"spike the canon"

ursula k le guin's norton book of science fiction, reactions to

she’s just smushing them if u think about it

Back in June—remember June? I sure don’t—I mentioned discovering a review calling Ursula K. Le Guin’s Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990 “a masterpiece of totalitarian propaganda.” This reaction was intriguingly over-the-top. But the review, published in the British zine Foundation, took a bit of effort to track down. Eventually I found the right copy of Foundation for sale in New Zealand and after the now usual nail-biting about tarrifs, it got through. So here’s a little bit about it. What follows is probably going to be quite niche even for people interested in this subject. Given that it is going to mostly be talking about a review that’s not online of a book that’s out of print, I’ve done my best to keep it comprehensible.

Some notes before we get into it, though. First, Slusser mentions at the beginning of the review that he unsuccessfully pitched a Norton Anthology of science fiction four years before this one came out. Le Guin mentions at the beginning of her introduction to the book that she was approached to do this. So, in short:

i love this image more every time i use it

I’m being a little flippant (what? you couldn’t tell?) but you cannot underrate the level of envy Le Guin provoked in some other writers because she was successful, admired inside and outside of the field, and also had what seemed to be a happy and fairly conventional life. Having two of these three things, sure, but having all three? That’s just greedy.¹ You can’t console yourself by thinking “sure, Ursula has it all, but we all know she’s totally miserable.” She just has it all! …that’s allowed?

Most people kept this sort of thing to their private correspondence but it leaks out and this review is definitely a place where you can see some leaking. However, being an envious hater doesn’t stop somebody from being perceptive.

Note two. There were two other editors who worked on this book—Brian Attebery and Karen Joy Fowler. Slusser basically treats these people as if they did not exist. In considering the review it’s hard not to mirror him. But obviously, they did exist. Do exist, as they are both still alive.

Note three. From browsing my issues, Foundation is what you might call a quasi-academic publication. I am not a fan of this sort of neither fish nor fowl writing and tend to experience it, as a reader, as a endless series of somebody pulling rank on me, an experience I do not have with actual academic writing. So just as Le Guin rather puts Slusser’s back up, he does that to me. Sometimes it is I who is the ho that is mad.

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Part One: We Call It Woke Now Grandpa

Slusser’s overarching criticism is that Le Guin is trying to remake the science fiction canon in her own, “politically correct” image, and by doing this for a Norton collection, one which will be assigned in schools and stay in print forever, she is playing dirty. This collection presents an image of science fiction that is false; it is what Le Guin would like science fiction to be, but not what it is. This is the charge.

So: is Le Guin “politically correct”? Sure. Le Guin says flatly she and her co-editors did not include any story in the collection that struck her as bigoted and that she finds bigotry an aesthetic flaw as well as an ethical one. It’s also true that Le Guin laments the lack of racial diversity in the book. These admissions can both go into the evidence file for Ursula K. “P.C.” Le Guin.

The problem for Slusser, however, is that the anthology that actually does exist is not as one-note as he needs it to be. From his characterization, you would sort of expect every story here to end with somebody saying “science is male and therefore bad.” That’s not really the case; there is more going on in the anthology than he can really admit. He concedes out that sure, Connie Willis wins awards, so maybe she belongs here, fine, whatever, but then so does Orson Scott Card.

But… Card is in the anthology! So then he has to add: but the story representing Card is not his usual kind of thing and anyway Le Guin is also too dumb to understand the story and thus fails to notice that Orson Scott Card is not politically correct. In fact there are a number of stories in this anthology that Slusser seems to think Le Guin is too dumb to understand or else she wouldn’t have included them,² rather than taking their inclusion as evidence he himself might be mistaken.

Slusser’s readings of individual stories in the anthology are often unconvincing. Here he is on the Willis story, for instance:

There are two notable stories of science destroying the scientist in this volume. Connie Willis’s “Schwarzschild Radius” proceeds by crosscutting between the laboratory where scientists discuss the theory of black holes, and a World War I battlefield where the flesh-and-blood Schwarzschild is seen to experience his own personal black hole, his own radius of destruction from which once trapped there is no escape: “Muller tries to dig the wireless out with his crushed arm so he can send a message that nobody can hear... and in the very center Schwarzschild burns himself out, the black hole at his center imploding him cell by cell, carrying him down into darkness, and us with him.” The story seems to gloss the separation of levels implied in Pascal’s statement “le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point?” We can cite the final lines of the story, spoken by the incredulous laboratory scientist: “I mean, can you imagine trying to figure out something like the theory of black holes in the middle of a war and while you were suffering from a fatal disease? And just think, when he came up with the theory, he didn’t have any idea that black holes even existed.” Human suffering is placed in the balance with rational speculation, and the latter is found wanting. Why bother with black holes “out there,” when we cannot control the black holes of war and human suffering we create here on earth, and which require heart and not reason to fix them? The frame of Le Guin’s anthology forces a comparison. Where the old sf would have seen in Schwarzschild’s situation a tribute to the scientific mind, does not the new sf (represented by frequent Hugo-winner Willis) move to a higher level of comprehension, where the rational act is now a sign of human absurdity? But is it not also possible that science (consider only Voltaire’s response to Pascal) has subsumed (if not resolved) the dilemma of heart and mind, able to look out from short and brutish lives, without fear and trembling, toward the infinite? Might not sf have followed suit? The question is unanswerable in the context of the Norton Book.

Now I wish there were a copy of the story I could link to, because the first thing that has to be said here is that Slusser summarizes “Schwarzschild Radius” incorrectly. The cross-cutting is not between a lab and the World War I trench; it’s between a modern-day biographer (“Travers”) interviewing a contemporary of Schwarzschild (“Dr. Rottschieben”) at a nursing home and the World War I trench. Schwarzschild is not destroyed by his work, even metaphorically, but by an incurable autoimmune disease that is causing the skin to fall off of his body, which is what that reference to being imploded cell by cell is all about. Neither of the quotes provided indicate an attitude toward science of why bother, and reading the story just makes Slusser’s treatment seem like a product of not reading, rather than reading.³

“Schwarzschild Radius” has the same kind of gloomy humanism that I find in a lot of Willis’s work: we are all going to die but we will produce some things that will survive.⁴ If you time travel back to the site of some enormous catastrophe there is nothing you can do to alter what will happen. You will not save a person and you will not save a building. Nevertheless, your activity is not pointless. Here, Schwarzschild is dying a horrible death. Still, he discovered black holes. There is certainly an emotional resonance Willis builds between the idea of the event horizon and the experience of “being in a collapsing trench.” From his own perspective, Rottschieben has never left the trench and to him the experience of the past co-exists with this present day experience at the nursing home. You can understand this literally or as a metaphor for trauma (or dementia). However, the science is what in fact escapes this “event horizon,” even though that seems impossible. That “can you imagine” line should be read as delivered with awe and not as a sneer (which is how Slussel glosses it).

Surely, at some point Le Guin’s inclusion of stories that do not seem to fit her agenda—or the degree to which a story like “Schwarzschild Radius” is not a didactic story about how science is a waste of time—might indicate that she has a different agenda than the one Slusser has chosen for her. Not being bigoted is a test one passes for some end. The end here is, I will venture, not to assemble a collection of science fiction stories that say science is bad. If a lot of the “hard” science fiction in this book is depressing, I feel that is partly a tendency of “hard” science fiction. Is “The Cold Equations” a story of scientific know-ho and can-do? I think… “no.”

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Part Two: More of A Pyrite Age If You Ask Her

So if Grandma’s slipper, in a human face, forever, is not exactly the game here, what is? Le Guin’s most controversial choice is not about what she puts in but what she leaves out: she starts the clock for this book in 1960, thus cutting out almost the entire “Golden Age” of science fiction. She also states bluntly that she will not entertain criticisms of this decision. The criteria are the criteria. Why does she do this? Well, it’s a way of saving space, but also… I mean, she doesn’t like it. Le Guin makes her dislike of the “Golden Age” clear repeatedly in her writing about science fiction.⁵ So she limits the project and she doesn’t have to deal with it.⁶

Is there an argument to be made here that she shouldn’t have done that? Sure. You could say that an anthologist, even if she doesn’t call her book an anthology, has a responsibility above her personal taste. Furthermore (and this would be closer to Slusser’s position) you can’t make a collection of Stories I Think Are Neat for Norton. It’s too big a deal.

I can see this point of view, and if this weren’t a collection that probably only exists because of “Le Guin” being a marketable name, I might even share it. But if you’re approached to do a collection like this because Norton is gambling that the “Le Guin” imprimatur will sell copies, then it seems a little perverse not to get to use that imprimatur for your own aesthetic purposes. Surely there is little point to having Le Guin specifically do a collection of what other people agree to be significant stories. She writes a very thorough account of what she and her co-editors did and why in her introduction and if some hypothetical future audience refused to pay attention I don’t think you can really say it’s her fault or even her problem.⁷

You could also say: Le Guin is just wrong about the “Golden Age.” If she’d been willing to extend her range, she could have easily found stories that she deemed good stories and worthy of inclusion. Here, I’d agree. There was plenty of garbage published during the Golden Age, because there is always plenty of garbage, but there was plenty of great fiction, too. Even Heinlein, who is a writer whose work she definitely did not like, produced stories she could have put into her anthology without grading on a curve (such as “—All You Zombies—”).

Le Guin could easily have added—let’s say—ten stories to the beginning of the book without compromising her aesthetic standards. And there are definitely enough stories from the eighties that could stand to be cut. Nevertheless, any hypothetical Le Guin list of “good Golden Age stories” might bear little resemblance to a list put together by somebody for whom the Golden Age was indisputably a Golden Age. For Le Guin, science fiction’s “Golden Age,” if it has one, starts in the 1960s.⁸ This is the moment it all came together. Any Golden Age stories Le Guin likes will be… the kind of stories she likes. If you have a problem with her taste you will continue to have that problem. After all, few science fiction stories strike just one tone about scientific progress or alien encounters, and so you can always extract evidence of a covert agenda. A Norton collection that includes Asimov’s “Nightfall” and a Kuttner/Moore collaboration like “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and “—All You Zombies—” surely can also be accused of being P.C. “Nightfall” shows scientific rationality failing in the face of experience, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” depicts children encountering technology and becoming post-human (at least to their parents), and “—All You Zombies—” is about changing sex and impregnating yourself so that you will give birth to yourself.⁹

But here’s the thing, I guess: saying a story is good or bad is a critical judgment, no? You can certainly say she’s wrong. Still, at some point the reason somebody puts together a collection of stories is because they have developed opinions about what does and does not belong there. And Le Guin’s criteria are aesthetic. She is uninterested in including a story because it or its author has some kind of significance in the field:

Our chronological ordering of the book may lend it a spurious air of historical intent. Excellent, scholarly, historical collections of science fiction exist; we intend no competition with them. We gave ourselves the freedom not to include any story because it was “important,” or “seminal” (or ovular, as the case may be), or typical of its period, or for any reason other than its inherent excellence as science fiction and as story.

And that gets us to the more interesting thing she is doing, which Slusser doesn’t see, and which seems much more fruitful to argue about. When she says she values art, Slusser assumes she is lying. Le Guin surely knows (he says) that art is “politically suspect” and since Slusser has already assumed that this entire collection is a desperate P.C. ploy to get in good with the academy, or whatever, her use of this term can’t be sincere. Invoking art in this context is (if I follow him) a fake way of getting rid of stories she finds politically bad. Unsurprisingly, I do not personally think that Le Guin is a pathological liar who can’t read, so I don’t agree with him. I think what she is doing here is something that is very idealistic—she is actually trying to put together a collection of stories that are the best stories.

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Part Three: The Pure Quintessence

In 1998, Le Guin sent a speech to Readercon titled “Spike the Canon.” (You can find it here, in the Readercon 10 PDF.) In it, Le Guin worries that science fiction will essentially settle for its own minor canon. She summarizes her own relationship with the idea of the canon like so:

Feminist literary theory has both clarified and complicated my own understanding of what “genre” is (though nothing will ever make it a word one can really pronounce comfortably in English). I was brought up of course to believe that the Canon of English Literature — what they taught in English courses — was the best fiction and poetry in our language. Uppity women¹⁰ have induced me to see that Canon as a selection from the best — a group of works passed through a filter designed to admit only certain kinds of writing by certain kinds of writer, and to exclude the rest as inferior, minor, secondary, of political interest, of historical Interest, of interest to women, for children, or otherwise qualified. Here then in the curricular flask we have the distillate, the Great Tradition, the pure quintessence; and over there somewhere in a lot of little bottles and old Mason jars is all the other stuff, including all genre fiction.

Those who use the canonical filter maintain that it is an aesthetic one, that it ranks artistic merit. Those of us who have stopped using it did so because we consider it to be less aesthetic than political, and do not like its politics.

The first part of what Le Guin is saying is familiar: you are brought up with an idea of the canon as the best of the best, and then you realize this is not really true.¹¹ Most people who have undergone this process progress from this moment to either rejecting canonicity entirely (something I’m not sure it’s actually possible to do) or embracing a plurality of canons.

Le Guin, however, basically says: the ideal of the best of the best is the right ideal, and what you want to do is push for that outcome, insisting on “only appropriate aesthetic criteria in choosing what is to be taught, while refusing the agenda which distorts artistic values in order to support certain vested interests; or by identifying the vested interests as such and using other criteria — equally but differently political — to choose and to judge literature by.” She admits that these two paths are “quixotic” and “difficult,” respectively, but they are preferable to simply accepting “minor” status.

So the Norton Book, which she doesn’t mention, is her big attempt to do precisely this thing, to create a book of stories that are there because they are the best stories, and for no other reason. She freely admits the political and ethical aspect of what makes something a “best” candidate, though in her case the political aspect is largely about absence (a story that is not racist) more than a prescriptive program. But ultimately the argument she’s advancing is aesthetic and not about internal significance. Significance is a matter of literary history. This is the book you would give to somebody who wanted to know what all that science fiction stuff was about.

So… would you?

Maybe. I mean, it would depend on who I was giving it to. I wouldn’t give this collection to a child, for instance—the stories are very much aimed at adults. If I gave this to somebody as a present, I would probably include the caveat that I think Le Guin is unfair to pre-1960 science fiction and that the collection is weirdly lopsided (about half of it is from the eighties). (Possibly I’d include another book with my present.) Slusser aside, it’s also true that many people found (and find) this collection sort of mystifying. You can find a review from Publisher’s Weekly that also basically comes down to: it’s fine, but why didn’t Le Guin pick the big and obvious stories here?

And I’m not in total sympathy with the project. I’ll admit that as things stand, I believe somewhat more in the plurality of canons than in Le Guin’s idealistic, purer alternative. I don’t think you can simply cross “significance” off the list of qualities under consideration when you’re talking about what makes up a canon. (However, in a collection of stories you’re putting together, you can do whatever the hell you want.) Finally, while “The Women Men Don’t See” probably is the Tiptree story, and I’d accept its inclusion on those grounds, I don’t know if I actually think it’s the best. I think that might be “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats.”

On the other hand, there aren’t a lot of stories in it where I think “this is just kind of bad.” (There are a few.) Le Guin’s approach means writers who were clearly talented but just not quite able to make a career can be included, such as Sonya Dorman. She even managed to find a Zenna Henderson story that I kind of liked. (Sorry, Hendersonheads.) (Are there any Hendersonheads?) While she didn’t pick the Le Guin story featured here, I was personally happy that it wasn’t “Omelas.” So I basically feel like, I am glad she made this collection. It’s a good collection and I enjoy reading it in the evenings. Even if I do not totally agree with her reasoning, it is a distinctive collection you would not have gotten from another group of people.

And after all, it is easy to find out what the “significant” works in the history of American science fiction are, because the Hugos and the Nebulas have done a better job at keeping track of those books than the Pulitzer Prize has for novels. The big, significant stories will be anthologized over and over. In the end, I would rather have a collection of stories Ursula K. Le Guin thinks are neat.

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Coda: Is There Any Reason To Care About This?

Well… no, not really. (She says, several thousand words later.)

One of the weird things about researching my book is that I dig through a lot of spats that nobody involved, if still alive, probably remembers. Imagine the single most embarrassing bit of drama you’ve been involved in online. Now imagine being interviewed about it in fifty years. If people do remember these things, they might be mortified. Or they might feel exactly the same way. Or they might be like… huh, I sure had more energy then… I made some points tho. Slussel is dead. Who knows how he thought about this, or if he thought about it at all after he filed his review.

For me, however, part of what’s interesting about going back to this is a sense I have that some of Le Guin’s readers have such a strong reaction to what they think she wants to be doing that they miss what she’s actually doing. She is a writer who attracts intense projection from others as well as (frequently self-righteous) demands (about the kind of person they want her to be, think she wants to be, think she actually is, and so on). Sometimes the difference between what the Le Guin in somebody’s head is doing and what’s there on paper isn’t very big. Sometimes, it’s massive. This is one of those times.

1. In Oregon I read a letter where one writer went through the opening of A Wizard of Earthsea line by line to prove it was badly written. He could not just copy / paste, like today’s haters. He had to type every line of that up on his typewriter. The result was like watching somebody try to do the Mystery Science Theater routine to like… I don’t know. What’s a good movie. Are there any. Have they cracked that yet.

2. Relevant passage:

In her Norton Book of Science Fiction, Le Guin has surely succeeded in giving this genre a canon of texts. The tragedy is that this canon in no way reflects the shape of sf in terms of its long and complex historical development. Empowered by the myth of “maturity”—her expressed sense of the need for sf to grow up—Le Guin gathers a series of stories, many from within the historical stream of sf and a number from without, and legislates a canon into existence. The authority of her canon is, in addition, reinforced in the eyes of the academy by presenting it as postmodernism's changeling. What is really enforced rupture of genre and history can be seen, then, as rightful metamorphosis, where the old sf cocoon “naturally” gives birth to the postmodernist butterfly-now a form beautiful and right-thinking, whereas (as in a fairy tale scenario) the ugly form of Science must vanish forever. This is indeed a fantasy, but a dangerous one. For it creates a structure of authority in which stories like Resnick’s “Kirinyaga,” or Sterling's “We See Things Differently,” or even Card’s “America,” each plucked from the complex eddies of the sf stream, can be held up as models of what sf ought to be. Indeed, each appears to exemply the ultimately satisfying scenario for the politically-correct academic, in which the white writer (masochistically perhaps) envisions a world where tables are turned, and racially and sexually oppressed peoples take the upper hand amidst the ruins of Science. Such expiatory dramas (examples of what Pascal Bruckner calls “the tears of the white man,” are what is desired of sf. But is it what Resnick and Sterling are writing? The ardour of Le Guin's wish for a better world, where such “equality” and justice reign, may not have been, say, Sterling’s motivation. Tom Shippey, in a subtle analysis precisely of Sterling's use of semiotic ghosts, depicts an author much closer to the old sf centre of power and hybris, this time seen in cyberpunk’s dazzling manipulation of power and hybris, this time seen in cyberpunk’s dazzling manipulation of the trope of multinationalism. Sterling’s narrator claims the power to alter historical situations at will, substituting bad for good and vice versa, but without any genuine sense of pragmatic realities and responsibilities. The ultimate insensitivity of his narrator to historical fact provides an ironic mirror, indeed, for Le Guin's totalitarian moralising, and that of the politically correct ideologues she apes. The result, irony of ironies, is blindness to real nature of the material she presents, and to the reality of sf, for better or worse. Card's “America” is a final example. Here thinly-veiled LDS propaganda—in no way a model for political correctness—is presented as a “comeuppance” story, this time where Native Americans reclaim their land after the fall of the white invaders. Not only however are the last and only whites on the continent Mormons, but it is a Mormon male that impregnates Virgin America, reinforcing the old hegemony all over again. The moral is: try and turn a living literary form into propaganda, and it will turn around and bite you.

3. In Michael Swanwick’s essay “A User’s Guide to the Post Moderns,” I found that “shortly after [Connie Willis] won two Nebulas in a single year, there was a tempest-in-a-teapot controversy over whether or not a Nebula winner should be allowed to wear Peter Pan collars.” Unfortunately I cannot find a picture of Connie Willis in a Peter Pan collar so her own HOES MAD will have to wait.

4. Caveat that Willis is very productive so she has written a lot I have not read.

5. In the introduction she has a bit of a survey of the past. This survey includes: Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and Stanley Weinbaum. I mention this mostly because it indicates that if she had had a Heinlein story in this book, it would have been “Waldo.”

6. I assume that this is also why the book is the Norton Book of…, not the Norton Anthology of….

7. From the vantage point of the actual future, Slusser’s feeling that this anthology will perpetuate a false canon has turned out to be unfounded. This anthology is out of print. I’m sure lots of people own it, but it is no more authoritative than any other science fiction anthology. Of which there are, approximately, eight hundred million. Poetry aside, science fiction has to be the subset of writing most obsessed with anthologizing itself.

8. Le Guin, as a critic and as a reader, often strikes me as a mixture of “uncompromising in her judgments” and also “highly conflict-averse.” She is happy to talk in broad strokes about what she doesn’t like but dislikes getting specific, and even when she’s willing to get specific she can do it in a sort of a weird way. (One example: “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” uses a novel Le Guin was sent in the mail as a negative example… but she also never names the novel or the person who wrote it! She just says “before I go further I want to apologize to the author of the passage for making a horrible example of her.”)

I think this changed as she got older—and it might have changed completely by 1994—but designing her collection around a rule that meant she didn’t have to say any particular old beloved story was terrible seems like a product of these two qualities.

9. Dark Woke King Robert Heinlein strikes again.

10.

11. Probably not that many people are in this position these days, honestly, and I would say my main problem with what Le Guin is saying in this talk is that she was literally incapable of anticipating a certain kind of smug philistinism about the idea of reading older works.