The LA Times‘ Scott Timberg is back, this time interviewing Ursula K. Le Guin:
Some of the SF faithful hold it against Le Guin that she prefers Borges and Virginia Woolf to what she calls the “white man conquers the universe” tradition of Robert A. Heinlein. Yet science fiction clearly fit this daughter of anthropologists. Here, she wrote, “All alternatives are thinkable. It’s not a comfortable, reassuring place. It’s a very large house, a drafty house. But it’s the house we live in.”
It isn’t easy to rise to Le Guin’s level of discourse, but I’d like to see more journalists make the attempt. I’m sorry to see her literary achievement jumbled together with nonsense like this. If a person isn’t a fan of somebody-conquers-the-universe fiction, all fine and good, but at least do the research and take notice that unlike most others in his generation who wrote military sf, Heinlein wrote about an ethnically diverse cast of universe-conquerors…
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Yet another journalist asking the question: “but if it is labeled as science fiction, how can it be any good…?”
Strikes me that this ‘interview’ struggles to create and reinforce that divide between genre and mainstream where none really exists; an article who’s conclusion was known well before the first question was asked.
No discernible need to include the dwindling audience (if there really is one) – other than as a plank in the contention that SF is dying off and therefore can safely be ignored.
The paragraph that mention’s LeGuin’s critique that there aren’t enough SF critics is ironic: I can’t imagine any educated interviewer writing up a piece like this.