27 de dezembro de 2013

Ursula K. Le Guin: "I didn’t just arrive during a transition — I was one of the writers who started it" (entrevista)

Aos 84 anos de idade e com uma carreira na ficção especulativa com várias décadas, Ursula K. Le Guin é com toda a justiça uma das gigantes no género. Os seus primeiros romances de ficção científica, publicados a partir da segunda metade da década de 60, contribuiriam de forma indelével para a grande revolução operada pela "New Wave"; e livros como The Left Hand of Darkness e The Dispossessed são dos mais populares e influentes livros do género. Na fantasia, o seu legado assenta sobretudo (mas não apenas) no mundo secundário de Earthsea, o vasto arquipélago onde a autora colocou personagens memoráveis, como Ged e Tenar, e escreveu aventuras formidáveis com reflexões importantes sobre o poder e o privilégio. Em entrevista a R.K. Troughton para o blogue da Amazing Stories, Le Guin fala da sua carreira literária, da sua entrada no género numa época em que este era dominado por homens, e sobre escrita propriamente dita. Alguns excertos:
R.K. Troughton/ Amazing Stories: Science fiction started as a genre of hard science. You started publishing during a transitional phase for the industry, when many authors were exploring a broader spectrum of ideas. You focused more on sciences like anthropology, psychology, and sociology rather than chemistry, astronomy, and physics. While realism explores some of the subject matters you were writing about, you created fantastic elements to serve as your tapestry. What makes speculative fiction the perfect canvas for your imagination?

Ursula K. Le Guin: I didn’t just arrive during a transition — I was one of the writers who started it. We moved SF away from being fixated on the “hard” sciences, but that’s only part of it. SF was a white-male-dominated field of adventure stories of an intellectual or imaginative kind, sometimes brilliantly conceived, often badly written. We raised the standards and made it into the complex, inclusive, prejudice-challenging, ever- changing kind of literature it is at its best today.

I can’t tell you why most of my fiction is imaginative rather than realistic; it’s just the way my mind works. Physics tell us us how the universe works, and that’s grand, but also we’re human, and the the social sciences are a goldmine of ideas for any writer interested in how being human works.

(...)

RKT/AS: Beyond the jacket of your book, the world was working through its own gender revolution when you first started publishing. The science fiction industry was no different. You served as one of the trailblazers of the feminine voice in a male dominated industry. What obstacles did you face when you were first publishing, and how did you overcome and persevere?

UKL: The first SF editor who bought a story from me was Cele Goldsmith Lalli, at Fantastic — one of the first woman editors in the genre. Don Wollheim and Terry Carr at Ace Books, who bought my first books, weren’t afraid of women, as some editors were. I didn’t try to overcome the misogynists in the genre. Why bother? I just avoided them, or outwrote them. Having a marvelous agent, Virginia Kidd, who worked on the same principles, was a tremendous advantage.

RKT/AS: While The Left Hand of Darkness is truly amazing, many believe your novel The Dispossessed to be even better. As evidence, it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and stands beside some of the greatest works of any genre in the last century. Where did the idea for the book come from, and how did you go about writing this legendary novel?

UKL: Part of the origin of Left Hand came from thinking about what kind of people would never have had a war. I kept on thinking about war and peace, about violence and nonviolence, and reading about it. I read Gandhi, and then the anarchists such as Kropotkin and Goodman. I found nonviolent anarchism a very useful way of thought, that fit in with the Taoism I picked up as a kid. And nobody had ever written an anarchist utopia. So I did.

(...)
A entrevista completa pode (deve) ser lida aqui.


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