NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY STEVE LAFRENIERE


I watched the Studio Ghibli anime of Tales From Earthsea—well, half of it. I thought it was pretty crappy but haven’t exactly worked out why. Then there was the Sci Fi Channel’s Earthsea series. Your opinion?

About the Sci Fi Channel travesty and the Studio Ghibli exploitation of Earthsea, I’ve written a good deal, which you can find on my website, so can I not repeat it here? I’ll just say this: Both films have only a superficial connection to the books, and both are quite stupid, though the Ghibli anime has some fine artwork.

I wrote a screenplay of the first two books of Earthsea with Michael Powell, who did Peeping Tom and Black Narcissus, in the 70s. Francis Ford Coppola was backing Michael then, and we tried hard to sell the screenplay, but the big studios were scared of Michael, either because he was old or because he had a reputation for shocking audiences. And none of them at that point had the dimmest idea of what fantasy is or how to film it. They treated us like we were lice.

Wow, you and Michael Powell. Perfect pairing, actually.

Michael pursued me for months, wanting to make an Earthsea movie, which I didn’t want, until finally I agreed to meet him. Then of course I fell in love with him. Most women did. He was a genius, and a lovely man. Working on the screenplay with him was a ball—and a whole education in screenwriting.

Have there been any worthy adaptations of your novels to the screen?

The only good adaptation to film I’ve had so far is the 1980 Lathe of Heaven from PBS. It’s still available on DVD. It was made on a budget that wouldn’t pay for the hairdressers’ doughnuts these days, but the screenplay’s adequate, the directing is intelligent, the acting is super, and the special effects are really something else. Like, the spaceships are lighted Frisbees, being hurled into the air by Ed Emshwiller’s son. I love it.

I have a friend who’s very into sf literature but won’t watch an sf movie. Snobby, or would you agree that the form doesn’t work well on film?

I’d send him to Brother From Another Planet, maybe? I love that movie. So many directors don’t understand or respect the book they’re working from, or, like Spielberg, don’t want to get beyond childish wish fulfillment, or they confuse sf with special effects and can’t match the effects the author’s words make happen inside your own head when you read.

No, they can’t. But why is that? Why do science-fiction ideas and narratives lend themselves so well to such old technologies as writing and reading?

Because the theater inside your head is just so much bigger and better equipped and has more up-to-date special effects than any studio in Hollywood.

Your father was the estimable anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Was he an influence?

I’ve used a lot of anthropological themes in my work and stolen lots of excellent ideas, though I’ve never studied anthropology methodically. I’d say I have certain interests my father had, and my mind works in certain ways his mind worked, which is probably heredity as much as influence. But he thought in facts and I think in fiction. He liked fantasy, by the way, the little there was back then: Dunsany, Eddison. I think he’d have liked Tolkien.

Your books have fascinating takes on castes, slavery, and racial conflict. Do you think we’ll eventually evolve past those limitations? I guess I’m wondering if you see yourself in any way as utopian.

I wrote two utopias. The Dispossessed takes place on another planet, where an emissary from earth describes it as hopelessly polluted, ruined by human greed and aggression. In Always Coming Home, earth was damaged the same way, but it’s set in the very far future, after the planet has mostly recovered and the human species has, perhaps, altered its nature slightly through natural selection—evolved past our present limitations, as you say—though that’s not certain. So I guess even if I write utopias I’m not a utopian. I try to hope. I can’t say much more than that.

What’s your take on magical realism? Where would you put it in relation to sf?

I think magical realism was invented to describe a certain kind of Latin American fiction—like García Márquez—at a certain period, when it was a useful term. Since then it’s been slung around so loosely it doesn’t mean anything in particular to me. I’ve written a lot that could be called magical realist—like all my Orsinian stories—but does calling them that explain much about them? It could be useful to call them that, though, because magical realism is considered literature, and so people who think sf or fantasy is subliterary might read them without losing their respectability. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be the cause of anybody losing their respectability.

The book that many consider your masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness, describes a planet of a-gendered humans. They become male or female for only a few days in every lunar cycle.

Four or five days. Like a menstrual period. And wow, they’re a lively four or five days!

That narrative conceit is not the central one in the book...

Well, it’s pretty near the center.

Your exploration of it is so up-to-date, it’s astonishing.

Thank you. It was fun.

Have you known transgendered or hermaphroditic people in your life?

The Left Hand of Darkness dates from 1968. Was “transgendered” even a word then? If I knew any intergender people—and no doubt I did but didn’t know it—they weren’t telling. It was a different world. Things people can take for granted now were considered unspeakable, or criminal, or imaginary. I asked a very nice doctor friend to read the book and tell me if he thought my Gethenians were physiologically possible. He read it and said, “Yes, this would be possible. But it is troubling, it is disgusting.” But let’s not feel all that superior to him now in our enlightened wisdom. How many states can a homosexual couple get married in? How many hermaphrodites live in the closet our society shuts them up in, the gender it forces on them?

How do you keep the immense scale of the books from wobbling out of control in your head? The sheer intensity of it would cause me to dream constantly of the alien worlds I’d created.

I’m a writer. My imagination works most actively and vividly in my writing, and the imagining and planning of it. I kind of live there, in the story, while it’s coming to be.

Yes, but for the Hainish Cycle of books you invented over 80 different inhabited worlds, each with its own cultures and physics...

No, no, thank you for saying so, Steve, but if I really had, I would admire myself tremendously. I would be in awe of my own staggeringly great mind. What I did was give the illusion of there being all those different worlds. That’s called art, or fiction, or something. The rule is, you only invent what you have to. And that’s pretty much what’s right in front of the reader. Let’s say it’s an ansible. I do not, in fact, invent the ansible. I do not explain how it works. I cannot, but shhh. I simply present the device as working, and as coming from a society which is far in advance of ours in science and technology, having spaceships that can travel nearly as fast as light, et cetera. And this background or context creates expectation and softens up the readers’ credulity so that they’re willing to “believe in” the ansible—inside the covers of the book. After the ansible had been around for a while, I invented the man who invented it, Shevek, in The Dispossessed. And he and I played around with some pretty neat speculations about time and interval and stuff, which lent more plausibility to the gimmick itself. But all I really invented was a) the idea of an instantaneous transmitter and b) a name for it. The reader does the rest. If you give them enough background/context, they can fill in the gaps. It isn’t just smoke and mirrors. There has to be a coherent vision of how things hang together in that society/culture/world. All the details have to fit together and be thought through as to their implications. But, well... it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. What else is any fiction?


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