INTRO TO LE GUIN (Lu)

● Had you read anything written by Le Guin before the workshop?

Ursula Le Guinwas a very prolific writer, but is known mainly for her science fiction and
fantasy writings. One of the "problems" she faces as a writer is that she is put under the
label of "genre" - a diminishing way to refer to these as "minor" literature vs the "big" genres.
The same happens with children's literature, or young-adult.
Then there's also the other issue of "genre": her being a woman. To write in a male-
dominated literary scene, and to be able to change the narrative of the male hero, the
conqueror of worlds, etc. She is able to take criticism and change her own perspective, from
what was expected of SF, and the new way to look at it: putting women at the centre. She
also grows into the feminist movement.
In the 70's there's also this shift in SF writing: from "hard" SF to "soft" SF, this is called the
"New Wave". So there are a lot of writers with a new perspective: writers of colour, women,
etc.

An interesting fact that is mentioned in the documentary, is that her Father was an
anthropologist: this influenced her way of thinking and her pondering about the way
scientists think. In a way, in anthropology, we find again the questions of identity and
otherness. But also the contradictions of anthropology. Ursula's father was known for his
work with the last member of a native community in California: Ishi - He worked on gathering
information and building an archive to "save" that culture from disappearance, after this last
member died. But, the contradiction is that it was this same culture, the white culture, the
one that made the other disappear. So how far can you "save" that culture? Will that
desperate gesture make up for the previous destruction? These are all "moral dilemmas",
questions with no answers. I think that most of Le Guin's stories are made up with the
structure of a contradiction, of moral dilemmas.

One of the interesting things of reading her forewords to her stories and novels, is to see
how she understands her writing not from the labels, but the creation of words, "a world
builder". And these worlds are built from those unanswerable questions.

There are two "big" series that group most of her narrative: the EARTHSEA and the
HAINISH cycle.
The Hainish Cycle is made up of part of her SF stories and novels. The stories that we read
are all part of it. It is centered on the Ekumen, this peaceful interplanetary league. It is a
device to explore questions related to human collaboration, and alternatives to violence and
exploitation. It is also a way to explore the idea of ways to create utopian societies, the
possibilities and the problems along the way. This cycle is made up of very fragmentary
stories, and sometimes it is not clear if a story belongs to it or not. The chronology is also
purposely unclear; she is not interested in a "closed" map or time-line.

The Earthsea cycle is made up of "fantasy" novels, set in a world of magic and dragons. In
these novels, she explores the ideas of bad and evil, light and darkness, not as a binary
opposition, but as complimentary.

It is interesting to think about this idea of the map, when creating a world.
Min 8 del documental: Creation of Earthsea. Begins writing some stories, then pictures the
map and the archipielago, then writes the novel.

● How would you describe this map? What is the relationship between the drawing of
the space and the narrative form?
It is fragmentary: It allows us to tell different stories that may have disparate connections.

MAPS
As you probably know, maps are ideological representations. The confection of maps is one
of the main instruments that the dominant power has historically used for the utilitarian
appropriation of territories.

The history of cartography

The first maps included in the drawing the pictures of mythological animals, as a kind of
bestiary (bestiario). With the advance of science and the bourgeois instrumental reason, the
representation of space became less figurative and more abstract: the trick of humanism and
illuminism: the illusion that a more abstract and detached way of representation leaves the
subject aside from what it is representing. But the subject is there, with its interests.

In The practice of everyday life Michel de Certeau says that in medieval and renaissance
pictures represented a city through the perspective of an eye that didn’t exist. That fiction
transformed the medieval spectator or viewer into a god-like eye or a celestial eye. An
utopical perspective.

So we can think about the following questions:

● How can we represent space outside the instrumental reason?
● What is our utopical perspective? What is left for us to see? What is the point where
the eye meets imagination?
● How can we portray space outside the western logic of representation?

TRAVEL NARRATIVES
Maps are also fundamental for a genre called "travel narrative".
The stories we are going to discuss today can be read from the perspective of what is called
"travel accounts or narratives". This is a genre that has a long history, but it was
consolidated mainly in the XVIIIth century, along with the european expeditions to "discover"
new land. Of course, in SF this is also a major theme: the conquest of space, or new
planets.

● What do we expect from narratives of travel / travel narratives / travel accounts?

POST-COLONIALISM
Go over hegemonic narratives and discourses, re-read them with a critical perspective: to
focus on the subject of the enunciation, the context in which they were produced, and their
social and political functionality.
The authors of these narratives were: firstly, merchants, soldiers, missionaries or religious
men - they represent the three cornerstones of colonialism. Then, scientists were added to
this repertoire. These were white men, commissioned by the States, and in a way, the
founders of modern thought.

Mary Louise Pratt coined the idea of the "imperial eyes" to refer to these subjects of
enunciation / narrators / because the way they build knowledge and narrative was by
imposing their dominant perspective onto "the others".
She investigates how these signifying practices encode and legitimize the aspirations of
economic expansion and empire.
Europe develops a "planetary consciousness": the consolidation of bourgeois forms of
subjectivity and power, the inauguration of a new territorial phase of capitalism propelled by
searches of new materials, the attempt to extend trade. All founded on their "mission" to
civilize the "other": savage, immature, etc.

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La pregunta de Fisher (Mon)

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VASTER THAN EMPIRES AND MORE SLOW

First published in the collection New Dimensions (1971)

● Colonialism
- How can we link this story to the post-colonial criticism.

The story reproduces a structure of colonial subjects, with a specific mission.

Why are these characters chosen for the mission?

● Paranoid interpretation.
What if we are subjects of an experiment? and what experiment?

● Adventure vs psychological story

No hay aventura: hay promesa de aventura: pero es un relato psicológico. (Prólogo)
The hegemonic narrative of conquest breaks down / cracks
Other questions arise:
- How to live together?

● Empathy. Does it exist?

Ontology impossibility. Being a genre that deals with otherness

● The woods.
The title is a riddle: what is vaster than empires and more slow? The implicit answer is the
forest, and that is the focus of the story.

The woods through literature. Space for mutation - Ovidio - Shakespeare, Midsummer
Night's Dream - a place to explore being other, freedom, otherness.
FOREST → as a monster?
Is it possible to think about the forest as a device for declassification?

● Haraway: these characters have no intention of making kin with the forest.
In the end, Olsen tries to find a new life there.
He realizes that the only way to inhabit the planet is to become one with it, instead of
establishing a differentiation I / It - I / Them -

Un pensamiento del bosque: ways of communication with non human existence.

● The end of the story: the narration becomes a descriptive and objective report, its as
if it went outside from fiction to narrate, and it doesn't narrate the Olsen/Wood
experience.
The voice of colonialism re-appears: Osden was left as a "colonist" - we know that the status
he acquies in the planet is not that of a conqueror or colonist.
It shuts down what the story has in a way opened.
- Who is this voice in the end?

extra
Inteligencia artificial.

CITA: Vivían de la luz o de la muerte. No de la vida

PARADISE LOST (Lu)

It was first published in 2002 as a part of the collection The Birthday of the World.

The beginning:

“The blue parts were lots of water, like the hydro tanks only deeper, and the other colored
parts were dirt, like the earth garden only bigger. Sky was what she couldn´t understand”

On the one hand, the story begins by the description of space through a map: a model
globe. We are faced with the traditional way of knowledge: we learn by comparison: we try to
link what is familiar to those aspects that are unknown. The unknown is always tinted with
our universe of references.
On the other hand, we are faced with the problem of imagination that is central to the genre:
“Sky was what she couldn´t understand. Because you couldn’t see it, it was transparent, like
air”.
- How can we depict things where we have no references, which are the limits of
imagination?

“Alive in the world are human beings, plants and bacteria”

● Utopian world: self-contained - self-sustaining and self-renewing (no waste, etc)

- Contradiction between Freedom and Control / Utopia and Dystopia
In this spaceship there are no viruses, nothing that causes disease in human beings or in
plants: “There is no gangrene in the world, no blood poisoning. No colds in the head, no flu,
no plague, no thypus or tuerculosis or AIDS or dengue or cholera or yellow fever” The list
continues. It is an interesting list. In a way it makes us consciouss of the relationship
between humans and their enviroment, our enviroment, because we live in earth. Everyhting
that surrounds us, that affects our lives.

The story begins in the year 141.

Luis and Hsing.

- Zero Generation: Roxanna's diary: Scientists as Gods

- The History of Earth, and the story of Zero Gen, as a myth
- "prisoner's of their ancestor's desires"
Humans are subjects of an experiment.
Moments in which the "invisible" institutions (State, Science, Education) become visible.
Characters that question their own reality: Luis & the VR programme
"They were interpretations. The planet of origin was inaccessible to direct understanding"

- BLISS - what do you think of this cult or way of life?

Somehow, it is a way to "free" people from the commands of the Zero Generation
With what is real, create a new layer of significance.
What is the value of memory and history?
Is it necessary to have a bond with something that is no more?
Related to the question of LANGUAGE.

- Language
Bourdieu, Acontecimiento: la novedad, cuando algo nuevo irrumpe y quiebra cierto
paradigma de lo que unx considera como real.
Arrival to a new word.

"The great crowd sighed - a sound like a wind in a forest, but they did not know that,they
have never heard the sound of wind in a forest- they had never heard any sigh, any voice
but their own and the voices of machines"