Excerpt:
Science fiction and fantasy are often accused of being escapist, trivial, and mindless, portraying bug-eyed alien monsters, scantily clad women, spaceships and bizarre other worlds, while Real Literature concerns itself with humanity’s true problems, the struggles of the Self to become whole in a hostile world and so on. Often the movies and books of science fiction and fantasy are in fact frothy and shallow. But I have recently read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Telling” that concerns itself with the dominance of a space-faring culture over one that it just beginning to take its technological first steps. It is about cultural survival and personal freedom under totalitarian rule. It is about self-imposed cultural censorship. It is about colonialism of the mind. Nothing to do with the real world, eh?