I used to inhale it all too - Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, Phillip K. Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
He holds, I think, the distinction ofbeing the science fiction author who has had more of his short stories and novels made into movies than any other sci fi author in history: including Blade Runner and Minority Report. I have to admit I was mighty partial to Bradbury when I was a kid - Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes - man oh man! ________________________________ From: turquoiseb <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, November 3, 2012 5:23 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] A book review after my own heart As some may have been able to tell :-), I spent a large part of my youth as a fan of science fiction and fantasy writing. I read everything I could find at the library, and other stuff found in second-hand bookstores that the libraries didn't feel worthy of putting on their shelves. And along the way I've had various "favorite" writers, most of them men (partly because...duh...most writers who get published are men, and especially most writers consigned to the scifi/fantasy ghetto are men). My faves have always been the "soft" scifi writers such as Roger Zelazny (who specialized in the reinvention of myth), Orson Scott Card (who specialized in the reinvention of religion and spirituality), and Philip K. Dick (who specialized in the reinvention of reality). But if I'm honest, my all-time favorite scifi/fantasy writer has always been (gasp) a woman -- Ursula K. Le Guin. When I moved to the L.A. area during my college years, I became a devotee of the A Change Of Hobbit bookstore, and thus got to meet and hobnob with a few of my fave writers, and/or hear them speak. Some, like Zelazny, were the kinds of public speakers who should have kept to writing, and others, like Card, could be as eloquent in speech as they were on paper. Some were fiercely intelligent, and others only posed as intelligent, more Mensa types trolling for attention. Only one writer blew me out of my socks with her combination of innate intelligence, charm, mastery of language, and above all, vision of and compassion for what it means to be human. That was Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. Under the first link at the bottom of this post is a review of a new 2-volume collection of her short writing, and the author of it seems to not only agree with me that Ursula is the best living genre/ghetto writer in the world, but one of the best writers, period. It's in her genes. Her father was one of the most famous anthropologists in the world, A.L. Kroeber, and her mother was a famous writer and social scien- tist in her own right. Ursula obviously grew up in a household that had been trained to view humans with the accuracy of a scientist, but also the compassion of a saint, and that trait has charac- terized all of her writing. She has won all the major awards in her genre many times over, and her seminal gender-busting novel "The Left Hand of Darkness" is still in my all-time Top Five. If you're looking for some good books to curl up with this Winter, you might do well to look into some of hers. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/11/ursula_le_guin_s_the_unreal_and_the_real_collected_stories_reviewed.single.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin
