I'm going to talk about is possibly my favourite book of all time The Dispossessed so again this is kind of a similar conceit where we have someone going into a different culture so this is a story of two worlds there's a narus which is a moon and it is anarchist society and the scientist who gets kind of disenchanted with his home world and he goes to visit the sort of founding world that the rebels came from to found the world that he lives on which is called urus and it's a very different type of society so he's there's a lot of thinking about different societies and how we structure societies and what that means and if there's one quote from Ursula Gwyn that I really kind of come back to all the time and it's really shaped a lot of my beliefs it's probably this one so for we each of us deserve everything every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings and we each of us deserve nothing not a mouth full of bread and hunger not eaten while another starved will you punish us for that will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate no man earns punishment no man earns reward free your mind of the idea of deserving the idea of earning and you will begin to be able to think and I think that I just feel that's really powerful and reading this kind of clarified that for me personally and it's I posted this on Facebook once and this dude that I was dating popped up to tell me that he thought it was stupid and that I was completely wrong and that we all deserve things and he was actually a pretty terrible person so when Facebook pops that up as a memory it's just a reminder that I don't want to be friends with someone that has these ideas about how some people deserve more than others the other thing I really love about the Dispossessed is that the main character is a scientist and he just feels so shevik and he just feels so much more realised than most scientist characters in science fiction so he has this whole vivid interior life and I feel that that's often especially in the early science fiction something that was maybe a bit lacking and this quote about visiting the university and how this process of science works is just something that I also really like, I'm a scientist and I think collaboration in science is very very important and this quote really sums that up so physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists all were here at the university and they came to him or he went to them and they talked and new worlds were born of their talking it is of the nature of idea to be communicated written, spoken, done the idea is like grass, it craves light likes crowds, thrives and cross brooding, grows better for being stepped on I think that just really sums up the process of working as a scientist and collaborating with people and here's another quote that I just really like and that I come back to when I struggle to feel like I don't fit in in the world so it's always easier not to think for oneself find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in don't make changes, don't risk disapproval don't upset your syndics it's always easiest to let yourself be governed there's a point around age 20 when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life or make a virtue of your peculiarities those who build walls are their own prisoners I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism I'm going to go and build walls in a later interview Esra Lilligwyn revised that age from 20 up to about 35 so I don't know if that's comforting to anyone else, but it was for me and the other thing I think is really extraordinary about the just possess is thinking about the context in which it was written so she's a relatively privileged white American lady writing in 1974 about an anarchist state and it kind of makes parallels with these real world communist states especially if I think Cuba comes to mind for me in the description, really difficult to ignore so it's these questions of who is free and who is oppressed and which side of the border is cut off from the other worlds and I don't think it necessarily comes down in the conclusion that one form of society is better that Shevek the scientist goes away and visits this other world and comes back and I don't think there's a conclusion that one way of living is better but it's just this quote which is the opening line of the book I think it's just really powerful in making us think about our place in the world and I think for an American writer that's an incredibly bold thing to do so there was a wall it did not look important it was built of uncut rocks, roughly mortared an adult could look right over it and even a child could climb it where it crossed the roadway instead of having a gate it generated into mere geometry a line an idea of boundary but the idea was real it was important for seven generations there had been nothing on the world more important than that wall like all walls it was ambiguous to faced what was inside and what was outside dependent on which side of it you were on I think that's just a really powerful way of thinking about our place in the world and how everything we do we do through a lens of perspective of the society that we're in and again for this visitor from an anarchist society going into a more structured society it's a huge culture shock and I feel this is kind of terrifying but possibly closer to the way that our world works so there is no way to act rightly with a clear heart on Earth there is nothing you can do that Prophet does not enter into and fear of loss and the wish for power you cannot say good morning without knowing which one of you is superior to the other or trying to prove it you cannot act like a brother to other people you must manipulate them or command them or obey them or trick them you cannot touch another person yet they will not leave you alone there is no freedom it is a box Uras is a box a package with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities and you open the box and what is inside it a black cello full of dust and a dead man a man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others I have been in hell at last this hour is right hell is Uras so that brings me on to the next thing I'm going to talk about which is oh okay okay the next I'm going to talk about really quickly is another story which is it's in the short story collection I really recommend all of her short stories they're brilliant sorry the ones who walk away from Omalus and again it's considering the idea about how societies are built on compromises I don't want to spoiler exactly what the compromise is but if it describes a utopian society with a terrible cost and how if you dig deep enough there will always be a cost so yeah I think I'll leave it to that for the moment so I was just going to talk very quickly about some of her non-fiction oh hang on sorry I messed that up let me just skip very quickly so just a couple of other things why she was really cool she refused to blurb a book that was an all male anthology of writers she just said no gentlemen I don't belong here and she was quite activist in a lot of ways and just to cut this is coming back to the dispossess of not the left hand of darkness so when she wrote the left hand of darkness she used a male pronoun as default and this opened up discussion about that and at first she was a bit defensive and then she thought about it some more and she said no I still dislike using invented pronouns but I don't dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun of he which does in fact exclude women from discourse and she said we should use they, them and their as a default pronoun and in thinking about that she said well I didn't want to rewrite the book because I wanted to let it stand for itself but I happy to document my change but keep the old book to sort of stand as the evidence and in thinking about this further she wrote a later essay where she actually went as far as to say I am a man and was talking about how the only kind of person to be was a man and she was trying to be this male kind of person it's a really great essay I really recommend checking it out if you haven't read it so I'm going really quickly because I'm just trying to skimpast these things again this speech as well I think is really really lovely so it was a speech to women at this Brynmore College and she's just talking about the power of women's voices and telling women to go out there and erupt and it's just really beautiful and a couple of years ago she was talking at this speech at the National Book Awards so she was that and this at this quote on the kind of power of resistance and change and the power of art to invoke resistance and change is just really really lovely and it's something that I come back to a lot because things feel hopeless and reading something like this really makes me feel that there's hope in the world so the title from this talk came from this interview that I read with her where she had some really great answers to a lot of questions but this is probably my favourite answer to an interview question ever which was if you could make a change to anything you've written what would it be and she said in the dispossessed I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns I knew about them all along but I never fitted them into the book and I don't know I just thought that was really really adorable and I was like I already love you as a writer and I love to do a little bit more as a writer reading that so yeah thank you that's probably my favourite I would say the dispossessed that's my favourite book or the left hand of darkness but you can get both of them in the collected heinish novels and stories and it's really interesting to see how she's developed oh and Leckie, I think that's a pointer so she said in various interviews that she doesn't regard herself as an anarchist at all so she said oh I'm just a bourgeois housewife I don't think I'm qualified to be an anarchist I've just read some theory so but I mean I think yeah I think it's more like she doesn't necessarily come down on the side of capitalism or anarchism it's more like we just need to be curious and keep trying to change and try to iterate things and not get stuck in rigid dogmas I don't know if that really answered your question yes yes no absolutely yeah no absolutely I didn't really go into that at all but yeah absolutely I think it does yes yes yes thank you all for coming