A tribute to Ursula Le Guin

I've been neglecting this blog for awhile because the continuing research and revision of my book has been absorbing all my thoughts. But now and then some bit of ‘outside’ reading knocks my socks off, as they say. The other night it was a story of Ursula K. Le Guin's, in her collection The Birthday of the World.

Le Guin's best work (for me anyway) is what i call fictional anthropology. Each of us is immersed in our own culture, and the only way to get some perspective on it is to encounter a different one. Leguin learned this as a child growing up among anthropologists, but must have realized that the genuine encounter depends on your ability to imagine the possibility of people thinking and acting in very different ways, for very different reasons, from those you have taken for granted. Whether this possible otherness has been realized by an actual culture on this planet is not all that important. What counts is that the possibility feels genuine, feels like a life you could be living in other circumstances.

Le Guin's command of imaginative but plausible detail, along with the eloquence and elegant simplicity of her language, make her imaginary worlds seem real enough to care about. But best of all, the reader cares because he sees these alternative cultures from the inside, and not as a detached observer. This is what makes it possible to think and feel outside the familiar box of your own culture. And this in turn gives you a feel for something deeper than opinions and convictions, something closer to the core sense of being alive.

The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick

The novel is not my favorite literary form, as the payoff in esthetic pleasure or insight rarely justifies the time it takes to read one (or so it seems to me anyway). When i do curl up with a novel it's usually something by an author i've been reading for 30 or 40 years without being often disappointed. One of those is Philip K. Dick, whose reputation is still growing 25 years after his death (thanks in part to some film adaptations (my own favorite being Linklater's A Scanner Darkly).

Without even trying to say what it is about Dick's work that keeps me coming back for so many years, i'd like to put in a word for The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, one of his last works, which for some reason i'd missed until now. It's unusual, for Dick, in that it has no science-fiction elements at all. (It's set in the San Francisco Bay Area during the time when he lived there, and the first-person narrator works in a record store, as he did.) Most of his novels and stories use SF motifs, especially simulated humans and alternate realities, to explore the human psyche while keeping the reader ontologically off balance, as it were. This one proves that he didn't need the SF trappings to spin a compelling psychological/philosophical yarn. And much of it throws a strong light on the triadic relationship among books, readers and reality—which my own work in progress is also about, to some extent.

If you're interested in the early Christian period and the apocryphal scriptures of that time, as Dick was in his final period (e.g. VALIS and The Divine Invasion), i would especially recommend this one as a novel well worth spending a night or three on. It might even change your life, as a scripture should … or maybe show you why your life doesn't really change …