Sep 03 2008
Le Guin on Rowling
I thought this was sort of interesting:
Le Guin has claimed that she doesn’t feel Rowling “ripped her off”, but that she felt that the books were overpraised for supposed originality, and that Rowling “could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. That hurt.”
That is interesting. ‘course, Le Guin is perfectly correct that Harry Potter is in general the furthest thing from original, at least in its discrete elements.
Indeed. I’ve not read much of Le Guin’s non-fiction writing, but I’m sort of fascinated by how rational and reasoned she sounds in her critiques of things. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m used to authors having far less restraint in their personal writing than they do as writers of fiction.
I speak of myself in this, as well.
Yeah. I think the word for this is “magnanimity”.
That said, I don’t find much of Le Guin “wonderfully original.” A few of her works certainly contain original elements, but even those are usually alone. Nothing like, say, Hyperion or Dune or the Uplift Saga.
I’m also curious as to why she’s surprised that critics were uninformed about an aspect of their opinions. (If you’ll pardon the pretzel-like form of the previous sentence.)