S46354595’s Reviews > The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy > Status Update

Break just before an essay that I know is going to take my entire brain power to get through (it's long).

Advice from Ursula on how to write:
Just write. Go on. Sit down and write. Scary advice. She's very brave for telling everyone to write.

Skipped the essay about Philip K. Dick. I don't know his works well enough to appreciate that one. And by well enough I mean at all.

But at the same time, I appreciate what she did for fantasy and sci-fi. She was a radical writer at the time, writing about things no one else dared to write. Fantasy and sci-fi would not be the genre it is without her, and for that, I will always respect her legacy on the two genres. I wish she was still with us :(

I'm admittedly not the biggest fan of Ursula's books. Mostly because I'm living in a time so far advanced in regard to the issues she was talking about with her books, that I feel like her thought experiments are a little bit old hat. The best example of this is The Left Hand of Darkness. We've gone so far in gender studies beyond that, to the point that it's almost historical.

Ursula says she didn't write The Left Hand of Darkness just so she could write the line "The king was pregnant," but I don't know if I believe her. That's a really good line. I'd write an entire book around that line if I'd thought of it first. And immediately all the tiktok people would be going nuts over the new mpreg book and I'd be rich and famous instantly. Too bad she wrote that in 1969 and not 2025.

I'm stealing Ursula's idea which she stole from some guy who lied about anthropology. For what? The book I'm never going to finish writing.

Her book introductions discussing their themes in reflection after writing them are a lot more interesting than her musings about Jung or prose style. Also, I think I finally figured out which of her books was the one I heard described as she made up a fake Native American tribe but in space in a documentary about her right after she died. That google search got me nothing for years lol. Planet of Exile is the book.

Slipped an article on Virginia Woolf I won't understand because I have never read her books and have no intention to. Skimmed a chapter about how you have to create worlds that are accurate to science at least somewhat or it will be unbelievable, because I completely disagree with that sentiment and would like to throw that chapter in a fire.

An entire essay about prose? No thanks. I could not care less about the style you write in. Ursula sure does, but I don't. Maybe that's why I found her Earthsea books tedious when I tried to read them. In my opinion, an author who cares about prose above all else has missed the point. Your readers care what your story is, what you're trying to say, and why. Not how close to Shakespearean English you can get.