Hobnobbing with Hobbits

This week I started on reading a non-fiction book which I treated myself to a while ago.  At £18.99, the trade paperback of Ursula le Guin's collection of essays 'Dreams Must Explain Themselves' was not cheap, but as usual it is studded with wisdom from this master of the science fiction genre.

The first piece in the book was written in 1972.  It is an acceptance speech for the National Book Award, which she won with what she formally calls 'children's literature', The Farthest Shore.  And she used her acceptance speech as an opportunity to hit back against the prejudice which science fiction  and fantasy writing suffers from.

"We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are quite used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapist" she says.  What strikes me, reading this line from the 1970s in 2019, is how little that prejudice against the science ficfion and fantasy genre has changed.  It is still dismissed as irrelevant, often by women who would benefit most from opening themselves up to its ideas.

Those people who dismiss science fiction and fantasy are missing an important point, one Ursula makes quite elegantly here.  "At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence...  Fantasists, whether they be using the ancient archetypes of myth and legend, or the younger ones of science and technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist - and a good deal more directly - about human life as it is lived, and as it might be, and as it ought to be lived'" she says.  I would entirely agree with that.

"We write stories about imaginary people in imaginary situations," Ursula says. "Then we publish them (because they are, in a strange way, acts of communication) - addressed to others.

These imaginary tales are often better ways to get a point of view across than engaging in political argument. I've seen this first-hand over the last two years, with the entrenched views about Brexit.  Much SF and some fantasy, carry important insights about the future, hidden in the pages of its stories.

But a rider has to be willing to hobnob with hobbits in order to unlock that wisdom.