I haven't read Always Coming Home since it came out, but I still have answers for the questions.
Is it a utopia? Yes. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's hardly the only Le Guin fictional society that has figured out how to channel conflict and aggression. And she does make the tiny point somewhere in the text that even in utopia there will be unhappy people. To me it's no more sweetness-and-light than Tolkien is black-and-white/good-and-evil.
Is it a novel? No. I had a three-hour argument with the NYRSF [New York Review of Science Fiction] staff on this point, they maintaining that any book-length work of fiction is a novel. The problem with conceding the point is that the book "fails" because it does not do well what novels do well (cf. Spinrad's criticism). However, if you look at the work as a fictional ethnography, all of a sudden it formally makes sense.
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Date: 2008-07-24 07:05 pm (UTC)Is it a utopia? Yes. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's hardly the only Le Guin fictional society that has figured out how to channel conflict and aggression. And she does make the tiny point somewhere in the text that even in utopia there will be unhappy people. To me it's no more sweetness-and-light than Tolkien is black-and-white/good-and-evil.
Is it a novel? No. I had a three-hour argument with the NYRSF [New York Review of Science Fiction] staff on this point, they maintaining that any book-length work of fiction is a novel. The problem with conceding the point is that the book "fails" because it does not do well what novels do well (cf. Spinrad's criticism). However, if you look at the work as a fictional ethnography, all of a sudden it formally makes sense.
Don Keller