Do you consider Ai a sexist?īut science fiction in 1968 wasn’t about women. In your 1976 essay “Is Gender Necessary?,” you refer to Genly Ai as “conventional” and “stuffy.” There has been some debate in the Book Club over Ai’s stereotyping of Estraven as female when he seems frail or vulnerable. That was just “research” and didn’t belong in the novel-only under it. I don’t think I left out anything, except my notes about language and the history of Karhide and Orgoreyn. And Terry Carr, the editor who accepted the book for Ace, a great editor with strong literary standards, didn’t say boo about them. I thought readers (or editors) would resent the hearth-tales as “literary.” But I knew they’d been essential to my understanding. so mightn’t they be also to the reader’s? So I put them back in where they seemed to fit best.
In 1968, science fiction was almost entirely straightforward stories conventionally told, with no interruptions to the Action. So I’d wait (fretting and worrying) and then one of these stories would come and somehow they were like a native of the country coming by and telling me, “Oh, see, this is how the land lies you head west for a while here.”Īt first, I wasn’t going to put them in the book at all.
I’d get somewhere and stop-where do I go next? If I just plunged ahead, I went wrong. It was as if I was finding my way in a country I knew only from an inadequate sketch-map. Those stories came when I’d get stuck writing the story, unsure where to take it next, how to get to where I knew it had to get. The book starts slow enough as it is!ĭid you write the hearth-tales concurrently with the rest of the story, or did they come after-or before? Were there any bits of folklore that you ended up leaving out of the novel? If so, why? No his slow efforts to get people to listen to him would have been pretty boring, I think.
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