Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2018“It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy s
Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2018“It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say, ‘Anything goes’ — that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven, or whuddevva, and the story doesn’t ‘add up,’ as we say. Fantasy doesn’t say, ‘Nothing is’ — that’s nihilism. And it doesn’t say, ‘It ought to be this way’ — that’s utopianism, a different enterprise… ‘Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?’ To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken… Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is — more than any other kind of writing — subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.” Time to Spare, 2017 -- source link
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