I have been juggling too many different balls lately to keep them all in the air at once, and the Sunday Seven was one of the ones I let drop. But never fear. Like an ageing acrobat suddenly reinvigorated by memories of former glory, I find the old muscles still work. Expertly, I dart down to grab the Sunday Seven, somehow managing to keep all the other balls alive, and reintroduce it into my routine.
- At Worldbuilding and Woolgathering, Edmund penned a response to my thoughts about Gene Wolfe and 40K, suggesting that 40K can be understood as a saturnine setting - I commend the post most highly for its depth and insight. And it even has a competition in it. (True story: I once did some peer reviewing work for Oxford University Press and they paid me in books. One of the books I requested was Michael Ward's Planet Narnia, but they never sent it to me on the basis that it was a quasi-POD book and they would need a few more orders to come in before they did another print run. That was in 2013. I'm still waiting.)
- I enjoyed this old post that I came across about Ursula Le Guin's worldbuilding. Le Guin is hit-and-miss for me, but this post made me wonder if I ought to do a reassessment.
- Patrick Stuart has decided to pivot towards quality over quantity. I see what your strategy is, Patrick. In any case, he doesn't always post nowadays, but when he does, he posts things like this and this.
- I post this more out of curiosity than anything: a 2010 Cato Institute event on Robert Heinlein 'In Dialogue with His Century'.
- I can't remember if I have mentioned this on the blog before, but I recently re-encountered CJ Cherryh's writing advice page, and thought it might be of interest.
- John Howe's illustrations of Tolkien's work were absolutely foundational in attracting me to fantasy literature, so I enjoyed this interview I found with him on YouTube.
- On a similar note, here is an interview with Tony Diterlizzi, whose illustrations were also, well, foundational in attracting me to fantasy gaming.
For Le Guin as the article says, her writing is more thought experiments than anything else. Often a novel is too big to be sustained by a single thought experiment leaving me hungering for more (except with Earthsea and its lovely spare language). I prefer a lot of her short stories and novellas as they're short enough to not need more than a thought experiment.
ReplyDeleteI remember especially liking Paradises Lost by Le Guin about people living in a generation ship and dealing with being placeholder generations.
Yes, I like her short stories a lot too - I've got some collections of them. Earthsea never grabbed me.
DeleteSo, if OUP had sent you a copy it could be you producing rambling blog posts on Narnia and Medieval Cosmology? A charming coincidence!
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I suspect if you read the right bits of Lewis then pick over some material online, you will get the basic thrust of Planet Narnia pretty quickly. It's still an interesting book, of course, though I suspect part of its importance to me was as an introduction to certain fields.
I remember watching the BBC documentary back in the day but I can't really remember which of the planets marry up to which books. Now that I think about it, it's probably on YouTube......
DeleteIt isn't, but there are lots of Michael Ward interviews available.
DeleteBig LeGuin fan, only got into her in more recent years (despite enjoying the early Earthsea novels as a youth). The fourth Earthsea book (the one all the fan _boys_ seemed to hate) is great. The Annals of the Western Shore trilogy is also quite excellent. imo she's definitely a "gets better with age" writer in that I think her later work is almost always better than the earlier (but often better known) work.
ReplyDeleteI might re-read Earthsea some day. I read them all in my early 20s and never really felt myself to be enjoying them.
DeleteFor the first Earthsea book specifically I like it a lot because unlike a lot of her novels the thought experiment doesn't eat the story. Love the writing style in that it feels a bit like my favorite least florid old school myths/legends/sagas, a full rich story that's stripped away so much of the internal monolog and blow by blow description and dialogue that tends to bloat out a lot of modern fantasy, and just tells us the important shit that matters.
DeleteSome later Earthsea stuff feels like Le Guin lecturing me, "no Bosh, we will not be having fun magic wizard pulp adventures today, we have important thought experiments to do today." And then bopping me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
In a similar vein there is the newer book Gifts, absolutely adored the thought-experiment based worldbuilding (which makes for great D&D fodder), but could just feel her getting cranky at readers for expecting adventures and fun and rolling up the old newspaper...