a birthday and a quote
Sep. 11th, 2005 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eldritchhobbitHappy birthday to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
blktauna! May you and your copy of the Necronomicon have a most splendid day, and many, many more!
And a quote for the day, directly relevant to the recent discussions about dystopias and post-cataclysmic fiction.
On Utopia and Dystopia:
To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.
Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader's present, actual world.
-Ursula K. Le Guin, from "A War Without End" in The Wave in the Mind
blktauna! May you and your copy of the Necronomicon have a most splendid day, and many, many more!And a quote for the day, directly relevant to the recent discussions about dystopias and post-cataclysmic fiction.
On Utopia and Dystopia:
To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.
Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader's present, actual world.
-Ursula K. Le Guin, from "A War Without End" in The Wave in the Mind
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-09-11 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-11 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 03:26 am (UTC)some aca buddies and I were just talking about SF and its revolutionary / radical potential, partic with regard to engaging with issues of racialisation and established patterns of relating to various communities. rhubarb rhubarb. much mention was made of octavia butler and nalo hopkinson.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-14 04:32 pm (UTC)A couple more I like:
We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time. – Damon Knight
That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have. – Frederik Pohl