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The New York Times reports that Renowned fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin has died at age 88. From the article:
Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like "The Left Hand of Darkness" and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.
Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause but said she had been in poor health for several months.
I'm not a fantasy fan (except for Prachett and Tolkien), but she will be missed none the less. I'm sure quite a few Soylents are fans of hers. Any author's loss is a loss to us all.
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It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:48AM (17 children)
So did she write science fiction or fantasy or both? I find it depressing people have difficulty telling the two apart.
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:46AM
Yes
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aim on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:47AM
She wrote both.
Earthsea is fantasy (young wizard, long before Harry Potter).
The Dispossessed is great science fiction, exploring sociology and psychology (not hard scifi IMHO, but very much worth the read).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by letssee on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:46AM (8 children)
Both, mixed.
In a way, fantasy and sf are the same genre imho. SF purports to be 'realistic, in the future', but if you replace the 'future science' with 'magic' they are the same genre more or less.
Good fantasy has rules for the magic, too. Which makes Earthsea good fantasy btw.
Both genres give a writer the freedom to break free from the constraints of realism and to explore interesting ideas without bothering if they are even possible. I'd lump in 'magic realism' and surrealism in the same category. Though you can always split out the categories further if you want to of course :-)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:13PM (4 children)
science fiction: no accepted scientific "truths" are contradicted by the in-story universe, but speculations are made about the unknown. In this sense, worm-holes are hyperspace stuff are still ok, but this may change.
fantasy: the in-story universe has its own set of laws. I like those fantasy universes that have a certain degree of self-consistency, but not all of them do.
For instance "Frankenstein" was sci-fi when written, but it is now fantasy.
Same with "To the Moon and Back" (although it's arguable whether or not scientists would have tolerated those ideas, especially since one of the characters in the story itself says that the bullet will melt and the humans won't survive).
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:27PM (1 child)
I always thought Frankenstein was traditionally considered part of the horror genre.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday January 26 2018, @07:51PM
For what it's worth--according to Stephen King, horror is a sub-genre of fantasy.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:11PM (1 child)
If a dude can teleport "because science" it's sci-fi. If a dude can teleport "because magic" it's fantasy.
no accepted scientific "truths" are contradicted by the in-story universe,
You think faster-than-light travel doesn't violate accepted scientific principles?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @06:57PM
Wormholes and warped space are both theoretically possible. When Star Trek came out, self-opening doors, flip phones, flat screen displays, voice-activated computers with realistic images were all fantasy and are now all commonplace. A real hospital today looks more like science fiction than McCoy's sick bay.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:26PM (2 children)
I would consider true science fiction writers to be people like Andy Weir (he admitted taking a few liberties with scientific fact in The Martian), Charles Sheffield (The Compleat McAndrew, among others), Jack McDevitt, Peter Watts, and Cory Doctorow. They tend to write stories with a setting like, "what would happen to society and human interaction if the following not-yet-proven-to-be-impossible technology was invented?".
The other side is futuristic space fantasy: Star Wars, Star Trek, writings by Frank Herbert, Peter Hamilton, David Drake, David Weber, and countless others. Space Opera.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @07:04PM (1 child)
Andy Weir (he admitted taking a few liberties with scientific fact in The Martian)
Citation? The only scientific mistake I saw in the book was that a 200 mph wind on Mars wouldn't knock a rocket down, but that wasn't known until the book was already a couple of years old. The cover has astronauts (who are mostly scientists and engineers) praised its accuracy greatly, as did astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the movie (the movie had a glaring error; sound is very different at different pressures. In the airlock the alarm would rise in pitch and volume as it was pressurized).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday February 01 2018, @12:13PM
Interview with Andy Weir, he starts to go into the inaccuracies at about the 13:45 mark: https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/163 [twit.tv]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:02AM (3 children)
Be depressed, then. The two overlap, many times. I don't know why that should be depressing, but it's your life.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:58PM (2 children)
The only difference between sci-fi and fantasy is swords.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
> The only difference between sci-fi and fantasy is swords.
Arguing this shows insufficient training in Use of Weapons...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 26 2018, @05:16AM
Any sufficiently advanced swordplay is indistinguishable from science?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:51PM
As many have mentioned, she wrote both.
But SF and fantasy tend to share an audience, and when they're good they both rely on inventive settings and allegory to make important points about us real-world humans. Lord of the Rings is in many ways about how World War I affected the Brits who had to go fight in it, even though he's talking about orcs and such. Foundation is about (among other things) the limitations of science as a method of solving political problems.
When it comes to le Guin, I absolutely love The Dispossessed: What better way to describe the flaws in political ideologies than to give them a foil?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @06:51PM
Sometimes I have trouble telling whether a story is fantasy or SF as I'm reading it. I wasn't sure about 11/22/63 until I was almost finished reading it (it's SF). I thought Black Bead was fantasy until its author, whom I met at Worldcon, informed me that it is indeed SF and you find out in a later book in the series.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org