Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)

Anybody can hear a story, or read a myth, that hits something deep within them. The ones you remember are the ones that reflect something deep within yourself, which you probably can’t put into words, except maybe as a myth.

An awful lot of writing seems to be sitting and staring.

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Well, there are several things involved here. One is that science fiction allows a fiction writer to make up cultures, to invent—not only a new world, but a new culture. Well, what is a culture besides buildings and pots and so on? Of course it’s ideas, and ways of thought, and legends. It’s all the things that go on inside the heads of the people.

He’s permanent—and science fiction publishers, particularly the paperbacks, aren’t used to thinking in terms of permanence. They think in terms of throwaways. And so that’s what’s got to be changed.

Actually I’m terrible at plotting, so all I do is sort of put people in motion and they go around in a circle and they generally end up about where they started out. That’s a Le Guin plot.

It’s a Gordian knot which I have no wish to cut. It’s obvious there’s going to be no future without the past and no past without the future. I get rather Chinese about the whole thing.

Again, it seems rather immodest, but science fiction and anthropology do have a good deal in common. As the cultural anthropologist must resist and be conscious of his own cultural limitations, and bigotries, and prejudices—he can’t get rid of them, but he must be conscious of them—I think a science fiction writer has a responsibility to do the sam

Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want—or for what the State or the advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility