4 de dezembro de 2013

Ursula K. Le Guin: When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating (entrevista)

Uma edição recente da The Paris Review teve em destaque uma entrevista com Ursula K. Le Guin - uma longa entrevista que incidiu sobre a sua longa carreira literária, na ficção especulativa e não só, sobre as suas influências, sobre as questões de género que atravessam a sua obra, e sobre a forma como as suas experiências pessoais e familiares se reflectiram no seu trabalho. É uma conversa longa, detalhada e bem merecedora de uma leitura atenta; Le Guin é indubitavelmente um dos grandes vultos da ficção especulativa contemporânea, e tem muito para dizer. Alguns excertos
The Paris Review: It seems to me there might be authors whose work is more accurately described by the term science fiction than your own—someone like Arthur C. Clarke, for example, whose work is often directly connected to a specific scientific concept. In your fiction, by contrast, hard science is perhaps less important than philosophy or religion or social science. 
Ursula K. Le Guin: The “hard”–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that. 
TPR: Might that be why your fiction has been more readily admired in so-called literary circles—that it’s more engaged with human complexity and psychology? 
UKL: It’s helped to make my stuff more accessible to people who don’t, as they say, read science fiction. But the prejudice against genre has been so strong until recently. It’s all changing now, which is wonderful. For most of my career, getting that label—sci-fi—slapped on you was, critically, a kiss of death. It meant you got reviewed in a little box with some cute title about Martians—or tentacles. 
(...) 
TPR: When you were starting out, did you know that you wanted to write speculative fiction? 
UKL: No, no, no. I just knew from extremely early on—it sounds ridiculous, but five or six—that writing was something I was going to do, always. But just writing, not any mode in particular. It started as poetry. I think I was nine or ten before I really wrote a story. And it was a fantasy story, because that’s mostly what I was reading. By then, my brother and I were putting our quarters together to buy, now and then, a ten-cent magazine called something like “Fantastic Tales”—pulp magazines, you know. 
(...) 
TPR: So, when you’d finished Left Hand of Darkness, you sensed that it was— 
UKL: Bigger. 
TPR: Bigger in what sense? 
UKL: It took on a lot more intellectual and moral ground, and it was quite experi- mental, after all. A novel about people with no gender is not your typical Ace Double. But I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn’t all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
A entrevista completa é imperdível - e pode ser lida aqui.


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