Quote of the Week

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there’s a message there, I don’t think I want to hear it.
--Ursula K. Le Guin, repr. in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989). “Close Encounters, Star Wars, and the Tertium Quid,” Future, Aug. 1978

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
--Ursula Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

R.I.P. Ursula K. Le Guin

American science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin -- best known for such novels as The Lathe of Heaven and The Left Hand of Darkness -- finished her last page at January 22, 2018, at age 88.

She will be missed.